By Kieron Wood

The Catholic Church in Ireland faces the worst crisis in its history.The scandal of clerical sexual abuse has compounded the catastrophic decline in vocations to the priesthood.

All but one of the diocesan seminaries have closed and a generation of religious illiterates is being produced by the current catechetical programme. The pews are emptying more rapidly than ever before. In some Dublin parishes, Sunday Mass attendance has fallen to well below 10 per cent.

The new Co-adjutor Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, has an answer to this accelerating trend.Women.

Martin, a former top flyer in the Vatican, is expected to take over from Cardinal Desmond Connell as head of the country's biggest and most important diocese within the next two months. His views on the role of women in the Catholic Church were made abundantly clear from the moment he stepped off the plane from Rome.

In his first session with journalists last August, he said women had told him they didn't feel fully welcome in the Church and he wanted to address that.

Martin's intentions were soon realised. At his liturgical reception in Dublin's Pro-Cathedral the following day, almost all the liturgical tasks - except celebrating Mass - were carried out by women. The lectors, the cantor, many of the servers and all those bringing up the gifts were female. Indeed, it seemed as if there was no place for men in Martin's Church, except presiding at the altar.

The gesture did not go unnoticed. Last week, during a talk at All Hallows College entitled `A listening and humble Church at the service of the people of God', Martin revealed that he had received letters of protest following the ceremony. "Many people wrote to me after I spoke in the Pro-Cathedral to tell me to stop running after the fashionable trend of talking about women in the Church," he said.

Despite the criticism, the archbishop stuck to his guns. "New structures for evangelisation must reflect on the position of women in the Church," he said. "I am acutely aware of the expectations of so many women in the Church today, of their impatience and at times of their anger at promises not being fulfilled.

"It is easy to say that all other offices in the Church except ministerial priesthood are open to women, and then to remain blocked in a closed, male clerical system. There is still a long way to go here. A Church deprived of the evangelising contribution of women is working on less than one cylinder.

"Our parish communities and our diocesan structures need to change. Prejudices and fears by men, especially priests, need to be addressed."

Martin said that it was easy to create "a special form of political correctness in religious matters, which is equally as empty as its secular counterpart, because it shares the same philosophical foundations." So is the appeasement of disaffected Catholic women a "special form of political correctness", or is it really the answer to today's fast emptying churches?

Whatever Martin's personal views, he has made clear that, as archbishop, he will support Catholic Church teaching on the ordination of female priests. Ten years ago, Pope John Paul reiterated that the Church had no power to confer the ministerial priesthood on women.

Unlike the question of married priests, which is a disciplinary issue, the ordination of women is a doctrinal matter and is no longer open for discussion, despite polls which suggest that many Catholics would support the ordination of women.

Certainly the Irish Catholic hierarchy has been slow in realising the full potential of women to fill senior positions, such as diocesan administrator.

The question is whether the appointment of women to a handful of senior jobs will win back those who no longer practise their faith - and whether the future of the Catholic Church depends on wooing women.

Ten years ago, the Swiss authorities conducted a survey to find out how religion was passed from one generation to the next. The poll found that in families where the father was a regular churchgoer and the mother was non-practising, 44 per cent of the children eventually became regular churchgoers.

But if the father was non-practising - even if the mother went to church regularly - only 2 per cent of their children would become regular worshippers, while more than 60 per cent of the children would never attend church.

Commenting on the results of the research, author and Anglican vicar Robbie Low said: "The results are shocking, but they should not be surprising. They are about as politically incorrect as it is possible to be, but they simply confirm what psychologists, criminologists, educationalists and traditional Christians know. You cannot buck the biology of the created order.

"A father's influence, from the determination of a child's sex by the implantation of his seed to the funerary rites surrounding his passing, is out of all proportion to his allotted - and severely diminished - role in western liberal society.

"We are ministering in Churches that accepted fatherlessness as a norm - and even an ideal. Emasculated liturgy, gender-free Bibles and a fatherless flock are increasingly on offer. In response, these Churches' decline has, unsurprisingly, accelerated."

In the Church of England,where women priests and feminist theology became com monplace in the 1990s, the ratio of men to women in the pews has dropped from near parity to a ratio approaching one-to-two. Of the 300,000 who left the Church of England during the "decade of evangelism", around 200,000 are reckoned to have been men.

The picture is not far different in the United States. According to a survey by pollster George Barna, 43 per cent of American men attended church in 1992. Within four years, that had dropped to 28 per cent. Jesuit priest Fr Patrick Arnold said: "It is not at all unusual to find a female-to-male ratio of two to one, or three to one. I have seen ratios in parish churches as high as seven to one."

Feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Reuther maintains that women now make up between 60 and 65 per cent of the active churchgoers in countries like Ireland. Wherever western Christianity has spread, the Church has become feminised. The only religions today with practising male majorities are eastern Orthodoxy, Islam, Orthodox Judaism and eastern creeds such as Buddhism.

According to some observers, feminism has permeated the very highest echelons of the Church. American writer Leon Podles, author of The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity, said: "In attempting to demonstrate to the feminists the importance of women in the Catholic Church, the current Pope, for all his excellencies and orthodoxy, has undermined theroleofmen in the Church. He talks about mutual subordination, but has never mentioned the father as the head of the family.

"Western Christianity has become part of the feminine world from which men feel they must distance themselves to attain masculinity. That is why men stay away from church, especially when they see that the men involved in church tend to be less masculine.

"Psychological studies have detected a connection between femininity in men and interest in religion. There may even be a physical difference. Among men, football players and movie actors have the highest testosterone level, ministers [of religion], the lowest.

"By driving men away from the Church, this feminisation has undermined Christian fatherhood. A man cannot be a Christian father unless he is a Christian first, and even fatherhood has been undermined in the Churches. In parishes, fathers are ignored or denigrated. Priests boast that they became priests because of their mothers. Don't they have fathers?"

One of the most far-reaching attempts to placate feminist critics in recent years has been the introduction of altar girls. But analysts observe that the custom of females in the sanctuary has no precedent in Catholic liturgical history, and has driven a wedge between the Catholic Church and its closest ecumenical partners, the Orthodox Churches, which remain firm in their opposition to feminist influence.

American commentator Fr Brian Harrison, speaking at a seminar in New Jersey, said: "There has been a huge drive for altar girls among liberal Catholics, and it is bishops, after all, who are the decisionmakers. They, not the rest of us, are the ones who have to bear the brunt of the feminist rage and rhetoric against the `patriarchal' Church, and have to formulate some sort of response to these women's ceaseless and strident demands.

"I suspect that the enthusiasm for altar girls on the part of some generally conservative bishops probably springs not so much from any deep liturgical, historical or spiritual reflection on the intrinsic merits or demerits of that innovation, but rather from the feeling that, as pastors, they should to some extent be responsive to popular demand.

"As a result, instead of reflecting the sublime harmony of the communion of saints, a foretaste of heaven itself, the sanctuary comes to symbolise an earthly battlefield in the new cold war against `patriarchy'."

This artificially-contrived `battle' between men and women in the Church is the antithesis of Catholicism. The problems of the Church will not be resolved by placating women at the expense of men, but by encouraging that `iconic complementarity' between the sexes urged in Pope John Paul's 1995 Letter to Women.

Martin accepts that "a stronger feminine face in the Church require[s] an authentic masculine face alongside it", but adds that "masculinity must, of course, not be confused with patriarchy". However, if that battle against `patriarchy' results in the estrangement of the remnant of faithful male Catholics, the battle for the future of the Church will be lost.

As Low put it: "The Churches are losing men and, if the Swiss figures are correct, are therefore losing children. You cannot feminise the Church and keep the men - and you cannot keep the children if you do not keep the men."

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