A poster illuminates Irish gender inequality, writes Patsy McGarry, Religious Affairs Correspondent
Trócaire has chosen gender equality as its campaign issue for Lent. You will be aware of this also because of the controversy over accompanying television advertisements and some letters to this newspaper. The campaign also includes huge posters of a black infant accompanied by the slogan "She may never be given a chance, simply because she is female."
She must not be Catholic. If she were, the slogan would read "She will never be given a chance, simply because she is female."
Indeed, as the "may" word suggests, a little girl in the developing world has a far greater chance of achieving something approaching equality in her culture during her lifetime, than she would have in the Catholic Church.
Trócaire is the official overseas development agency of the Catholic Church in Ireland. It is, without doubt, one of the most-admirable and admired non-governmental agencies in Ireland and its campaign on gender equality is to be lauded . . . except for this pot/kettle/black element.
It begs the question should Trócaire not be aiming its campaign more at the institution which is its patron? There is no mention whatever of the status of women in the Catholic Church or of that institution's treatment of women in the literature for Trócaire's current Lenten campaign.
It is hard to believe this is oversight. It is equally hard to believe it is deliberate. Trócaire doesn't do cynicism. Or hypocrisy. It is probably more an indication of how little the exclusion of women from, for instance, the permanent diaconate, the priesthood, the episcopacy, has registered as a matter of real concern within the Catholic Church itself.
Trócaire tells us on its website "the role of women in our global society has changed dramatically over the past century. In many countries, women have the right to vote, to own property in their own name, to work in every profession, to join the army or to do any number of other things that were forbidden to them in the past because of their gender. Because they were women they had to adopt a particular role in society."
This, of course, is correct. But such advances in the status of women had little to do with the Catholic Church and were often resisted by it, at least implicitly. This may be said to be unfair as today lay women are increasingly taking over administrative roles in the Catholic Church's affairs. However, women remain peripheral to its core roles and decision-making and that is the way it is to remain - by its own decision.
Indeed, many in the church retain the traditional suspicion of women. A group of Irish people visited Rome in the Jubilee Year of 2000 and among their number was a woman on her first visit to the city.
She was going through a difficult time. Her husband had died the previous year. Not long before that, her daughter lost a newborn baby hours after its birth. Her only sister was then dying and would pass away within weeks, the first of her siblings to do so.
She was feeling put-upon and went to confession to a young Italian priest in one of the great basilicas of that city. She had expected consolation, maybe explanation. Instead, she was told to stop feeling sorry for herself, accept what was happening as the will of God, and to get on with her life.
She emerged from the confessional upset and seething. Earlier, on a trip to the Sistine Chapel, she was mildly rebuked by clergy on a suffocatingly warm day for not covering her shoulders. She had forgotten.
She is of a generation of Irishwomen which has never known much sympathy from the church. Many of them lived lives of despair, in homes where coping with drunkenness and violence was frequently their lot, facilitated by a clergy whose most profound advice was to "offer it up" or "accept it as the will of God".
With no income of their own, in a society dominated by a church which frowned on women who worked outside the home as selfish when they said they should be looking after their children (still the argument of the Catholic right) - they were trapped. They were slaves, in every sense of the word.
In his "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the collaboration of men and women in the Church and in the world" on May 31st, 2004, less than a year before he became pope, Benedict XVI made the Catholic Church position on women clear.
Reflecting that "recent years have seen new approaches to women's issues", he bemoans the fact that "in order to avoid the domination of one sex or the other, their differences tend to be denied, viewed as mere effects of historical and cultural conditioning".
The pope continued, "This perspective has many consequences. Above all, it strengthens the idea that the liberation of women entails criticism of sacred scripture, which would be seen as handing on a patriarchal conception of God nourished by an essentially male-dominated culture. Second, this tendency would consider as lacking in importance and relevance the fact that the Son of God assumed human nature in its male form.
"In the face of these currents of thought, the church . . . speaks instead of active collaboration between the sexes precisely in the recognition of the difference between man and woman," he wrote.
Having taken the scenic route to a predictable conclusion, the pope made clear once more in his lengthy letter that the Catholic Church is not about to allow women a role of greater equality.
To be absolutely fair, no church, indeed no religion, can hold its head high when it comes to gender equality. Certainly the reformed churches have more recently adapted to a fairer world by allowing women become priests/ministers/bishops, but neither were they in the vanguard when it came to the push for women's rights - probably the only successful, if incomplete, socio-political revolution of the 20th century.
Maybe Trócaire can help change the situation within the Catholic Church by directing its campaign for gender equality within, asking why it should be the case in the church that "She will never be given a chance, simply because she is female".