I read a post today at US Catholic - Boycotting the Mass. Here's a bit of the post ....
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.'
Some women in the U.S. are taking notice of this protest as well .... is it worth it to willfully take a week off? But even if you do, will enough women boycott that you'd actually be able to see a difference in the pews? Would it make any difference?
Is protesting something you consider unjust worth the effort if you believe it won't actually bring about change? I think it is.
For some reason this reminds me of living with my mother just before she died. She and I had terrible arguments and there was no way for me to win one of them because she had all the power in the relationship - it was her home and she could make me leave if she wanted to, but even more, she didn't care about damaging the quality of our relationship. That didn't stop me from arguing with her of course :) but what it did do was it eroded any trust, respect, and maybe even love I'd had for her. It's been eight years since she died and I'm still so upset at her that it's almost impossible to remember anything good we ever had between us.
In the relationship between the church hierarchy and we women the hierarchy has all the power. Yes, women who wish that we were treated equally can complain, as long as it's not too loudly, and we can walk away, saying we have anywhere else to go, but we can't really do the one thing we might want to - we can't get the hierarchy to trust us and respect us and love us enough to be willing to consider change.
Oh, for those who will say the women's ordination thing isn't about trust and respect and love, but about Jesus only wanting men to be priests, read Did Jesus Exclude Women from Priesthood? by Sandra M. Schneiders.
