Are Catholic countries really less violent towards women?

Following the appalling murder of Sarah Everard, kidnapped at London’s Clapham Common, a tsunami of protest has arisen in Britain about violence against women. An extraordinary number of women have said that they do not feel safe in the streets – or sometimes at home – because of the threat of male violence. The First Minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford, has suggested putting all men under a 6pm curfew.

Speaking on the BBC radio programme Any Questions last weekend, former Supreme Court Judge, Jonathan Sumption, deplored gender-based violence, but then added an insight of his own: looking over the European statistics, he claimed that violence against women was “lower in Roman Catholic countries”. He hadn’t explored the reasons why, but he suggested that it might be because family life tended to be more stable in Catholic countries, and this may have a restraining effect on aggression.

Callers rang to question Lord Sumption’s claim (he is not a Catholic, by the way), arguing that women in Catholic countries may be more subdued, or fearful of complaining about male violence or harassment.

A possible problem with his lordship’s analysis is that Catholic countries can be very different to one another in other respects. Poland, for example, would differ from Italy and Spain in one important area: alcohol is a bigger problem in Poland (and all Northern European countries) than in the Mediterranean – and alcohol has always been a major feature in domestic abuse.

However, Jonathan Sumption’s claim set me thinking about my own experiences – ‘my truth’, as Duchess Meghan puts it. And it made me realise that I grew up in a very peaceful society.

As a youngster in Dublin, I wandered all over the city day and night, without ever a bother. As a teenager, I was theatre-mad and used to return home from the Gate in Parnell Street, or the Abbey (then in Pearse Street) at all hours of night. Sometimes I’d walk along by the dark pathway of the Dodder river. I never had any problems: and I never experienced or witnessed any form of violence or aggression within my family or immediate environment either.

Others will tell different stories. (As Queen Elizabeth said in her riposte: “recollections may vary”.) We know children were beaten at school, and domestic violence did occur, since it was everywhere.

But Jonathan Sumption’s thesis – that men in Catholic societies were less likely to be violent towards women – certainly reflects the story that I know.

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Mother’s Day this year fell on the eve of my own Mother’s death, 30 years ago, which made it a day of special reflection for me. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the prince is told to pull himself together and get over his father’s death: his father lost a father, and that father before him also lost a father, and thus back through time: that is to say, the earthly loss of a parent is the natural order of things. It is also the spiritual order of things to depart this world for the next.

And yet, we can miss our parents even more as we grow older. Because, as we age, we begin to understand them more, and develop a stronger feeling of shared experiences. Age differentiated us from our mothers when young – she was older, we were young, and the ‘generation gap’ often showed, too, in clashes over values. But eventually, that gap closes and we often grow closer, in values, to our parents’ way of thinking, coming to understand it was often based on experience.

Guilt and remorse about answering back or rebuffing our darling mothers’ kindly advice and the sorrow we sometimes caused may be another accompaniment to the bittersweet recollections of Mothers’ Day – as it is for me.

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The Archangel Gabriel isn’t, strictly speaking a saint, but Gabriel is a key character in the canon of holy personalities in art. Indeed, the Annunciation is often regarded as the first, and most frequently depicted, image in the development of European art. Fra Angelico’s frescoed painting is considered a key moment in European art – painted between 1440-1445 and still pored over by art experts today.

The paintings of Gabriel are often wonderfully delicate, and narrate the start of the gospel story. Among the most famous is Annunciation by Matthias Grunewald, at the Colmar Museum, Germany, where the Archangel carries the staff of church doorkeepers, who safeguarded the church. Jan van Eyck’s Annunciation Diptych, now in Madrid, shows Gabriel’s greeting to Mary as the beginning of the Ave Maria: ‘Hail Mary, full of grace…’ Orazio Gentileschi’s Annunciation is an exquisite colour composition, showing Gabriel kneeling before Mary, with a lily in his hand.

March 25, of course, marks the Feast of the Annunciation, where Gabriel, with Mary, begin the journey of Christianity. It is still a subject for artists today.