The Catholic Church, Women, Sexuality . . .

Colm Toibin, an Irish writer who lives in Dublin, wrote last Sunday in the New York Times Magazine about John Paul II.  Toibin is author of, among other books, The Sign of the Cross:  Travels in Catholic Europe.  In today's NYT Magazine, Toibin writes a short piece about today's Catholic Church--and its future.  To read the whole piece, click here.  Some excerps follow:

The rules that the church still imposes that affect most law-abiding people tend to govern sexuality and gender; they seem difficult to many Catholics because they focus on the matter of how we love and whom we love. A divorced woman falling in love a second time can be denied communion; a gay man who has found comfort, once unimaginable, in love can be excluded from the official church; a couple who use artificial contraception are deemed to be sinful; a priest who wishes to marry must leave; a woman who feels a vocation to the priesthood must live her life with this vocation unfulfilled.
. . .
The slowness of Holy Mother Church, the sense of it as a bastion of distilled wisdom overseen by -- at least most of the time -- unworldly old men, guards it from fashion, gives it the immense solidity that is lacking in, say, the Church of England, which has moved with the times, thereby losing much of its power. But the slowness of the Catholic Church in dealing with the sexual abuse of children and minors by members of the clergy has been very damaging. It has seemed astonishing to the Catholic faithful that the official church did not understand that, for parents, the safety of children is antecedent to all rules and all hierarchies. In its response to these allegations, the church seems to have been truly universal; it behaved as badly in Boston as in Newfoundland as in Dublin as in Sydney, moving offending priests to other parishes rather than reporting them to the police, more concerned with protecting its own reputation than protecting innocent lives.
. . .
If one were to give advice to these grand old men [i.e., the Cardinals, as they elect a new pope,] -- and they are not, I notice, seeking advice -- it would be simple. Find a cardinal who was brought up with many, many sisters, who has a lesbian in the family, a cardinal whose life has been bound up and fully informed by women, who knows the problems and challenges they face in a church where they cannot minister. Even if the next pope and his cardinals were not to change the rule against female priests quickly, it might be important, as acts of witness and of love, to enter into real dialogue with women in the church, and to be seen to listen, to take heed, as St. Patrick did centuries ago, to the other's pain.