Let’s be crystal clear: this debate is not about female access to the priesthood

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Let’s be crystal clear: this debate is not about female access to the priesthood 

23 March 2016 | by Joanna Moorhead | Comments: 2 A few months ago, I attended a press conference that, had it been at almost any other institution, would have seemed ridiculously outdated. The issue was the participants. There was a big stage, a long, wide table, and six speakers. All of them were male.

No prizes for guessing where I was. Yes, you got it: the Vatican. The six men on the dais included one bishop, three priests, and two laymen. Where Rome is concerned, “diversity” means non-priests (and you’ve got to hand it to them; if I’d been at the same press conference 20 years ago, all six figures on the stage would probably have been ordained).

But as diversity goes, it is not quite cutting the mustard in the twenty-first century, where most organisations are rightly increasingly aware of the need to represent minorities who might feel that white, able-bodied men are not necessarily suited to articulate their situation.

When it comes to groups traditionally regarded as minority, the Church has to be given some credit. Europeans – Italians especially – are over-represented at the Vatican, but in most line-ups that the Church fields there are non-white, as well as white, faces. Older people, who sometimes feel left out of decision-making bodies, are exceptionally well represented in Rome.

But, and it’s a very big but, there is one minority group that is extremely badly represented on Church panels; it’s the minority that is actually a majority – namely, women. If that press conference I attended had been almost anywhere but the Vatican, some strategist would have twigged that, in 2016, you cannot fail to field a woman, and someone would have been wheeled in. And yes, maybe she would have been a token; but tokens have their value, and are often an imperfect and interim stage on the path to wider and more meaningful representation.

Recently there has been a lot of publicity about an initiative that probably is not going to catch on in the Vatican, though it would be wonderful if it did: the Owen Pledge, named after a development economist called Owen Barder, who campaigns to get other men to sign up to his pledge, “At a public conference I won’t serve on a panel of two or more unless there is at least one woman, not including the chair.”

On his website Barder helpfully includes a list of frequently asked questions, top of which is one that would be a real concern in the Vatican – and many other parts of the Catholic Church: “What happens if we have tried to find women but there is nobody available?”

Here is Barder’s answer, and it is one the powers that be in Rome should maybe think about: “Try harder.” As he goes on: “There are loads of brilliant women [out there].” If your organisation does not have any to field, the logical question must be: why is that? And the very next question must be: how can we correct such a glaring imbalance in the way we run our affairs?

Let’s be crystal clear: this debate is not about female access to the priesthood. It is about a growing awareness in almost every organisation on the planet that to present a rounded and considered and all-bases-covered view of itself to the outside world, any discussion that takes place must include voices from as wide a selection as possible of its stakeholders.

So any organisation that includes women needs to have women represented in a line-up – a conference, a press event, a committee, a panel of any kind – that purports to represent its views. In its grass-roots membership, the Catholic Church is female-heavy; so, in an ideal world, women should probably outnumber men on any representative group. But, let’s not get carried away: all I’m asking for is visibility, and the chance for female voices to be heard.

The irony for the Church is that it is already impacted by this growing awareness, but because it is failing to address women’s representation at all levels – and especially in Rome – it is sometimes unable to field the necessary female figures to make up the balance on what would otherwise be all-male line-ups. Media organisations, for example, will often positively seek out women as interviewees; and if the official Church cannot provide them, it finds them by other means.

So, like it or not, women are increasingly called on to represent the views of the Church. But how much happier, and healthier, it would be if women’s representation was tackled inside the organisation, rather than the hierarchy being pulled reluctantly into modern thinking by outside forces.