Women and the pope
In January, Australians are to be treated to a visit from the pope. He's coming over for the beatification of the person expected to become Australia's first saint, Mary MacKillop.
It's an interesting turn of events, really. In her time, Mary MacKillop was a rebel, an advocate for the poor and oppressed. She rejected the rigid confines of the church's hierarchy and set up her own independent order of nuns. She struggled to bring education to the poor and set up refuges for single mothers.
Yet now her beatification is being used as a public relations exercise for the Catholic Church. But just what does the Catholic Church have to offer women?
For the record:
The Vatican continues to oppose abortion rights for women, contributing to the deaths of more than 200,000 women per year from unsafe termination procedures. In order to justify this, the pope elevates the importance and rights of a foetus over and above those of women.
The pope continues to oppose contraception, resulting in countless unwanted pregnancies around the world.
The result of the Vatican's insistence on refusing women the right to control their own bodies is that other social rights such as equal access to food, education, health, work and equal social and political participation continue to be restricted.
Without equal access to all of these, women's needs cannot be met and women's rights cannot be respected. Women remain vulnerable to the population control policies of overt right-wing religious fundamentalists and/or "population planners" of the industrialised countries, who blame overpopulation in the South for the world's problems and obscure the North's control over the hugely unequal distribution of the world's resources.
The pope continues to argue against the use of condoms, thereby contributing to new HIV infections around the world, and enormous suffering by those affected by the AIDS pandemic. Stigmatising of people with HIV/AIDS and condemnation of any sexual expression outside the rigid confines of marriage makes the fight against HIV/AIDS harder.
The pope continues to condemn lesbians and gay men, and opposes divorce on any grounds.
On top of all this, the pope continues to oppose the ordination of women. Yet the majority at the ever-decreasing congregations tend to be women, many of whom are seeking a church more relevant to their needs.
While the pope's visit may mean that these issues are temporarily glossed over, the real story is that the pope has nothing to offer women. Oh, except perhaps sainthood in a few hundred years' time — but hey, I'd rather have my rights now.
By Kath Gelber