Sir, – The most urgent agenda for the survival of the Catholic Church is to correct its gender imbalance.
For 2,000 years male leaders of the church have tried for no good reason to keep power and control in their hands.
The time has come for women to claim their God-given role to share equality in the church. Church leaders have to accept that the patriarchal and ecclesiastical world is obsolete if there is to be a future for the church.
Covid is here and is having consequences. Intentional communities that support the leadership of women are increasing daily and returning to the theological essence of the Eucharist.
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It was Jesus who said, “Where two or three are gathered in My name, there am I in the midst of them.”
I have been a missionary religious for over 60 years, and some papal statements, such as “Women can never be ordained” (John Paul II), seem to me to be “codology dressed up as theology” (Mary McAleese).
I have never felt called to be ordained, but I feel called to stand up for the many women, such as St Thérèse of Lisieux, who did, and do.
As the poet Christopher Fry puts it in A Sleep of Prisoners: “So many thousand years to wake, But will you wake for pity’s sake”. – Yours, etc,
CORA
RICHARDSON,
Dublin 6.