George Pell, Mary MacKillop and how feminists have ruined the Catholic church ...

(Above: Mary MacKillop, back in the day when women had to dress as penguins so as not to frighten Catholic men, who naturally mistook them for a difficult kind of alien wild life usually found somewhere south of Antarctica, best deployed to run schools teaching the importance of men in their lives).

Call me a heretic, call me an apostate, call me an atheist, a pariah, an outcast, a recusant, a nonconformist, a misbeliever, a contrarian, a dissident, a renegade, a schismatic, a vile secularist, heck, call me a wretch on the highway to hell.

But stop already, enough with all the compliments, I can only take so much, I'm starting to blush.

I guess after all being excommunicated by the Catholic church isn't such a big deal, since it also happened to our very own saint to be, Mary MacKillop.

We're wildly excited here at loon pond at the canonisation ceremony scheduled for next year, and it almost goes without saying, so are the Pellists, even if they are in the grip of their own vagaries and heresies.

Why George Pell himself has felt the need to offer up Mary Mackillop: A very normal woman who was unusually good.

And what an admirable piece it is too, since only a devoted Pellist could provide an enhanced bonus steak knives approach, with this kind of thinking:

Mary was an outstanding leader in a rough and boisterous church, well able to stand her ground charitably and calmly. The Catholic Church had more women in leadership positions as a result of Mary's work and the arrival of other orders of sisters from overseas than today.

Nearly all Catholic primary schools, the majority of our secondary schools and all Catholic hospitals were then run by women. One of the sad ironies of the past 50 years is that with the arrival of the feminist movement most nuns vacated positions of leadership.

You see! What an utterly sad and profound irony that feminists should undo all the good work of Mary MacKillop. Made the nuns give up their day jobs and vacate their positions of leadership.

And you were blaming male-centred phallocentric attitudes in the Catholic church keeping women out of the priesthood! Not realising women have been derailed in the church by rampant floozy feminists. Unlike the bloody militaristic Salvation Army, which put that General Eva Burrows in the position of world leader way back in 1986 (and you can hear her talking about it here).

Nope, nothing to do with the good Pell. Why he called for a bowl of water and washed his hands of the entire matter. Absolutely nothing to do with him! Why he's fervent in his belief in women as mothers and wives and breeding machines. Those bloody feminists. Drove the nuns out of the church they did, with their snarky shrewish ways, unlike the Pellists, who have the most wonderful attitude to women in power in the Catholic church. Provided they don't have anything to do with the important business in front of and behind the altar.

I guess now you're beginning to understand why deep down I have this profound problem with Mary MacKillop, and surely it's one any decent Pellist would share.

She was uppity, and she was difficult, likely enough because of her Scottish background and fondness for haggis and bagpipes, and she didn't seem to understand that the role of women is to be submissive, and let's face it, she wasn't a wife or a mother or a breeder either.

The importance of which was explained by the good Pell when he was explaining a Vatican document prepared by the Catholic Church's doctrinal chief Herr Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger back in 2004:

MARK COLVIN: Why though when, again, the document goes on to quote Genesis, and say that women was created as man's helper, isn't that a demeaning relationship?

GEORGE PELL: No, I think the document goes on to explain why it isn't demeaning. That women, like men, are made in the image of god. It emphasises the importance of motherhood and I think that is particularly important today, when there is no western country, no country in the western world which is producing enough children to keep the population stable. That is, I think, a very significant issue which merits widespread public discussion.

Huh? We're on the way to nine billion, but the Islamics are better at breeding so we need more tykes popping out like buns from the oven? But do go on:

MARK COLVIN: But this equal but different document, ah, doctrine, which you say that it is espousing, also seems to be contradicted, you know, when it quotes Genesis, what was said to Adam and Eve – your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you. How equal is that?

GEORGE PELL: Well we certainly believe in the equality of men and women. I think we understand the core insights from Genesis in a, in a Christian way, and what this document is doing is countering the attempts, misguided attempts, of some to ignore biology and ignore human nature and to deny it. (more vacuities and mindless equivocations here in Vatican document on women causes confusion).

Never mind, we seem to have been sidetracked away from Mary MacKillop

Mary of the Cross belongs to the whole church and the people inside and outside the church realise what she was. From her letters and her story we know that she supported no dissident theological positions and sought Roman intervention and protection rather than opposing it. It is sad to see small partisan groups trying to enlist her in contemporary squabbles.

Yes, you bloody feminists, trying to pretend she was some kind of feminist when actually she recognised the power of Rome, and perhaps realised that feminism would turn up to ruin the church, and take an attitude designed to turn women away from their biology, and from their Genesis assigned role as submissive helper of men.

As if there's anything wrong with the Book of Genesis!

And let's get rid of a few ugly rumours about her taste for a drink or two:

She suffered much and was treated very badly on occasions.

But not by men and certainly not because she was a difficult woman.

She was often sick, regularly short of money, excommunicated by one bishop and expelled from Adelaide by another. Some of her nuns opposed her, a division arose between the "Brown Joeys" under her control and the "Black Joeys" controlled by the bishops, and she was wrongly accused of drinking too much brandy.

Drinking! As if there's anything wrong with having a snifter or three when prescribed by a doctor for the treatment of menstrual pain. Why I always like to have a little brandy and milk, perhaps with a panadol thrown in, before retiring, just like my grandmammy, though you know you can also have a rum and milk, and why not make that an OP rum while you're at it, and why is this room suddenly revolving, and I suddenly feel the need to lie down ...

Phew, that's better, nothing like 1 part olive oil, 1 raw egg yolk, salt and pepper, 1 to 2 tablespoons of tomato sauce (ketchup to some), a dash of Tabasco and worcestershire sauce, and some lemon juice or vinegar, plus a dash of vodka or whatever else it is that ails ya, to get the wheels back on the road and the tyres burning rubber. Mary MacKillop surely swore by it, she was such a dinkum Australian:

The secular nature of Australian life is often exaggerated, and outside the Catholic community Mary MacKillop already has a significant following. All Australians recognise her as one of their own, and her qualities and strengths as typically Australian. She was unusually good, but very normal.

Unusually good but very normal? Does it work the other way too? You know, unusually bad but very normal?

We can tell what a person is from their friends and from those they admire, and every community needs its home-grown heroes, local models to encourage us in the right direction.

Saint Mary MacKillop is a very worthy saint for Australia, an important first for all of us.

For all of us? An important first for all of us? Like believing in the gobbledegook of miracles is an important first for all of us?

Um, actually would it be terribly rude of me to say that it doesn't matter a toss? To be sure it was the Dominicans that scarred me for life, and not the Joeys, though I know many Joeys women impeccably scarred for life in the proper Catholic way.

I mean, come on, meaningless mystical mumbo jumbo nonsense about miracles and sainthood, helped along by the abolition of the Devil's Advocate office, so the antipodes can score a saint at the time when the Pellists have made the church less attractive than ever for women and other minorities (sssh, we promised not to mention pedophilia or the confusion it creates when the church completely fails to comprehend how it should show Christian love to homosexuals).

The result seems to have sent the likes of Guy Rundle into a reeling tizz:

Thus the church is no longer shy about the required miracles, knowing that a world with ''psychics'' hanging out their shingle in every shopping centre, and The Secret topping the best-seller lists, supernatural explanations are more popular than ever before. As the world disappears down the Twitterfeed, and in the swirling particles of the Large Hadron Collider, people reach for anything that will put it, and themselves, back together.

Those who believe that such religions are ultimately a regression, and a refusal to stare the joys and terrors of human freedom square in the face, need to better understand the reason why such a bizarre process as canonisation can re-enter the world as a rational activity, and the degree to which the self-defeating neo-atheist movement of people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins - the most shatteringly empty creed to come along for many a year - has been of God's party without knowing it. (here).

Oh yes, the Catholic church and its strange ways are all the fault of 'neo' atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins.

You know, if I hear the word 'neo' one more time outside a discussion of the Matrix, I'm reaching for my gun, especially when it involves penis envy amongst squabbling atheists, but when Rundle starts to blather about empty creeds, as if atheism should be a creed and belief like another religion, I do wonder if he too has a secret love of brandy mixed with milk.

Some times it's hard to tell who's the bigger goose - the Pellist heretics, or the Rundle word machine - as they lash out at strident feminists and strident atheists.

What's with this notion that they should be quiet, and polite, and submissive, like polite, demure Catholic schoolgirls?

All that said, I really would like one genuine miracle to happen - or perhaps it should go in the category of sci fi.

I'd like to see Mary MacKillop transported to the present time, given a quick fit out, and then set loose in a church run by Pell and the Pellists. By golly, I reckon she'd have his guts for garters, and quick stix at that.

And now, since my partner insisted on it, here's a song celebrating the joy of knowing a Catholic school girl. Take it away Frank, you dead sexist you:

Oh and since this is genesis Crumb week, thanks to Harold Bloom, here's a couple more panels from R. Crumb's book of genesis, explaining just why women are the problem, and giving a clear guide to the Catholic church's terribly modern genesis-inspired thinking on male-female relationships (click on to enlarge). What a fine Xmas present the book would make for devoted Xians: