observer / british catholics

The faithful lose in this victory for misogyny

Many British Catholics who want no part of these power politics are left despairing

• Editorial

• The Observer, Sunday 16 January 2011

• Article history

At the end of Pope Benedict's visit to Britain in September, the challenge for the Catholic church was to build on the momentum and goodwill he had created among other Christian communities. The ordination as Catholic priests, in double-quick time, of three former Anglican bishops, outspoken dissidents all, was not top of most people's list of what to do next.

The Catholic leader Archbishop Vincent Nichols tried at the ceremony yesterday to make the best of an arrangement with which he is privately thought to be uncomfortable. But however it is dressed up, this was the Catholic church fixated on stealing a march on Anglicanism. It is as if the Reformation was a recent score to be settled.

The establishment of a special ordinariate where former Anglicans who reject women's ordination can carry on much as before, but within the Catholic fold, can only cause tension between the two churches. That in its turn will focus attention once again on disputes between different branches of Christianity, and make religion look out of touch with the real world.

In the face of poverty, climate change, natural disasters and all the other challenges facing our planet for religious institutions to be consumed in bickering about whether women can be priests is the stuff of satire.

It is only institutional religion that continues to regard women as second-class citizens. IfCatholicism believes that recruiting a handful of renegade Anglicans who share its institutional misogyny will buttress its position it is mistaken.

Meanwhile, those aspects of the church beneficial to the whole of society – its work for social justice, with the poor, the marginalised – are once again pushed into the background. Many British Catholics who want no part of this game of ecclesiastical power politics are left despairing. Those of other faiths or none, and of even moderately enlightened disposition, will be more inclined to turn their backs in anger.