Another Revolution in the Church! (Yawn)
Have you heard the news? There’s a new revolution in the Church! It’s been started by, of all people, a little old lady from Clonakilty in County Cork, Ireland. Jennifer Sleeman, an 80-year-old grandmother and the mother of a Benedictine monk, is fed up with women “being treated as second-class citizens” in the Church. So she issued a call to Catholic women to “join your sisters” in boycotting Masses throughout the Emerald Isle on September 26.
What are women to do instead on that Sunday morning? “Stay at home and pray for change,” Sleeman told the Irish Times (Aug. 11).
What type of change? “Whatever change you long for, recognition, ordination, the end of celibacy, which is another means of keeping women out.” Reach into the grievance grab bag, ladies — one gripe is as good as another. Ultimately, the purpose is to “let the hierarchy know” that “the days of an exclusively male-dominated church are over.”
Why would such a boycott work? Because women make up “the majority” of worshipers, Sleeman says. “The empty pews will be noticed.”
You May Also Enjoy
It is high time the U.S. bishops together called us as a Church to a public act of repentance. I offer the following litany for such an occasion.
Review of American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900-39 by Eric Homberger, The Intellectual Follies by Lionel Abel, Out of Step by Sidney Hook, Will Herberg by Harry J. Ausmus, and The New York Intellectuals by Alan M. Wald
There is a group in the Church that has noticed your smooth transition to the new missal — and is still peeved about the whole thing.