The Gospels were about equality so why women are still oppressed?
Interview with Soline Humbert Irish Daily Mail 15 March 2025
SOLINE Humbert can remember the feeling she got when she was 17. It was a feeling that she couldn’t describe and one she tried to reject at the time, as unfamiliar as it was. But it was a calling that she discovered she couldn’t ignore. For, similarly to the priests who preach from the altars of our churches on a daily basis, Soline felt she was called to the priesthood and called to God – something she still believes.
Since her teenage years, she has spent her time campaigning for better rights for women in the Catholic Church. She is not alone. In fact, she is part of a worldwide movement of people who are currently on strike for Lent in a move they describe as fasting from sexism.
Soline is a member of We Are Church Ireland, part of an international organisation which aims for equality within the Church.
She and her husband Colm Holmes and Eamonn McCarthy founded Brothers And Sisters In Christ (BASIC) in 1993, which became part of We Are Church International.
Soline is insistent that she is not speaking for the movement as a representative but simply represents herself and her own experience as a woman within the Catholic Church who believes she has been called to God.
Now 68, she has led a spiritual life while all the time campaigning for the Church to open the door to women priests.
‘We have never stopped campaigning for it, but of course the Roman Catholic Church has been officially very much against it,’ she says. ‘But we have kept at it.
‘Then, more recently, there was a big consultation process in the Catholic Church, called a Synod, including in Ireland. In every feedback from that consultation in Ireland and the other countries, it showed that the role of women is a big issue and that equality for women is a big issue.
‘Because at the moment, women are obviously second-class in the Catholic Church, because we are excluded from the governance of the Church and all the ordained ministries.’
The issue is now once more a hot potato for the Catholic Church globally.
‘Equality for women will not go away – that’s the reality,’ says Soline. ‘It will keep on surfacing and trying to block it, to silence it – as has always been the way in the Catholic Church – has always failed. It has always come back up.’
On International Women’s Day, Soline and a group of like-minded men and women held a protest at the Spire as part of the Lenten movement taking place to highlight the lack of rights for women in the Catholic Church.
‘International Women’s Day is a time to highlight both the achievements of women generally in society but also to highlight where there’s a lot more work to be done for women’s equality,’ she says. ‘The Church obviously is an area where a lot more work needs to be done.
‘So that’s why we were at the Spire, to just highlight again what still needs to be done and to remedy the exclusion and the discrimination against women.’
The call to strike for Lent aims to show how vital women are to the Church. The movement has asked for women across the world to withhold their work inside the Church and ‘fast from sexism’ by organising protests like the one that was held in Dublin.
It almost seems anathema that a Church suffering from dwindling numbers and disappearing populations is insistent on excluding women, much like the insistence on not allowing priests to marry.
But the message has been loud and clear from the top of the Church. In 1994, Pope John Paul II in an Ordinatio Sacerdotalis declared ‘the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful’.
Then despite his reputation for liberalism, Pope Francis has insisted that ordaining women is not possible ‘because the Petrine principle has no place for that’.
But excluding women from ministry, says Soline, goes against the teaching of the Gospel.
After growing up in France, at 17 she moved to Ireland and it was here that she felt her calling. ‘My mother died when I was 11 and the first summer after her death I had a teacher coming to Ireland to bring some students to learn English,’ she explains. ‘So I came over to Tullow in Co Carlow and I fell in love with the country and the people, and came back the following summer.’
At the age of 17, Soline came back to study in Trinity and it was there that she felt her calling to the priesthood. ‘It’s very hard to describe,’ she says of the experience. ‘I was a student at Trinity. It was the last thing I expected. I was brought up thinking only men could be priests so I’d never questioned it.
‘I had, I suppose, a spiritual experience, an experience of God inside me, and then a sense of calling to the priesthood. Now that I could not understand at first, I thought to some extent, was I going mad? I knew some men got that sense of calling, but that was not at all on my radar, religious life, you know? ‘But I found myself with a very, very strong sense of calling.’ She tried, she says, to push it away and the experience has been painful for different reasons.
‘But, as I say, I’m 68, and it has never left me,’ Soline says. ‘A lot of things I felt when I was 17 or 18 have come and gone, but this has never left me. So you have to say there’s something in that. Because as I said, I didn’t go looking for it. It wasn’t on my plan for my life, and of course it has caused a fair bit of suffering – there’s no point claiming it hasn’t – as it has for a lot of other women. ‘But no, it hasn’t gone away, and it will not go away.’
Soline is a mother and a grandmother now but has lived her life as a spiritual person and advisor. She also celebrates the Eucharist at home but still sees herself as a Catholic.
‘My faith is not in a patriarchal institution,’ she says. ‘My faith is in God and God is not patriarchal, and God does not discriminate against women.
‘The official institution would see me as outside the Church.
‘I do not support the belief of women’s exclusion, and also I celebrate Eucharist as well, so some would consider me as outside. But I am a Catholic. I was baptised a Christian in the Catholic Church, and that’s who I am.’
It is no secret that the numbers of priests in Ireland are in decline. In 1965, there were 1,400 new seminarians while last year’s intake was just 25, bringing the total currently training for the priesthood to 75.So while priests struggle to cover masses and many parishes have to do without daily worship that was once commonplace, to Soline and her like it makes no sense that women are forbidden from ordination.
Yet she says she doesn’t feel frustration.
‘God called me,’ she says. ‘That’s the way I live. But obviously, officially not. But for me, that calling to priesthood has been so strong for so long.
‘I said yes to it and when I said yes to it, well that was it. I trained as a spiritual director and spiritual guide. So I’m accredited to help people on their spiritual journey and their spiritual life. There is an accredited association of spiritual guides in Ireland and I am a member of that association and that’s what I work at.
‘Ultimately I think what I’m trying to highlight is that there is a lot of lip service in the official church about women being so important and women’s equality. But in reality it is very much still a patriarchal institution, and you cannot have a patriarchal Church and a Church in which women are equal.
‘So far the choice from the leadership has to be to keep the Church with its patriarchal structures and to pay lip service to women’s equality. ‘It is a choice that has to be made, she says, between patriarchy and the teachings of the Gospel. ‘Equality is part of the good news and the Gospel,’ she says. ‘Patriarchy has nothing to do with the gospel. It’s sexism.
‘Some day the barriers will fall because the barriers have nothing to do with God, the barriers have to do with patriarchal ideology which has nothing to do with God or with Christ.’
Though it has taken a long time for anything to change, Soline is convinced that change will eventually come and refers to the Church’s views on slavery as an example. ‘It took a long time for the Christian Church to see that slavery was not compatible with the Gospel,’ Soline explains. ‘It was only in the 19th century, 19 centuries after Christ, that the Church ruled that really slavery was not compatible with being a Christian. So I’d say it’s going to be the same for exclusion of women and discrimination against women. That’s why it’s taking so long as well.’
It is a long road but she insists that women with a religious calling and their fellow travellers cannot and will not be put off by hearing the word no. ‘One has to keep persisting,’ she says. ‘To get the vote, a lot of women had to fight for it.
‘Nothing has come our way in terms of equality as women. Nothing has come our way without women – and some men with them – pushing for it, and very often it’s taken decades.’
The reason for the exclusion lies among the official Church leadership and Soline says that a lot of priests and, indeed, lay people are in favour of women priests and opening up the priesthood to marriage as well.
‘I think what Jesus realised was that the religion of his time was used to oppress some people,’ she says. ‘Religion can be, and has often been, used not as liberating, but as oppressive.
‘Yes, when it comes to women, a lot of the Church and Christianity has been manipulated and used as coercive and oppressive and controlling. But to me this is not what Jesus was about. He was about liberation, freeing people and certainly freeing women as well as men from any forms of oppressive structure.
‘But once the Church started colluding with power and money and status, it ended up quite oppressive of a whole range of people – women in the first instance as well as other groups of people.’
As a mother, Soline brought up her sons to understand that women should be equal in society and in the Church. ‘It was very important for me that they didn’t associate God with women being second class, certainly not Jesus with women being second class, not to perpetuate through next generations the sense that men in the eyes of God were somehow destined to govern and rule in the Church, and women were to obey, because that’s the reality,’ she says.
But since she was called, she feels society has changed dramatically and Soline wholeheartedly believes the Catholic Church must follow.
‘As people we grow, we change, we learn, we see different points of view,’ she says.
‘So that’s where the hope is, that people’s minds and hearts can be open to see new things and new truths and move on.
‘At the heart of the message of Jesus was love.
‘That was good news, that all people, all of creation, really was love, was created out of love and sustained by love. So, of course, love has to be at the heart and the centre of the Church, not control, not fear, not power.’
Soline has spent 61 years preaching the message that women in the Catholic Church should be equal and, as a viewpoint, it still goes against the hierarchical views held by the most senior figures in the Vatican and indeed the man who is charged with being God’s representative on earth.
There is no doubt that Soline has been branded a troublemaker, an outsider, an outlier but the intelligent and thoughtful woman who has made Dublin her home is far from the madwoman persona that some might like to tar her with as an easy way of dismissing her devotion and determination to be recognised inside her Church.
‘There’s always opposition,’ she says. ‘But sure, listen you can’t just stop because there’s opposition. As I say, nothing that was won in life would have happened if one had just given up when there was opposition.
‘If you believe in something and if you believe something is worthwhile, you won’t stop fighting because of opposition.’
Women are a problem for the Catholic Church, an institution with ingrained misogyny - Soline Humbert
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