Ad personam and without relation to the subject matter.
Are you talking about this quote?
I don’t mean to complain or be fussy but let me just give a quick demographic run-down on the council’s members and you decide for yourself just how in-touch these guys are with women around the world… There are 13 Cardinals, 5 Archbishops, 8 Bishops, 1 Monsignor, 1 Rector (yes, he’s a priest; did you even need to ask…) and 3 Laymen.
Since these guys are…well guys…and they wanted to get together for four days and do nothing but talk non-stop about girls…they had a bright idea. No, it was not to invite women to join their council as members…what, are you drunk? No, they had some Italian actress make a video asking women to submit one minute or shorter videos about who they are…because evidently they believe nothing of importance about women requires more than a minute to explain. By the way, I sent them a link to my blog but I did not get an invitation to participate in their meeting.
The irony of the 31 all-male membership writing the following statement as the opening salvo of their working document about women just kind of says it all…“In our Plenary, the invaluable contribution of our Members and Consultors will allow us to gather some aspects of women’s cultures in four thematic stages, in order to identify possible pastoral paths which will allow Christian communities to listen and dialogue with the world today in this sphere.” You see, they’re going to “listen and dialogue” about women by not listening to or dialoging with them. This is clearly miracle fodder.
That’s really the high-point of the working document. It just goes downhill from there with sexist ideas and language.
In fairness, I must mention that 7 of the 35 Consultors are women – 2 religious and 5 laywomen. So the members are 31 men and then there are 28 more male consultors bringing the male attendee count to 59 as compared to 7 women consultors. I just have this sneaking suspicion that those 7 women have been carefully vetted and chosen based upon their parrot-like ability to repeat what the hierarchy says about women. I am not expecting them to contribute in a way that represents me or women like me or pretty much the majority of women in the world.
If so, I agree this is just all innuendo. This person seems to be more interested in bashing the people asking for opinions and their way of doing it, than doing anything that might actually get through to them. I don’t think I’d ask anybody to come speak to me about “women’s issues” if they come in presupposing they are their just for window decoration or something and aren’t going to be listened to anyway. Who knows but there may be at least ONE GUY in there who really wants to know and is pushing the effort to accept any (name removed by moderator)ut at all? Isn’t that even a possibility, and mightn’t it be prudent to assume that as a possible situation?
Now it’s easy to see how pride and group identification and even feuds between factions of a house divided, can so easily be fueled. Frankly, if the “squeaky wheel gets the grease” was the way to get through to the Vatican, then the Church would be just another government. It used to drive me crazy, when I worked at an aerospace company in the 80’s and all the desks were just butted together without dividers, people would sit there for hours discussing the stupidest things that could have been answered even without “OK Google” with a simple phone call. Example: I listened to several engineers being paid on a government project, spend at least 45 minutes discussing the ins and outs of why the city seemed to have a problem with people coming into town and painting house numbers on curbs. One of them heard a 30 second blurb on last night’s news and it seemed this was something they really had to hash out – you know engineers we think we have explanations for everything. Really. Back then we had “phone books” and “telephones” as resources I got tired of hearing it because I was actually trying to work at the time. I picked up the book, looked up the city engineering office, called, asked, and delivered the answer to the rest in a total of about three minutes – so then we could all go back to work.
When they ask for (name removed by moderator)ut, give them (name removed by moderator)ut. Complain all you want, but at least do what is available or you’re just noise. If even 5% of complaints ever made it to their targets, a whole lot of people would be a whole lot more informed about their problems.
