Sir, - In my opinion it is only the unenlightened and the unthinking who could possibly take exception to your fine and very measured Editorial, "Ordaining Women" (September 16th). You quite accurately assert that the ordinations of Mother Frances Meigh and Rev Lynda Peilow are challenges to the ban on women priests - an ancient but unjustifiable bias in our beloved Catholic Church. Women priests (and bishops) will become a common sight in our country and the Frances Meighs and Lynda Peilows will be looked back upon as courageous pioneers.
The Irish Times is simply fulfilling one of its solemn social duties as a serious newspaper when it highlights sexism in all its forms and habitats. But for many of us the issue of the ordination of women is a profoundly spiritual and theological issue and your Editorial writer displayed a prophetic spiritual awareness when he/she declared: ". . . there can be no true unity without openness; and suppression of honest debate is the path to disheartenment and schism."
Twelve years ago, when the then Bishop (later Cardinal) Cahal Daly removed me from my parish because of my liberal views and radical actions, my pleas for diversity within unity fell on stony ground. I will not go, or be pushed, into schism. But I have been tempted to be disheartened and have resisted that temptation by evolving into a "marginalised" shepherd to the ever increasing numbers of "marginalised" sheep. I very deliberately chose the words: "Tolerance - Love - Diversity" for my episcopal motto.
We Catholics believe that Scripture and Tradition (not traditions) are the two sources of God's Revelation. On both counts women can be ordained and the Pope of Rome displays staggering error and fallibility when he declares that the Church has no authority to ordain women.
The first person to give the body and blood of Christ to the world was Our Lady. If a woman can do it physically and literally, she can certainly do it sacramentally. The argument that a priest must be a man to sacramentally represent the male Christ is dangerously flawed. Christ became "man", not "a man". We have always believed that ordination conveys a sacred character. That character is communicated to the spirit, the soul, and not to the body. Gender therefore is not an issue and never can be a authentic bar to ordination.
St Paul writes of the Deaconess Phoebe of Caesarea and of other women in the ministry. St Cyprian writes of a female priest who served the Church at Cappadocia. St Priscilla is written of as: "the priest officiating along with the other priests in the central act of worship in the Church." In the ninth century Pope Pascal I was the son of Theodora the bishopess. Also in the ninth century we find the English Pope John (really Joan) who was deposed when she fell pregnant. And in more recent years a Roman Catholic bishop in Czechoslovakia secretly ordained women when the political regime there suppressed the Church and its male priests.
St Brigid of Kildare was ordained priest and bishop by St Mel, Bishop of Ardagh, and Mel declared: "Brigid's successor is always entitled to have episcopal orders and the honour due to a bishop." Hilda of Whitby and her successor, St Beoferlic (Beverley of York), were also bishops. St Therese of Lisieux, the Church's patron of the missions, wrote: "I feel in me the vocation of the priest." The Bavarian mystic and stigmatic Theresa Neumann, who died in 1962, is reputed to have been ordained in secret by a sympathetic bishop.
This letter will send a whole bevy of canon lawyers, theologians, church historians, scripture scholars and other enthusiastic "defenders of the faith" racing to their typewriters. I can well imagine how they will quote from this scholar and that scholar, from this text and that text and maybe even feel at the end of it all that some great theological battle has been fought and won. But the Jesus who chooses the weak to confound the strong, the foolish to confound the wise, the contemptible to confound the respectable and who made Mary Magdala the first witness of the Resurrection is Himself placing women at His altar. Frances Meigh and Lynda Peilow are profound signs of the things to come. - Yours, etc., Pat Buckley,
Presiding Bishop, The Society of St Andrew, Larne, Co Antrim.