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Born: October 19th, 1928
Died: November 24th, 2020
Elizabeth Lovatt-Dolan, who has died following a short illness, was president of the World Union of Catholic Women’s Organisations (WUCWO) for almost a decade from the mid-1970s.
As an organisation dedicated to promoting the participation of women in society and in the church, it was none too pleased with a Vatican document published in 1976 that outlined why women could not be admitted to the priesthood. This pronouncement deflated hopes raised by Vatican II that women were on course to take their place behind the altar.
Lovatt-Dolan went to Rome in 1978 to tell the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith face-to-face about the great difficulties many of the 20 million-plus membership she represented had with their stance.
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“This meeting in Rome could have been fractious and divisive – not so with Elizabeth,” according to theologian Fr Dermot Lane, a long-time friend. “She was too diplomatic for that and she wanted to keep the doors of dialogue open. She was a bridge-builder and had a unique capacity to hold together opposite points of view.”
This personal quality helps explain how she, as a woman with a passionate belief in equality, could stay loyal to a church resistant to change. The year after stepping down from the WUCWO presidency in 1983, she received the highest papal decoration that could be awarded to women at that time, the Crucis Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, in recognition of her outstanding leadership.
Progress
She was certainly no “holy water hen”, according to one clerical friend. Never afraid to be highly critical of the church, she embraced progress that was made, such as allowing laity to become readers and ministers of the Eucharist. She took up both roles in her south Dublin home parish of Mount Merrion.
Born in Dublin, her parents were Fianna Fáil senator Billy Quirke and his American wife Clare Riordan. The eldest child of two, she attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart on Leeson Street for a secondary education that was to be a defining influence. Active membership of the past pupils’ union led her up through the ranks of representational Catholic women’s participation and onto a world stage.
Lovatt-Dolan was a woman of her time who, with a strong ethic of service, applied her formidable intellect and talents to a “career” in voluntary work. Having studied English and German at UCD, in 1950 she went straight from university into marriage to John Lovatt-Dolan, who was a high-profile senior counsel before his premature death in 1985.
Very secure in her own faith, she was unthreatened by, but always interested in, the views of people of other religions and none
Their only child, Mary, was born in 1951, but a well-heeled housewife’s lifestyle of tennis and tea was never going to satisfy Lovatt-Dolan, who used that time to study Russian and Italian, as well as immerse herself in charity work. That’s not to say she wasn’t highly sociable too, with she and her husband joining Joan and Garret FitzGerald and Mary and Mairtín McCullough in starting a legendary tradition of annual New Year’s Eve parties. She was also president of the ladies’ committee of the Dublin Grand Opera Society in the late 1960s.
Terms on the board of the Mater Hospital in Dublin from 1970 to 1974, and then again from 1985 to 1996, flanked her time as WUCWO president. She also served on the board of Trócaire, on the Irish Bishops’ Commission for Justice and Peace and was appointed by government to the first Garda Complaints Board set up in 1986.
Reform
Commitment to gender, economic and racial equality drove her reform of the Paris-based WUCWO, ensuring it wasn’t an enclave for the white and wealthy. This threw up quandaries such as how to provide subsidies to enable women from some Third Word countries to attend international seminars, without the financial aid being intercepted by the men in their lives. During her presidency she addressed a plenary session of the United Nations in New York on disarmament.
A consummate politician, she could speak five languages but also knew how to listen. Very secure in her own faith, she was unthreatened by, but always interested in, the views of people of other religions and none.
Her feisty independence and social network helped keep her living in her own home into her 90s, before moving in with her daughter. But she was determined life’s final chapter would be in the care of the Sacred Heart community she so loved.
Just last October she moved to their Cedar House nursing home in Goatstown, never suspecting her time there would be so short. The book she left by her bedside, Mary McAleese’s newly published memoir, reflected her undimmed interest in politics and the church.
Elizabeth Lovatt-Dolan is survived by her daughter Mary, four grandchildren and one great-grandson. Her brother Michael pre-deceased her