In spite of being a devout Catholic and daily massgoer my mother would not have passed Rome’s current criteria for canonisation. She was prepared to speak her mind. Some incidents will illustrate the point.

My father was headmaster of a mission school in Surabaia (Java)- we are talking of the 1930’s - and my mother sat on the board of the adjoining girls’ school.

The day I was born, the Religious Sister in hospital refused to put my mother on the list for holy communion. “You have not been churched!” she said.
“I’ve just done the most wonderful thing in my life and given birth to another child. Why do I need to be churched?”
The Sister did not want to give in. Nor did my mother. She insisted that the parish priest be called. More words followed. Next morning my mother received holy communion as usual.

My parents also prepared people for Mass on Sunday in one of the class rooms. One day the parish priest came to visit them and announced: “I have received a new chalice from Holland!” He produced it from his bag and put it triumphantly on the table. My mother lifted it up, to admire it more closely.
“My God! Mrs. Wijngaards, what are you doing!” the parish priest called out.
“Doing what?” my mother asked.
“This is a sacred vessel. No woman may touch it!”
“I sank through the ground”, my mother would tell me later a dozen times. “I felt hurt, humiliated, angry. Why should I be kept from touching a sacred object just because I’m a woman? Am I so dirty or profane?” She only put the chalice down after having scrutinised it carefully.

As a theologian, so many years later, I can give the answer to her “why?”. Women were, indeed, from at least the 5 th century onwards considered second-rate, sinful and ritually unclean, yes unclean on account of menstruation and childbirth. A Church ordinance in France forbidding women to touch sacred objects was deviously published under the name of Pope Soter and handed on as part of papal teachings. The dossier is now known as the False Decretals. From there it entered the Decree of Gratian (1040 AD), a collection of laws that became the source for all later Church legislation. Church lawyers explained the reasons:

“A woman is an animal that menstruates. Through contact with her blood, mustard degenerates, grass dries up and trees lose their fruit before time. Iron gets rusted and the air becomes dark. A woman’s fluids are filthy and unclean. That is why women are kept away from the altar. ”

Medieval theologians Rome invokes as witnesses of a presumed ‘divine tradition’ against ordaining women, considered the prohibition to touch sacred objects a major argument to exclude women from the priesthood. The prohibition stayed in force until the new code of church law of 1983. But Rome has not grasped that removing this and other prejudices has in fact shattered the ‘theological’ grounds on which the exclusion of women was based. Thank God women like my mother dared to speak out!

John Wijngaards