Peter Costello
A Divine Calling: One Woman’s Life-Long Battle for Equality in the Catholic Church,
by Soline Humbert, foreword by Mary McAleese
(The Liffey Press, €19.95 / £17.95)
This book arrived for review at about the same time that it was announced that Dame Sarah Mullally was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. Her elevation brings into focus the role of women as ordained ministers in the worldwide Anglican communion.
The appointment of women ministers has already proved divisive; though encounters with women rectors in the Irish context Ireland suggests they have brought a new energetic and compassionate feel to their offices.
Her elevation was welcomed by Cardinal Kock, the Prefect of the Dicastery for the Promotion of Christian Unity. But the appointment of Dame Sarah has proved divisive across the world, with mixed views in Africa, where two thirds of the Anglican communion live (an outcome, of course, of a colonial heritage) and in the USA.
The swirling discussion about married priests in the Catholic Church, revolving around the reluctance of Irish men to come forward as priests, and the feeling that the hierarchy often lacks the compassionate tone that a woman might bring to debate and administration.
Spirituality
This book, though many may disagree with what it claims and hopes for, is worth the attention of every Catholic. Certainly the story Soline Humbert has to tell is an interesting one, which relates as it unrolls aspects of our recent history which ought to be pondered on by everyone, no matter what their essential views are.
It is important I think to realise that Soline Humbert is French, not Irish by birth. She became involved with Ireland by coming here as a schoolgirl to stay with a rural family over two summers, after which she returned to study at Trinity College. These earlier experiences shaped her. The family she stayed with was struck by her very different approach to the day-to-day life of Catholics. From the beginning she was out of step with the Irish.
At every turn Soline found her vocation opposed. This was not a role which was open to women”
From quite early in her religion took a different course in its spiritual growth, as she describes in these moving and detailed pages. It was at Trinity that she first felt a call to the ministry.
From an early date the service of the Eucharist was seen as a role for men, for the public role of religion in the Middle East, in Greece and Rome called for the service of a priesthood. In the early Church, women were excluded for reasons difficult to discuss in a family newspaper, but which can be appreciated more clearly by reading Purity and Danger (1966), a landmark book by Catholic anthropologist Mary Douglas.
This being so, as she relates, at every turn Soline found her vocation opposed. This was not a role which was open to women. Her arguments will be familiar. She sees herself and her call not as unique – other women have also felt the same vocation.
Though it is Catholic teaching that at the Last Supper Jesus ordained the apostles into a priesthood, others have noted the significant role of women in the Gospels: the risen Christ revealed himself first to a woman, who then brought the news to Peter. And at Pentecost, when the Church as an institution commenced, the Holy Spirit was seen as descending not only on the Apostles, but also on the Virgin Mary, in this instance a representative woman.
Change
But throughout the book Ms Humbert fails to see the matter in a worldwide dimension. Those ‘patriarchal’ figures she opposes in Ireland and Rome see the matter in a different perspective.
Hasty change is not a way of action in the Church. What Rome fears is not perhaps married priests or the ordination of women as such – the arguments found in scripture on both sides are rehearsed in these pages.
What Rome really fears is another Great Schism (such as that which sundered the Church into Orthodox and Catholic). One can see in the reaction worldwide of the elevation of Dame Sarah Mullaly to the See of Canterbury the emerging division in the Anglican communion that Rome would fear between European and North American opinion, and the social and religious feelings of so many in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
Ms Humbert feels her call to serve God; her opponents feel just as deeply solicitude for saving the Church from further decline”
Somehow Soline Humbert intent on her own vocation does not come to terms with this core problem. People talk loosely about the Church’s future lying in South America and Africa, yet we have also had to be aware that it is in these territories too that American evangelicalism is making great strides in gathering adherents.
Ms Humbert feels her call to serve God; her opponents feel just as deeply solicitude for saving the Church from further decline. It is a crux which cannot yet be resolved. The new Pontiff Leo XIV is intent, it would seem, on maintaining connections with all currents of feeling in the Church, maintaining an overall sense of unity as a way of resolving difficulties.
I suspect traditionalists reading this book may be surprised. Several of the important moments of revelation in Soline Humbert’s spiritual life occurred in such places as St Kevin’s in Harrington Street, Knock Shrine, and St Patrick’s Purgatory on Lough Derg. She seems in a way deeply involved in the traditional Church, rather than in a radical reconstruction.
She merely wishes to serve as Mary Magdalene did on that morning when she met a man she thought was a gardener and went on to spread the good news that a prophecy seemed to have been fulfilled.