Monk’s mother calls on women to join one-day boycott of Mass

Published: Wednesday, August 11, 2010

AN 80-YEAR-OLD woman is organising a one-day boycott of Sunday Mass "by the faithful women of Ireland" next month.

Jennifer Sleeman from Clonakilty in Cork said she wants "to let the Vatican and the Irish church know that women are tired of being treated as second-class citizens".

She has called on the Catholic women of Ireland to "join your sisters on Sunday, September 26th. On that one day boycott Mass. Stay at home and pray for change. We are the majority. We may have been protesting individually but unremarked on, but together we have strength and our absence, the empty pews, will be noticed".

She said: "Whatever change you long for, recognition, ordination, the end of celibacy, which is another means of keeping women out, join with your sisters and let the hierarchy know by your absence that the days of an exclusively male-dominated church are over."

She told The Irish Times she had chosen the date of September 26th as her 81st birthday was three days previously, on the 23rd.

She said she looks at her "children and grandchildren and see no future for the Catholic Church. Some of the grandchildren go through the rites of sacraments but seldom, if ever, visit a church afterwards. Some of my children are actively looking for a meaningful spiritual life but they do not find it in the Catholic Church." But, she said, "I must except my eldest son who is a monk in Glenstal Abbey, another place that helps me keep some shreds of faith."

She noted her son, Fr Simon, was supportive of her in her action.

Over recent Sundays, Ms Sleeman had been to the Church of Ireland in Clonakilty, to Mass in Knocknaheeney, and back to the Catholic Church in Clonakilty. "I felt so welcome in the first two and just wondered what I was doing in 'my own church' [Clonakilty]," she said. "Since then I have been to the celebration of the Methodist Church's 150 years in Clonakilty, another joyful and welcoming occasion."

A former Presbyterian who converted to Catholicism 54 years ago, she said: "I am not a cradle Catholic. I chose to join as an adult helped by meeting a wonderful priest . . . but I now wonder did I do the right thing?" She has found that "somehow I have grown up but the church has not".

The sexual abuse scandals "horrified me. I find I belong to an organisation that seems caught in a time warp, run by old celibate men divorced from the realities of life, with a lonely priesthood struggling with the burden of celibacy where rules and regulations have more weight than the original message of community and love".

This article was featured in the The Irish Times - Wednesday, August 11, 2010 by PATSY McGARRY, Religious Affairs Correspondent

UPDATE......

Women's boycott a wake-up call for church

JENNIFER Sleeman's call for women to boycott Mass on September 26 should give all Catholics food for thought on the subject of how women are treated by, and within, their church.

The Vatican has made it clear that anyone who ordains a woman will be guilty of a grave sin, but it failed to elaborate as to whether the offence would be greater or lesser in the eyes of God or the church than the sin of child abuse; or the presumably sinful practice of moving clerical abusers to different parishes instead of standing up for their victims.

One thinks also of the grief and trauma inflicted in the past on thousands of women, mothers whose babies were refused the dignity of a church-approved burial because they hadn't been baptised. Their innocent souls, the church had people believing for centuries, were lost in limbo and could never see the light of God.

The bones of many of those "limbo babies" lie under stones or in unmarked graves all over Ireland, thanks to that cruel teaching that the church, thankfully, has ditched.

The Vatican "decommissioned" limbo only after many years of pleading and petitioning from groups around the world.

The involvement of women as Eucharistic ministers in the church might be seen as a step towards equal status, especially as women were long denied the sacrament of communion for up to six weeks after giving birth -- to prevent defilement of the Blessed Host.

Women also are allowed to join pastoral councils, but these tend to be mere extensions of clerical power, rubber-stamping the wishes and decisions of the local clergy.

I am aware of a case in which a woman in the midlands who had lapsed in her Mass attendance was approached by the parish priest and offered some down-to-earth advice.

He informed her that other members of the council found her non-attendance at Mass upsetting and he asked her if she wouldn't mind being seen occasionally in the chapel as this, he assured her, "would keep those auld bags quiet".

Ms Sleeman's boycott plea may serve as a much-needed, wake-up to the Catholic Church.

This article was featured in the Irish Independent - Thursday August 19 2010 by John Fitzgerald, Callan, Co Kilkenny