The Catholic Church tries to argue that its refusal to allow women into the priesthood is not a sign of misogyny - women have many other opportunities to serve in the church and use their skills, right? We can tell a lot about the real attitudes of Catholic prelates towards women by observing how they treat women in their employ.

In The Pontiff in Winter: Triumph and Conflict in the Reign of John Paul II, John Cornwell writes about a conversation he had with a monsignor with long experience working in the Vatican:

Laywomen, who might have exerted a civilizing influence, were present in the Vatican in pitifully small numbers. The contemptuous way in which they were treated revealed the misogynist culture that prevailed. A former secretary, now living in Switzerland, reported that she was treated more like a slave than a human being and that she was literally locked in her office each day by her boss, a distinguished Dominican priest-theologian, and had to knock to be allowed to go to the bathroom.

Another told me that after she was appointed personal assistant to an archbishop, officials were in the habit of opening the door to her office and staring at her in sullen silence. When she went to the Vatican cafeteria, male bureaucrats would move away if she sat close to them.

These reports, if even partially true, are absolutely horrid. Women have to ask in order to use the bathroom? Women have to endure sullen stares as if they were interlopers? Women have to eat alone because men don’t want to sit too close to them?

All of this suggests very negative, very demeaning attitudes towards women. I don’t think that any of the cited behavior can be explained away as “innocent” or misunderstood — these men, from what I can tell, don’t like women and don’t want women around.

It would be implausible to think that these attitudes play absolutely no role in the Vatican’s refusal to consider having women as priests. The question, then, is to what degree the other reasons usually offered are mere rationalizations and to what degree they are genuinely believed.

 

Read More Book Notes from the Book Reviews on this site.