I’ve been in a lot of churches and worked with a lot of clergy and I have to say that once the big dress is on, it makes no difference what’s going on underneath.  That’s not to say that the gender of a priest is unimportant – just that it’s not important which gender it is.

Women’s leadership in the church goes back a lot further than two decades, though.  St Bridget of Sweden (one of the six patron saints of Europe) was a visionary and pioneer of care for unmarried mothers and their children nearly seven hundred years ago.  At a time when the separation of men and women in religious contexts was almost complete she established an order in which monks and nuns lived in shared communities.  She worked tirelessly amongst plague victims and fought corruption in the church at the level of the papacy itself.

But the key to Bridget’s story is that she chose to exercise responsibility and leadership when she could have chosen the opposite.  The daughter of a wealthy family, she was lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Sweden and could easily have led a life of luxury and privilege, ignoring the needs of the world around her.

That’s the thing about leadership.  It’s not some sort of special treat.  It’s demanding and taxing and often lonely, it makes people vulnerable and it requires particular skills and a generosity that aren’t the prerogative of one gender or the other.  When we deny leadership to gifted people who are willing to serve just because of their sex, we do nothing but spite ourselves.

Admittedly, it’s not all of us who can choose to lead, but we all have the choice of whether to support those who offer themselves up.  The good ones are rare, and in a world in dire need of wise leadership, why would we exclude half the candidates?

The image at the top of this post is from an illuminated manuscript of the Revelationes sanctae Birgittae made in Naples c.1375-1395 and now in the National Library of Poland, Warsaw.