Mary KennyControversial campaign aims to challenge gender issues in the Church, writes Mary Kenny
It will be interesting to see if the Church of Ireland joins its sister church in England in calling for “a conversation” about whether God should be represented as a woman.
The call comes not from the establishment of the Church of England but from a Steering Group within the Anglican Synod called Women and the Church (known as Watch).
Having successfully established that women in the Church of England (and Church of Ireland) can now be priests and bishops, the chairperson of Watch, Hilary Cotton, sees the next hurdle as dismantling the religious language and imagery which portrays God as “He”.
Mrs Cotton has called for a move away from the patriarchal discourse of holy writ, saying: “Until we shift considerably towards a more gender-full expression in our worship about God then we are failing God and missing something.”
WATCH’s campaign is likely to cause a conversation, indeed, in the Church of England, though a controversial and divisive one. Some Anglicans are appalled at the idea of departing from historical Biblical traditions.
However, I see the God-as-Female campaign in a slightly different light: I suggest that it is, subconsciously, a move by Protestant Christianity to recapture and rediscover the Marian element that was so deeply embedded in faith before the Reformation.
Tradition
England was especially devoted to Our Lady before the Protestant Revolution (as the Reformation is sometimes called), and the traditions lingered on for centuries afterwards.
That devotion is still found in High Anglicanism and manifest in pilgrimages, for example, to Walsingham.
Our Lady provided a feminine aspect of faith, as did such holy women as Mother Julian of Norwich, whom Hilary Cotton quotes with fervour – Julian called God “our mother in all things”. Yes, but that was in the 14th Century, before the great divide.
A sparky conversation indeed beckons among our Anglican brethren. I mean, of course, sisterhood!
Charles Kennedy’s religious sensibility
Charles Kennedy, who has just died aged 55, was the first ever Catholic leader of a British political party. Mr Kennedy led the Liberal Democrats, very successfully, from 1999 to 2006.
It was known that he had struggled with a drink problem and, in a famous and startling television inquisition, Jeremy Paxman confronted him openly about it.
Charlie Kennedy was too nice a person to reply: “If booze was a bar to political advancement, half the House of Commons might be disqualified and Winston Churchill would never have been Prime Minister.”
But he was too humble for such sallies. Later, he admitted his struggle with alcohol.
He used his religious sensibility in strongly opposing the morality of the Iraq war, which indeed turned out to be such a disaster, and the source of our present troubles with Islamic State.
Mr Kennedy was a Scot, but more than that, a Highlander, and of course the Highland Scots have a long historical tradition of Catholicism.
Revived monarchies
Mr Tom Leonard from Spiddal in Co Galway has been published in the national newspapers papers disparaging respect given to Prince Charles on his recent reconciliation trip to the west of Ireland.
“Royalty is based on a primitive, knuckle-dragging idea that people who are born into a particular family are somehow better than everyone else,” he wrote. “The English royals have convinced millions of their people to sheepishly accept this nonsense for years.”
Mr Leonard recommends that we – the Irish people – also examine “our childlike attitudes”.
He is correct in stating that kingship is a “primitive” idea. So it is: just as a burial ground is a “primitive” idea – it goes back to the practices of the earliest humans. He also has a point in using the word “childlike”. The British constitutionalist Walter Bagehot said that one of the strengths of a monarchy is that even a child could understand the concept. Indeed: you can’t keep little girls away from stories about princesses.
Whether monarchy is a suitable form of constitutional arrangement is for each nation to decide for, or against. What fascinates me is the revival of popular European monarchies, which are adorned these days by beautiful and well-educated women, notably Queen Mathilde of the Belgians – a double graduate from the Catholic University of Louvain – Queen Maxima of the Netherlands, Queen Letizia of Spain (pictured), all university graduates, and Crown Princess Mary of Denmark, the accomplished daughter of a brilliant Scottish Mathematics professor, recently voted “the most popular woman in Denmark”.
After the First World War, monarchies were relentlessly swept aside as relics of an antiquated order. But where monarchy has survived, it has revived, and even improved itself by acquiring more educational skills and marrying women of intelligence and character who also look fetching in pretty frocks. Exactly what a little girl thinks of as a princess.