Madam, - The Catholic Church has forfeited its position as spiritual guide to women by denying and suppressing the emerging sense of women as gifted people in their own right. Women are playing more active roles in many aspects of life outside the family without the humiliation of male dominance. Perhaps progress is slow, but the principle is being absorbed into our culture and our lives.
In great contrast, the Catholic Church teaches and practises a spiritual discrimination that places women only in a submissive and supportive role to the gifts and limitations of their brothers. Women play supporting roles in a system that supports men because they are men, and not because of the inherent value of their contribution.
Is this not an abuse of the gifts of God? An institution that bends the will of many towards its own gratification and survival does not serve its members and does not serve God. If the Catholic Church continues to abuse women in this way, she is serving evil, not good.
The difficulty is not in understanding what is happening within the institution; the difficulty is in finding the energy and the courage to face the truth. The institutional Church has not applied the teaching attributed to Christ - "Love one another as I have loved you" -to women as well as to men.
As long as women are treated with suspicion and as the enemy, abuse will continue. And perhaps women will continue to be treated as the enemy because the clerical system has taught its members that women are at the very least suspect and dangerous because of their sexuality.
A celibate priesthood has endeavoured to be chaste by treating women as a separate species for whom the teachings of Christ can be applied only in a limited way. A huge amount of the energy of the church, and perhaps the finances too, is invested in keeping up appearances. The institution is not capable of examining its conscience because it hasn't got a single conscience.
Is the Catholic Church as a system, perhaps, a collective of partly responsible institutionalised men who do not know or understand the whole picture and therefore cannot be held morally or legally responsible? Or do some men know in fact what they are doing?
There is no defence, theological or moral, for abuse. The huge administrative difficulties that we might face are no excuse to continue the abuse. The bottom line is that a Church that abuses is not in the service of God.
If we continue to teach that our little girls must submit to the spiritual leadership of their brothers who become priests, then we are guilty of spiritual abuse.
If we teach our little girls that Jesus said, "Do this in memory of me", but was excluding them, then we are guilty of spiritual abuse.
How much longer will we allow our little girls to be spiritually abused in the name of religion and at the bidding of institutionalised men who are perhaps incapable of being morally responsible? This will not go away. - Yours, etc.,
CAITRIONA McCLEAN,
Weston Avenue,
Lucan,
Co Dublin.