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Of Synodality and Closed Doors, Pain and Hope

Soline Humbert • 19 March 2022

First published in The Japan Mission Journal, Spring 2022, Volume 76, Number 1

Soline Humbert, born in 1956, is a French-Irish, ministering as a spiritual director since 2006. She has degrees in History, Business Administration, and Ecumenical Theology from Trinity College, Dublin and diplomas in Catechetics and Spiritual Direction. She is a member of We Are Church Ireland. Soline is married, with grandchildren.

 

 

 

When I was asked several months ago to write an article on synodality, I was surprised but I agreed, albeit very reluctantly. I reckoned that after Christmas, when I would be actually writing it, that inner reluctance would have given way to a measure of enthusiasm. However the passage of time has done nothing of the sort, in fact quite the opposite. I also thought that by then I might be able to write about participating in an official synodal experience, but the archdiocese of Dublin is still in preparatory phase, so there was no help there.


I could of course attempt to write something theoretical, impersonal on synodality; after all I have studied ecclesiology and read enough learned articles, and listened to discussions about it. As I sat with and reflected upon this deep-seated reluctance, this lack of enthusiasm which was actually blocking me from even starting writing, what I discovered was a well of pain. For me, to write about synodality in an honest, authentic manner would necessarily mean engaging with this pain and listening to what it is telling me and sharing it, in all its vulnerability. There was no way of ignoring it.


By now, you who are reading this, will have realized that I am inviting you on a kind of journey, an inner exploration which is tentative, partial, not systematized, not offering you a worked out treatise. It will lead where it will....


The first thing which I have noted in myself is that I do not share in the enthusiasm that the word synodality and all that goes with it generates in so many, starting with Pope Francis. One Irish bishop was interviewed a few months ago on radio about it, and he was positively gushing about it. I would of course like to share in that enthusiasm, for it is an uplifting, positive emotion, but the reality is that I can’t.


The official guidelines for the Synod process state clearly that it must reach, include, people on the periphery of the church. I have asked myself: am I one of these people considered to be on the periphery? Yes, on the margins, and how did I come to be there? And where exactly is the center of the church? Is the center where the Pope, the curia, the bishop, the parish priest are? Who defines the center, and therefore the periphery? I like to think that the Heart of Christ is the center, and in that case I know there is room and a welcome for me there.


But in terms of the official, institutional church I am on the margins because the power center has pushed me out there. Or as the authorities would argue, I have put myself there, by my own misguided obduracy. All of my adult life the official church has been a cold house, a very cold house indeed. Whenever I have seen posters about domestic violence warning about situations ‘When home is where the abuse takes place,’ I have thought about the church, my spiritual home ‘where the abuse takes place.’ As long ago as 1995 in a seminar on the ordination of women in Dublin I described myself as having been spiritually abused. I did not say it lightly then, it cost me a lot to acknowledge it first to myself and then publicly. Now, nearly thirty years later I cannot but reaffirm it: There is widespread spiritual abuse in the church. I am not talking only about the kind of spiritual abuses committed by an individual confessor, spiritual director, or religious superior. I am talking about church rules, teachings, practices which do injury to one’s spirit and conscience, which are destructive and anything but life-giving. They are so much part and parcel of the church culture, have been sacralized and decreed as divinely endorsed, they are mostly not even recognized consciously as being abusive.


In a very recent interview Sr Jeannine Gramick of New Ways Ministries describes how she felt when she was investigated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith trying to pressurize her to abandon her ministry to LGBTI+ people. She said she felt then like’ ‘a battered woman.’ Indeed, there are countless people like her, like us.


From the time I experienced a sense of vocation to the presbyteral ministry in my late teens I have been at the receiving end of spiritual violence in the church and pressure by the authorities to ‘desist,’ to ‘recant.’ To put it somewhat crudely, I was to acknowledge I was either ‘mad, bad or sad.’ Being young and somewhat naively trusting it took me some time to realize that the church is a deeply patriarchal institution. My sense of vocation to an ordained ministry, the exclusive preserve of males, was perceived as a threat to this patriarchal power and quashed, using all means, including spiritual violence, all forms of exclusion, of silencing and the threat of excommunication.


I am now in my sixties, I have never lost that sense of vocation despite the church authorities’ determined efforts to kill it or to persuade me to abandon it. Pope Francis, who is all in favor of open doors, is only the latest pope to reaffirm that the door to women priests is closed. And while he is also in favor of listening and discernment, he has never extended an invitation to women like me to at least listen to our deep sense of calling and to our journeys with that vocation. Obviously he believes we have nothing of value to communicate, no truth to share, no word from the Spirit. It has been the official church policy and practice to this very day to treat us as non-persons, to shun us, to freeze us out. In a patriarchal church we simply don’t exist.


So what of synodality for women like me? The Irish bishop who was gushing with enthusiasm about the launching of the synodal process was also careful to explain there would be ‘’parameters’ to be respected. I know full well that who I am and what I represent is outside these carefully defined ‘parameters.’ That much has been drilled into me at every opportunity over nearly half a century: ‘You do not belong’ or ‘You can belong, but only on our terms and that means IF you agree you don’t have that vocation.’ Confronted with that ultimatum, I have chosen to sacrifice that kind of belonging to keep my integrity and to being faithful, as I perceive it, to the One who is faithful to me.


What does this synodal process mean for women like me after a lifetime of exclusion, threats, rejections, denigration? What does it mean when Pope Francis calls for openness to the Spirit and to new paths but repeats over and over again that the door is firmly shut in our faces?


Sr Nathalie Becquart in the Vatican Secretariat for the Synod recently said that two things were needed for the synod process: trust and humility.


I have faith and trust in God still. I trust in the Spirit wholeheartedly. But I have no faith left in the present church system and the leaders. It wasn’t always like that: I started off full of trust. And then along the way I realized I had no trust left, it had gradually been eroded by the repeated abuses, deceptions, manipulations, and lies. Once that trust was gone, it was truly gone. Something precious had died. Once trust has been squandered, destroyed, it takes a lot of efforts to rebuild it. People who want to be trusted again must show themselves worthy of that trust. Appeals such as ‘trust us, trust us’ no longer work when they are not backed with very concrete actions. As far as I am concerned, and I can only speak personally, I have experienced nothing, absolutely nothing, to restore my own trust.


What about humility? After all, that and obedience and patience, are deemed the cardinal virtues for women in the church. And yes I know, if I had any humility (as defined) I wouldn’t possibly think for a second God would call me, a (mere) woman, to be a priest. If I still do lack that kind of humility, it’s not for want of having been admonished repeatedly. But is that really what humility is, the humility of Mary of Nazareth and of her Son Jesus? Decades ago I came across a definition of humility by a French priest which made instant sense to me: ‘Humility is knowing one’s place and taking it.’ And with it, the painful realization that there is no place for me in the institutional church as it is.


The Synodal process culminating in the synod of bishops in Rome in 2023 means that the ultimate discernment will be in the hands of some men (males). Many women fear, with good reason, that their voices will not be heard. And many men, too.


Nearly thirty years ago I initiated, with two others, a petition asking for all ministries in the church to be equally open to women and men. It obviously struck a chord because, although it was pre-internet days making the process very laborious, we quickly gathered 10,000 signatures. After the primate of all Ireland Cardinal Daly refused to receive them we raised another 10,000. We divided them and sent them to all bishops in Ireland. A handful acknowledged them.


Pope Francis has said, quoting Yves Congar, that ‘we don’t need another church but a different church.’ It is my profound conviction that a church where men continue to claim to have the final word in decisions and to arrogate to themselves the right to place restrictions on women is just more of the same patriarchal church where spiritual abuses of power are endemic.


Dear Pope Francis, you tell me that this door which was brutally shut in my face by your predecessor Pope Saint John Paul II will remain shut for ever. Why do you want me to take part in this synodal process when you have already indicated that whatever I might share of my spiritual life will be ‘inadmissible’ by you and your fellow bishops, and will make absolutely no difference to that door remaining shut?


Whatever trust and hope I have do not come from a pope but from the One who speaks in the depths of my being: ‘See, I have opened a door for you that no one can shut’ (Revelation 3:8).


Can the synodal process as presently framed and organized give birth to a Church of Communion for which we long, while insisting on closed doors for women? I remain in pain and in hope.

 

 

Soline Humbert

17 March 2025
Interview with Soline Humbert Irish Daily Mail 15 March 2025
by Soline Humbert 25 February 2025
A reflection by Soline Humbert for the Women’s Ordination Conference Retreat “Hidden Springs, Holy Radiance” 9 February 2025 [ see recording on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szP5h1kzEsU ] We have been gathering over the past three days in the presence of Brigid of Kildare, and I am sure she has brought gifts to each one, for my experience is that she is attentive to our needs and very generous with her help. At this stage I just want to share some of my own life journey with Brigid. I first encountered her in 1969 when I came from France to Ireland as a child on holidays to learn English. I went to a small Irish town called Tullow. As it happens it was in Tullow that on the first of February 1807 the order of nuns of St Brigid which had been dissolved at the Reformation, had been refounded by a far-sighted bishop. Symbolically an oak sapling had been brought from Kildare Town, from the church of the oak, to Tullow and planted in the grounds of the Brigidine convent where I took English classes. It was by then a majestic oak tree. It still stands to this day. Coincidentally and somewhat ironically, 1969 was also the year that Pope Paul the 6th removed St Brigid, along with 193 other saints, from the Universal Roman Calendar of saints. The reason being that there wasn’t enough evidence for her existence! That despite the fact she was the most mentioned Irish person in the writings of several centuries after her death... What was true was that her flame had been somehow extinguished, and her importance diminished in a deeply clericalised and patriarchal church as Ireland was at the time. She was in the shadow of St Patrick and very much the secondary patron Saint, reflecting the secondary position of women in general. But change was slowly happening. Having discovered in myself a vocation to the priesthood I eventually co- founded a group for women’s ordination and launched a petition to open all ministries to women in February 1993. At the very same time, which I consider providential, the flame of St Brigid was rekindled by the Brigidine sisters in Kildare Town. Women were stirring after a very long wintertime in the church and in society and becoming more fiery. Brigid with her torch was blazing a way for equality. It is then, and only then, that I came across the story of her ordination as a bishop and I remember my astonishment for I had never read anything like that before, or since, for that matter. Of course, while this fact was mentioned in many of the lives of Brigid going back to the first millennium it had been quietly left out of the pious descriptions of her life which were fed to the people. The way the story is recounted makes it clear that her ordination was considered to be very much the doing of the Holy Spirit. Objections about her gender were voiced but powerless to negate what God had done. It reminds me very much of the passage in the Acts of the Apostles when St Peter is amazed to discover that the Holy Spirit has descended on Cornelius, a gentile, and which leads him to conclude that “God has no favourites”. Brigid’s episcopal ordination at the hands of a bishop overcome by the Spirit is also a powerful affirmation that when it comes to ordination God has no favourite gender. Her ordination’s divine origin shows that Brigid was a bishop because God ordained it, and her. A very subversive truth our Church has yet to learn... As we campaigned for women’s ordination we made sure that this episode from Brigid’s life was brought into the open, again and again, despite clerical efforts to dismiss this dangerous historical memory as pure legend and keep it buried. Interestingly when the Anglican Church of Ireland, (Episcopalian) ordained their first woman bishop in 2013 it was to the diocese of Meath and Kildare! A very symbolic act. I have often gone to St Brigid’s Well in Kildare, a little oasis of peace, to spend some time with Brigid and re-source myself by the gently flowing water. After the First Women’s Ordination Worldwide Dublin international Conference in 2001 I went there again on the anniversary of my baptism and I hung my purple stole on a tree overlooking the well. I had worn that stole for many years as a sign of waiting. From now on I would wear stoles of other colours. And a few years ago, I found myself back in Tullow, as a guest speaker at the invitation of the Brigidine sisters for an international celebration. It was very moving to be able to speak of my calling to priesthood in the place where the order of St Brigid had been revived and where I had first come as a child half a century beforehand! That day I sensed very much the presence of Brigid the bishop and I was filled with joy and gratitude. In some ways we can say St Brigid has risen up and is leading the way for women to rise up. Although a woman in what was very much a man’s world and a man’s church, Brigid exudes a remarkable confidence in her being, in her words and in her actions. No doubt that confidence was rooted in a deeply contemplative life nurtured by prayer. “From the moment I first knew God, I have never let him out of my mind, and I never shall”. She embodies the authority which stems from being filled by the Spirit and a leadership at the service of peace, justice, hospitality to the strangers, charity to the poor and marginalised, reconciliation, healing and harmony with creation and care of the earth. The two Scripture readings we have just heard are very fitting for she was renowned for her practical care and generosity to those in need or suffering. Like Christ, she went around doing good. I must not be the only one who saw and heard in Episcopalian bishop Mariann Budde’s recent words the spirit of St Brigid as she used her God- given authority to plead for mercy for the people in vulnerable situations in the face of unbounded cruelty. Brigid is a bold, dynamic presence. She is said to be a woman of the threshold, of liminal places, and she is a sure guide for our times when we also are in transition on the threshold of a new church and a new world too. She calls to us to step boldly forward with our torches burning brightly, bringing the light and warmth of God’s Love to a world gone cold in the grip of darkness and despair. Her life reminds us that with “God nothing is impossible” and to expect miracles. I shall end on a light- hearted note: I went on pilgrimage to St Brigid’s Well and Solas Bhride in Kildare last Tuesday to prepare for this retreat. On the way back from the well and driving through the wide expanse of the Curragh where thousands of sheep graze freely I started seeing a multitude of rainbows. It reminded me of one of the many whimsical stories about Brigid: Caught in a rainstorm, she hangs her mantle on a sunbeam to dry. Dripping from its edges, colourful rainbows form in the water droplets, and her mantle is ‘bright’ with colour. Lady, from winter’s dark, Star of Imbolc, rise! Dance across our threshold: Scattering warm laughter Seeds of hospitality, Tolerance, forgiveness! Return again to the folk: You the Spring we yearn for! (Tom Hamill)
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