Nun challenges Church to ordain women

A CAMPAIGNING nun has challenged the Catholic Church to ordain women, accusing the hierarchy of discrimination and double standards in excluding females from the priesthood.

Sr Louvenagh Heffernan, a Loreto sister for 20 years, said the ban on women priests effectively judged them unworthy of the sacrament of ordination and she insisted this was never what God intended.

Writing in today’s Irish Examiner she said: "If we believe, as I do, that God is just, fair and honest why then by the actions of the leaders of the Catholic Church is God portrayed as unjust, unfair and one who discriminates?"

Sr Louvenagh, who teaches art and religion in Loreto Secondary School in Fermoy, Co Cork, said she decided to speak out amid her growing concern for falling Mass attendances and the decline in vocations.

"I think people are looking for change now and that means the priesthood has to change. It definitely will happen. It has to happen. It’s just a matter of when.

"I think the sooner the better. The way things are going now with Mass attendance falling and parishes short of priests, the church will only decline more the longer we leave it."

The Waterford native made her comments a week after a demonstration staged by West Cork grandmother, Jennifer Sleeman, who urged the faithful to boycott Mass last Sunday or wear green armbands to services to protest the lack of female involvement at the highest levels of the Church.

Sr Louvenagh has been part of a low-key campaign on the same issue for many years and is a member of BASIC, Brothers and Sisters in Christ, an organisation of lay and religious Catholics eager to see the ordination of women.

She said it made no sense that a woman was considered worthy to give birth to the son of God but not worthy to serve at the highest levels of the church he founded.

Sr Louvenagh also accused the Church of double standards in campaigning for social justice while perpetuating an injustice against women.

"It seems a matter of: ‘Do what I say, not what I do’," she said. Sr Louvenagh added she hoped some day to be ordained: "I would love to be. I love my Church and I want to serve it as fully as any man."

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