“‘How long does it take to become a priest?’ asked the child. ‘A lifetime,’ replied the old priest.
“But if you are a little girl, it will take several lifetimes, generations. When I first heard the call to priesthood years ago, I wondered how I would be able to live with it in a Church which denied it.”
These are the opening lines of Soline Humbert’s recently published memoir, A Divine Calling: One Woman’s Life-Long Battle for Equality in the Catholic Church.
It sets the stage for a compelling story of her struggle to honour her call from God to ordained ministry in the Catholic Church. It is a profoundly moving book, beautifully written, deeply personal, theologically perceptive, honest and courageous.
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When Humbert decides to go public about her vocation, she encounters scorn, ridicule, incredulity and abuse. She’s accused of being “egotistical” and “wanting power”.
On one occasion, outside a church after a funeral, a priest she didn’t know came up to her and shouted to her face: “Women priests? Over my dead body!”
After Humbert started doing radio and TV interviews, she came to expect abusive phone-calls to her home, some threatening violence and rape “to put her right”.
She soon realised that a “woman voicing her calling to the priesthood brought up the worst misogynistic violence in some men”. She also begins to understand why other women who also felt God’s call to the priesthood chose not to make their vocation public.
At issue in this memoir is the claim by the male-dominated Catholic Church that the exclusion of women from the ordained priesthood is God’s will and they have no authority to change it.
This judgment, made solely by men, is declared to be definitive and the faithful are expected to adhere to it. It is not open for discussion.
The male church doesn’t want to hear from women such as Humbert, who say God is calling them to the priesthood. They already know the mind of God on the issue. The matter has been settled. The door shut. The priesthood is reserved for males alone.
Humbert first heard “the call” to the ordained priesthood in 1974 when she was a student at Trinity College. She was just 18 and had left her home in France the previous year to study history and politics in the university. She says her “call” resists all attempts to explain it.
“It came from ... beyond me, not of me. It was a desire I didn’t choose or want. It was something I couldn’t understand or even imagine. I had never heard of a woman being a priest.”
Initially, she presumed that since God was calling women such as her to the priesthood, God would also inform church leaders of this fact. But it soon dawned on her that it was not going to happen that way and that she was going to have to tell them about it.
Humbert writes about her meetings with many of the country’s leading church figures over a period of 30 years, and it makes for fascinating reading.
Below is an edited extract of her meeting with the archbishop of Dublin Desmond Connell in 1993. Humbert writes: “I was looking forward, though with some trepidation, to telling him directly about my spiritual journey and sense of vocation. But as I sat across from him at a highly polished table in a high-ceilinged room in Archbishop’s House, I realised that wasn’t going to happen.
“His purpose in agreeing to see me was to discharge his episcopal duty to show me the error of my ways, to set me right. He had no interest in listening to anything I might share so it ended up a very one-sided conversation.
“He then tried to persuade me through an appeal to his episcopal authority. `When I’ (and he emphasised the ‘I’) ‘tell you that you do not have a calling to the priesthood, do you not hear God speaking to you?’
“I was taken aback. It was of course a literal interpretation of `whoever listens to you, listens to me’ (Luke 10:16). ‘No,’ I said. ‘I hear you, my archbishop, speaking to me, not God’.”
In a powerful foreword to the book, Mary McAleese highlights the fragility of the theological foundations underlying the church’s position on women’s ordination, describing it as “a classic case of the emperor who had no clothes”.
Humbert’s book will resonate with many Catholic women, who make up half the church but don’t see themselves represented on the altar, celebrating the Eucharist.
For them, it sends out a message that the Incarnation (when the divine took on human form) relates only to men, that women are lesser human beings, not fully redeemed or created in the image and likeness of God.
Moreover, it tells the world that women are inferior and second-class and this message feeds the violence and abuse that all women experience across the globe, in their homes, on the street, and in the church.
Ursula Halligan is former political editor at TV3 and currently a doctoral student of theology at Trinity College Dublin. A Divine Calling. One Woman’s Life-Long Battle for Equality in the Catholic Church, by Soline Humbert, is published by The Liffey Press
