Broadcaster Lavinia Byrne has spent most of her life as a nun, a member of the community of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a sister congregation of the Loreto order. Although some of her women colleagues have changed denomination in order to be ordained in the Church of England, she did not. "I'm a cradle Catholic; I could never be anything else. For me, there was no such temptation. Never."
Her faith remains as strong now as ever. Her Catholicism is part of her, she says. She likes the life. As a broadcaster, writer and teacher, she has been able to contribute hugely to the understanding of Christian spirituality. In recognition of this work, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Birmingham for her services to religious broadcasting. Few nuns could be as fulfilled, and as unlikely to leave her community. But she has left.
On January 6th she asked "with deep regret" to be dispensed from her vows. Sister Lavinia is now known by her honorary title of Dr Byrne, and was introduced as such on Tuesday for the first time when presenting the Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
Her departure from the religious life was not by choice. There was no other way. "This has all come about from my having written a book, not a heavy work of theology, but a book of the moment. A book I was asked to write. I am not a rebel." Her book, Woman at the Altar, was published in 1993, and is, she says, "a journalistic account of reactions to the ordination of women priests in the Church of England."
It is not an act of subversion, merely an informed attempt to place the changing role of women into context. She makes no secret of her childhood wish to be a priest. "When I was little I had no idea that being a girl debarred me from ordination. It was a painful truth when I realised at around the age of 10 that I could not be ordained because I was a girl.
"Nowadays I do not have a vocation for the priesthood but I do wish that the Catholic Church could find an intelligent way of acknowledging my vocation as a preacher. The irony is that part of my work in Cambridge at Westcott House (part of the Cambridge Theological Federation within the University), is teaching students how to preach."
Recalling the mood which greeted the announcement in November 1992 that women were to be ordained in the Church of England, she describes the excitement. "Glasses were raised in London wine bars and across the country. There was a real sense of excitement and renewal." Was she envious? "No. I shared the sense of excitement that those women experienced. For once, a church story was good news."
In Dublin last weekend to address the People of God, POBAL conference, arranged by lay persons, at Milltown Park, Dr Byrne describes her lecture, "Coming Alive in Cyperspace" as a deliberately morally neutral one. "Change in China will happen because of the Internet. The Internet destroys ideologies and challenges any monolithic societies, by questioning their political and cultural power and authority."
But another aspect also interests her. "Very few persons have discussed the ethical questions arising from the use of the Internet. I believe that the Christian tradition does offer a grid for interpreting modern media. The life of the Blessed Trinity requires us to take person-hood, relationships and community extremely seriously. If the Internet produces poor, sad, lonely individuals, it will have failed in a task for which it is supremely well equipped, namely to get people communicating."
A small, animated woman, Lavinia Byrne is highly articulate, precise, practical and well served by her sense of humour. She is also a good talker, well able to communicate. "I have the knack for getting things across in a brief amount of time." It is a skill she calls upon her BBC Radio Thought for the Day slot, which she has done for about 10 years. She is also a regular leader of BBC's The Daily Service on Radio 4.
"It is odd," she says in a hugely likeable tone of polite irony she has mastered, "I'm not allowed to preach, but I have a slot which goes out at 12 minutes to eight every morning with an audience of six million." Her effectiveness as a broadcaster is due, she feels, to being "middle of the road. I don't take sides. I can look at contrasting opinions, I am balanced. That's why I'm a good journalist."
No one could doubt that this sane, sensible individual is light years removed from dogma or defiance on any level. When asked for her views of the present Pope, whose reputation as a strict conservative is well known, she replies openly: "I don't know the Pope." There is no a trace of guile, nor are her attitudes guarded. She no intention of criticising papal policies. "But I do know the Catholic hierarchy of England and Wales, and they are wonderful to deal with." However she is a realist, commenting of the Catholic Church in general: "It is losing the ability to speak with any worthwhile authority because it utters old verities when people are looking for practical help in real-life situations and in a brand new context."
Asked to explain what appears to be a more liberalised Catholic Church in England than the one we know in Ireland, she says, "Catholicism in England is different. It's different because it has to be. It is a minority church in England. Because of Cardinal Hume, English Catholicism is now widely respected. He brought it out of a ghetto."
Since November 1998, she has been the subject of immense indirect, but ongoing, pressure from the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) to recant her views. The word "recant", with its medieval connotations, leaves one wondering what exactly she is supposed to recant, as her book explored the events and thinking which led to the ordination of women priests in the Church of England. While certainly approving of the new developments within the Church of England, Woman at the Altar went further. "It argued that the Catholic tradition could be appropriately developed to encompass women's ordination, as the key building blocks were already in place. The arguments from Scripture and tradition had been revisited and found not to be absolute." The book was intended neither as attack nor directive. The Vatican thought otherwise.
The CDF is charged with enunciating what is and what is not Catholic doctrine and is also charged with disciplining those who do not conform, or who are seen not to conform. "My only problem with the CDF is that they have punished me retroactively. I wrote the book in good faith at a time when debate and discussion were open and free. Subsequently, in May 1994, the Pope issued a document, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, restricting priestly ordination to men only. At considerable inconvenience, the publishers printed the text of his letter at the back of the book. So that the Pope, had, as it were, the last word.
`What I am supposed is to do is publicly state that I support Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, and I am also to announce that I support Humanae Vitae, which bans artificial contraception." In the book she points out that there were two vastly important scientific discoveries in the 20th century: the Moon landings, which changed the way we look at the world, and the invention of the artificial contraception pill. "The Pill gave women power over their own fertility. I did not take sides. I simply pointed out that women now have freedom and choice and opportunities that were not available to their mothers and grandmothers."
If the book gave offence, it was probably through the irrefutable coherence and logic of the arguments she presented. Woman at the Altar, which was well received in England, suggested that the time was ripe for the Catholic Church to ordain women. In the introduction, she writes: "The ordination of women to the priesthood is the logical conclusion of all the recent work of Catholic theology about women and, in particular, about the holiness of all the baptised. It is not an aberration from what the Church teaches, but rather a fulfilment of it so that not to ordain women would now be to compromise the Catholicity of the church."
Admitting to having been "very depressed and upset" about the situation, she accepted an invitation to the US from an old friend, and spent last Christmas in New York. "We were both novices together but my friend is now married with a family." There, she read a report estimating that some three million attended Mass in that city on Christmas Day.
"How many of them support the Church's ban on artificial contraception? I began to think about it and decided that the Church collection must have come to about $10 million, so was that why it was okay for them to hold such beliefs but not for me." Weary of the entire saga and the fact that the Vatican was refusing to deal with her as an individual but were instead communicating with her only through her community's superior general in Rome, Sister Annunciata Pak - thus creating tension affecting others, and Byrne's relations with them - she decided to leave.
So here she sits, just over six weeks since leaving the community which had been part of her life for more than 40 years. As a girl of 11 she had gone as a boarder to St Mary's Convent in Shaftsbury run by the order she would later join. It has been a long connection. If the hurt and depression have lifted somewhat, she says: "I'm sad about it. It does seem such an unnecessary miscarriage of justice."
"Justice" proves a key word. Her friend and supporter, the late Cardinal Hume, had openly encouraged her saying: "Lavinia, this is not about obedience, it's about justice."
Ironies abound in Byrne's story. In England, Woman at the Altar had been published by the editorial director who had commissioned it and all her previous books - to date she has written 18. "It is a secular publishing house and free to publish as it pleases." However its reprinting in the US three years ago proved the beginning of the controversy. "The US publisher is St John's Press in Minnesota, which is owned by the Benedictines." Action was taken by the local bishop on the orders of the CDF, which led to the book being banned.
There are a couple of stories; that copies were burnt, or recycled, possibly used "greenly" as a source of energy in the heating of the monks' water. "And also that they were simply pulped, some 1,500 copies. But I don't know for sure what happened. I can't get a straight answer from anyone."
Soon after these events the CDF began its campaign in earnest. It has taken its toll; she looks tired and older than her 52 years, but perhaps this is due more to the contrast created by Byrne's youthful attitude than to the stress she has obviously suffered. Not that she has reached the stage of brushing it all aside. "I got more and more depressed because I felt my integrity was being questioned, and no one in Rome would speak to me directly."
Born in Birmingham in 1947, she is the youngest daughter of four children. Her approach to telling her story is ordered and logical. "It starts with my grandparents," she says, and recreates the atmosphere of a world dominated by Irish Catholics striving to succeed in the Birmingham of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her maternal grandfather was a doctor whose patients included Irish bargees who worked on the canal network and also the priests of the Birmingham Oratory. There was a strong Irish presence in the city. Her world was a Catholic one. She was baptised by Father Denis Sheil, the last novice accepted to the Birmingham Oratory community by Cardinal Newman. Until she was 12, she was not aware of having met anyone who did not belong to her church.
Two of her grandparents are Irish, and Lavinia can still claim Irish relatives including Prof John Harbison, the state pathologist, and his younger brother, archaeologist Dr Peter Harbison. "I have Irish hair," she says. But there is also a French connection. "My maternal grandmother was French; I'm very proud of her. She was an amazing person. As children we used to travel to France and visit her, near Nice on the Riveria. When she was widowed she moved back to France and lived in the house which had been used as a brothel by the Nazis. She was very artistic and, I think, rather frustrated. She was highly intelligent and I think she would have loved to go to university. But as it happens, I'm the first of the women in my family to have gone."
These early experiences of France and French culture developed Byrne's love of the language. In addition to her theology degree, she took a degree in French and Spanish at the University of London and later trained to be a teacher at Cambridge University.
Through her family history, which is largely that of a strong merchant clan, she has a well-defined grasp of social history. Alongside her grandfather - the doctor whose patients also included J.R.R. Tolkien, the Cambridge Old and Middle English scholar, best known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, she mentions her father's father, Thomas Byrne, who had an India rubber firm.
One day, in response to an employee's suggestion about putting air into the rubber tyres the company was then manufacturing, he replied: "No I don't think so Mr Dunlop." "My grandfather lost that one" she says. Two of his brothers had been great sportsmen, both county cricketers, with one captaining England at rugby - "quite an achievement for a Catholic at that time". Her father was a steel merchant, and her mother created a very French home for the family. "We had beautiful French furniture. Mother was a brilliant cook. All her cook books were in French. She was a homemaker and made a very beautiful, French home for us. My father would not have been as successful without her." Her upbringing sounds very civilised. She smiles and agrees. Her parents were also strong Catholics, although the household was not pious.
Her grandmother was a stronger influence on her than her mother. From both, she has inherited "familial tremor", a disease of the central nervous system. "I have very shaky hands." Having lived with this since childhood, she seems not to notice, remarking cheerfully: "it's been much worse than this." Now working on The Journey is my Home, a memoir, she says the title is deliberate. "Meaning my journey is a continuing one; I wish to continue learning and living within the church and proclaiming the gospel thereby." Her other ambition is to grow the perfect tomato plant.
And will we see women priests within the Catholic Church? "If it is God's will."
Woman at the Altar by Lavinia Byrne, published by Mowbray, is available at www. amazon.co.uk
