Dr John O’Loughlin Kennedy: Is Mary McAleese Being Fair?
Mary McAleese is reported as saying the exclusion of women from ordination is based on “fake theology”. Ireland’s former President has formal qualifications in both Civil and Canon Law but not in theology. Her legal training, teaching and practice, however, have given her wide experience in pinpointing invalid reasoning. Her standing and her following will ensure that this direct challenge to Papal teaching will influence many Catholics. Is she right in this case? If the Church authorities have the courage to debate her contention, I think they will have great difficulty in defending the magisterial documents that comprise the relevant teaching:
- the Declaration Inter Insigniores (CDF, 1976) and
- the Apostolic Letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (Pope John Paul II, 1994) which relies very heavily on the earlier Declaration.
While the Pope insisted that the faithful accept the new teaching, that “the Church has no authority whatsoever” to admit women to the priesthood, he stopped short of invoking papal infallibility.
Historically, women were widely presumed to be naturally inferior. This was codified in Roman Law, on which Church Law was based.
The contribution of women during two world wars, their achievements in higher education, aviation, the arts, and in the suffragette movement, together ended this worldwide prejudice, except in a few cultures and, regrettably, in the Church.
The scope of infallibility as defined at Vatican I had been exaggerated in multiple small steps to encompass virtually the entire magisterium. Clergy dutifully dubbed this “creeping infallibility”, although it was really pseudo-infallibility. This meant that any correction of earlier imperfections could jeopardise the authority gained from Vatican I. After that Council, the bureaucracy no longer spoke for a pope who was primus inter pares, but for one that was infallible and was defined as overseeing everything in the Church. The bureaucracy thus leapfrogged the bishops and became their superior and the effective government of a centralised Church. Bureaucracies are inherently selfish, and St Paul identifies selfishness as the opposite of the Spirit. No Christian Church should be governed by its bureaucracy.
By exaggerating the scope of its infallibility and glorifiyinh selected first millennium precedents, Rome has narrowed its own options in dealing with third millennium problems. Change now risks undermining the aura of never being wrong.
Canon Law §138 recognises the principle that authority to do something implies authority to do whatever is conducive to its achievement. In telling us that the Church has “no authority whatsoever” to ordain women, Pope John Paul II had to disregard the shortage of vocations which is impacting both of Christ’s parting mandates: “Do This” and “Make Disciples of All”
Space constraints mean I can only give examples of the many logical fallacies and the one outrageous deception common to both magisterial documents.
Equivocation: At one point in the argument, the word “apostle” indicates a precise and specific calling but later it is expanded to include almost every significant office in the Church.
Non-sequitur: It simply does not follow that the omission of women when Christ was appointing apostles should debar women from being priests, deacons or other Church officers.
Unwarranted Assumption. There are no grounds for the assumption that fidelity to Christ requires that the Church must never do something that he never did. If that were true, the Church would have “no authority whatsoever” to ordain men as individual priests. Christ never did that. Christians were a priestly people long before ordination of priests was introduced. The individual, mediating, sacrificing, Christian priest did not become the norm until the Fifth Century, subsequent to the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, and it owed a lot to the pagan Roman priesthood.
Outrageous Deception: In 1975, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Donald Coggan, wrote to Pope Paul VI alerting him to the trend in Anglican opinion towards the ordination of women. To avoid creating a new obstacle to future unity, he suggested that the Pope might accept women’s ordination as “within a diversity of legitimate traditions”. Paul asked the Pontifical Biblical Commission for scriptural guidance. When it was on the verge of reporting that New Testament studies could not settle the matter, Paul ended the correspondence without agreeing. Next, he asked the CDF to find the proof text he needed. Not surprisingly, they too failed. But to meet the Pope’s need, they manufactured one ! They redacted the Gospel, Mk. 3:14, omitting the crucial job description for Apostles: “and to be sent out to preach”. This removed the explanation of women’s exclusion. Appointing women as itinerant preachers in first century Palestine would have been idiotic. The redaction facilitated speculation that Christ was honouring some unspoken, but binding, limitation in God’s eternal plan for the Church. Conveniently, the speculation offers a pseudo-divine justification for continuing the discrimination against women indefinitely after humanity has rejected it.
Disguise traditional prejudice, blame God instead!
If a theology requires rewriting Scripture and flouting logic, then “fake” it is. And, in speaking truth to power, Mary McAleese is being truly prophetic.
A version of this article was first published on the Irish Times website 11th May 2025
Dr John O’Loughlin Kennedy is a retired economist. His recent book, The Curia Is the Pope, and why it cannot listen, is published by Mount Salus Press in Ireland and by Amazon.In 1968, he and his late wife, Kay, co-founded the international relief and development organisation, Concern Worldwide.
“Baptism is the foundation of Christian life. … There is nothing higher than this baptismal dignity, equally bestowed upon each person, through which we are invited to clothe ourselves with Christ and be grafted onto Him like branches of the one vine.”
(XVIth Synod Final Report, 21)
So what now are the grounds for denying Ordination – a dignity now declared to be subordinate to Baptism – to baptised and qualified women? Dr O’Loughlin Kennedy’s summary of the emergence of the male ordained priesthood connects it inexorably with the male-dominated secular structure of organised Christendom, a socio-political era we are now being told to put behind us.
Has the mansplaining Catholic magisterium truly done that yet?
So easily and insidiously can hypocrisy creep in again – in talk of an inverted pyramid that still denies true equality to half the people of God. We all, male and female, need the ordained service of both men and women, properly schooled in the dignity of Baptism. I do not see how the church can heal if it continues to deny that need.
Mansplaining is a behaviour that we have only recently come to name and recognize. It is so deeply engrained in biblical and Christian tradition that a critique of it will take us very far. This critique cannot be carried out without the intervention of women’s voices (and also of LGBT voices).