When minds think small, history has a habit of acting big. We have all experienced moments when a bomb explodes under our comfortable certainties and a new future is revealed. So let’s think large, panoramic, cosmic even. A female pope is going to be appointed. Me.
The cardinals who decide this matter may take some persuading but I am ready. My pitch will not be directed at the conclave meeting in Rome this week to select John Paul II’s successor. That would be premature.
There has been a woman pope before, Pope Joan, although scholars can’t agree on whether she existed or not. English, clever and with a taste for dressing as a man, her brilliance rewarded her with the papacy in 853. Her miscalculation was having a baby, which resulted in a martyr’s death. Frankly, she was a bit of an embarrassment.
Time, faith and absurdity, however, are on my side. Here is how it will happen. Since the average age of the 115 cardinals who will elect the new pope is 71, the candidate they choose may live for another 10 years, or less. In 1978 cardinals had to hurry to the Sistine Chapel twice within seven weeks, first to elect the successor to Paul V1 and then to the short-lived John Paul I. A few more conclaves like that, plus the ordination of women, and that top job is mine.
Will the church be ready for me? Why not. The fact is that the future of the church is in female hands. Its history has been driven by womanly devotion, not always prettily. Arthur Rimbaud wrote, “Like dogs that have been whipped, in their humiliation, The Poor unto dear God, the master and the king, Offer their laughable and stubborn supplication.” His 19th-century sensibilities were appalled by pious women in church, “well pleased to wear the benches smooth”.
Women are the everyday face of the Catholic faith. It is women like me who take their children to church, who undertake the bulk of its ministry, from distributing holy communion to singing in choirs, running children’s liturgy groups to making tea: who sit with men on child protection committees following the paedophile crisis wondering why we are being urged to protect our children from strangers, when we all know why these committees have been established.
Yet we bench-polishers, equal in the eyes of God since love, redemption and soul are non-gender specific, sit quietly and ask polite questions.
Listen to this recent exchange between Baroness Shirley Williams and Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, in The Tablet, the Catholic periodical. She says of the church, “It has tended to either be rather frightened of women or rather demeaning of women, perceiving them as being lesser beings.” He does not disagree and on women priests says these are delicate matters “that shouldn’t be rushed”.
Rushed? Nonetheless, his words are a hint of encouragement and I am hurtling through a thousand years of doctrinal debate to the present, in what secularised academics still persist in describing as a post-religious world. (How big does religion have to be before you see it? There are billions of believers of every faith on every continent.) In my faith the female members are still barred from office. John Paul II would not concede any ground on the issue of the ordination of women. Discussion of this issue could be seen as dissent, potentially punishable by excommunication. But things can and do change.
It is 2015. In the face of plummeting vocations and church attendance, the pope allows the ordination of women priests. By now a widow, with children who have flown the nest, I am free to be ordained, then fast-tracked. (When I discussed this idea with my husband, his bored response, “Do we have to move to the Vatican?” simply was not good enough. For the purposes of this exercise, he has to die.) I agree to become the Bishop of Birmingham.
Finally, I am handed the application form for popehood. What would I bring to the role? Fewer saints, more debate. Papal infallibility would come in for some serious scrutiny since parental fallibility is my everyday reality. I will not just kiss the ground, I’ll mop it. And I’ll even know which detergents in my bucket represent value for money.
This is not simply a bad joke: a universal church needs to tackle all the dirty obstacles that keep so many in poverty — those who live, that is. Condoms would be allowed to save lives.
I would urge my ancient male colleagues in the curia to examine whether their authoritarian positions were the result of fear and despair. My funeral would be happy, children and African choirs singing a new requiem by James MacMillan; traditionalists weeping for joy that I had gone.
But as I’m sure you’re thinking, the words “Habemus papam” (we have a pope), will never be directed at me. Prospective popes do not have to fill in an application form. They do, however, have to demonstrate a moral integrity that I am not capable of. And as a pope is also the Bishop of Rome, and few today can imagine a time when women will be bishops, my case flounders.
As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, dean of the college of cardinals, prepares to fulfil his duty in electing the new pope, he knows that the church is in trouble. On Good Friday he wrote, “Lord, often your church seems about to sink, and to be a boat full of holes . . . The face and clothing of your church shocks us.” Was he referring to the apparel of the hierarchy or to the garb of the rest of us, the bench-shiners? Would appearance be a little better if some of those faces were girlish, some of those frocks filled by women? Big old history is waiting in the precincts of the Vatican.
And laughing.
