Within the Catholic church, women’s role was defined as servile. They were home-makers, priests’ housekeepers and flower arrangers for church altars. In one of his almostdaily letters to former taoiseach Eamon de Valera, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid wrote: “The feminists are getting angry and are moving into action. They seem stung by the suggestion that the normal place for a woman is the home. I shall shortly have another note to meet those persons. Their thoughts are confused.”McQuaid and his successors ensured that women continued to know their place right to the end of the 20th century. It must have been a foreign experience for senior churchmen to be called to account by the three-person commission of investigation, two of whom were female, including the chairwoman, Judge Yvonne Murphy.
It is an inescapable aspect of the Murphy Report that, among all the personnel who handled complaints against priests, no woman was involved. Yet in many cases it was women who forced the church to face up to its “earthquake” of dirty secrets.
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