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                                                                                RELIGION, Page 64

Cut from the Wrong Cloth


Many women are seeking a larger role in church affairs, but
Catholic bishops cannot seem to agree on what those
responsibilities should be

By RICHARD N. OSTLING


    It took America's Roman Catholic bishops three years to
develop a scheme for ending the nuclear arms race. They needed
six years to produce a master plan for reforming capitalism. But
it has become an unending struggle for the men of the hierarchy
to come up with a coherent policy on women to guide their flock
of 58 million. The bishops are already into their ninth year of
trying to agree on a pastoral letter, and the longer it takes,
the more rancorous the debates become. Feminist lobbyists,
antifeminist lobbyists, even a few bishops, proclaim the project
a disaster and say no letter should be produced.

    The latest episode unfolds this week when the U.S.
hierarchy meets at the University of Notre Dame. The bishops
have set aside a full afternoon to air their views on an 81-page
third draft of the proposed letter. As the bishops deliberate,
the campus will provide space for a simultaneous gathering of
liberal caucuses that are dissatisfied with the church, its
all-male priesthood and its reigning Pontiff, John Paul II. The
counterconference will feature an ersatz Mass, celebrated by
women.

    American Catholicism's ongoing struggle between the sexes
is complex and contradictory. Consider:

    -- Despite all the angry rhetoric from the left and right,
a TIME poll of U.S. Catholics by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman
shows that women parishioners are remarkably content with their
lot. In fact, the women are happier than the men.

    -- Nonetheless, the poll also shows continuing and
widespread lay dissent on the hot-button issues that affect
women, including birth control, divorce, female priests and, to
some extent, abortion. Although women favor allowing married
priests, they are divided over whether this change would make
male clergy more understanding toward women's concerns.

    -- While Catholic tradition says females cannot be
priests, congregations could not operate without women, who do
everything from catechism teaching to worship planning to
pastoral counseling. Half of U.S. parishes hire salaried laity
or members of religious orders to fill ministerial roles, and
fully 85% of them (an estimated 17,000) are women. That does not
even count women's continuing dominance in parochial schools.

    -- These new roles for women are in accord with church
law. But conservatives claim that the "feminization" of the
church may be causing the slump in men entering the priesthood.
TIME's poll also shows a gender gap in Mass attendance, with
women outnumbering men.

    -- Religious orders, women's centuries-old power bastion,
are gradually disintegrating. The number of U.S. sisters, which
reached a high of 180,015 in 1964, dropped to 99,337 this year,
the lowest point since at least the 1940s. To survive, orders
are seeking part-time women volunteers and considering offering
the option of sisters' either taking short-term vows or joining
for life.

    -- Increasingly, Catholic caucuses pressing for women
priests and feminism are allying with those that advocate
abortion choice and homosexual liberation. In the long run, this
could isolate the women's rights crusade from the Catholic
mainstream.

    The current imbroglio started in 1975, when 2,000
Catholics who favored priesthood for women met in Detroit. The
result was the Women's Ordination Conference (WOC), a group with
4,000 members -- and ceaseless debate. In 1977 the Vatican
doctrinal office sought to halt the discussion with a decree
insisting on an all-male priesthood. In 1979, during Pope John
Paul's first U.S. visit, Sister Theresa Kane, then president of
the organization for leaders of women's orders, publicly
informed the Pontiff of "the intense suffering and pain" many
churchwomen experience.

    With such currents swirling about, the U.S. bishops in
1983 authorized the preparation of the still pending pastoral
letter. Even in these days of participatory churchmanship, there
has never been anything to compare with this project. Its chief
writer, staff director and consultants are all women. The
bishops sponsored open hearings in 100 dioceses and 60 colleges,
met with 24 national women's organizations, received 10,000
pages of written testimony and amassed opinions from 75,000
women in all. The text has been revised several times, with
drafts made public and debated in 1988 and 1990. The Vatican,
leery of the discussion's direction, insisted that
representatives from the U.S. hierarchy attend a conference in
Rome last year to hear out papal advisers and bishops from 13
other nations on women's issues.

    During this arduous process, voices of complaint from
American women have been weeded out of the text and papal
pronouncements brought to the fore. The current draft proclaims
sexism to be a sin, in church or society. Dioceses are asked to
establish women's commissions. Willingness to treat women as
equals is a criterion of fitness for the priesthood. But the
text drops previous urgings that the Vatican immediately
consider letting women join the order of deacon, thus permitting
them to perform many pastoral functions also filled by priests.
The text weakens proposals for allowing women preachers and
altar girls, which Rome rules out and American parishes
routinely permit. Long gone is the suggestion of serious
discussion about women as priests; instead, the ban is restated.

    Ordination tops the list of specific issues simply because
"all major decision making is done by bishops," notes Ruth
Fitzpatrick of Fairfax, Va., coordinator of the WOC. She sees
grass-roots protest mushrooming. "We're watching the inward
collapse of the whole patriarchal structure of the Catholic
Church." Another radical, Sister Maureen Fielder of Catholics
Speak Out in Mount Rainier, Md., reports that hundreds of groups
of Catholics shun church-as-usual. "I know plenty of women who
get together and celebrate the Eucharist together," she says.

    Others who favor women priests say feminists must realize
that progress takes time. Boston College theologian Lisa Sowle
Cahill notes that bishops writing in the 1930s made "a great hue
and cry against women leaving the home," whereas Pope John Paul
favors women's careers and job equality so long as the
centrality of family and motherhood is preserved. Cahill thinks
the ordination issue is being pressed by "a small and privileged
class" in the West, while women worldwide are struggling just
to survive and need Catholicism's help.

    Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, the first woman to be chief
editor of the respected journal Commonweal, sees no doctrinal
reason to prevent women priests. But big "anthropological and
psychological barriers" stand in the way, she observes, so "I'm
not going to put all my eggs in that basket." Better for now,
she thinks, to seize the opportunities for nonordained women to
hold positions of administrative power and intellectual
influence.

    The same point is made by a more conservative thinker,
Ronda Chervin, a philosophy professor at the seminary of the Los
Angeles archdiocese. Chervin is one of the three official
consultants on the bishops' pastoral letter who have remained
throughout the project. She does not see the all-male priesthood
as an injustice and predicts, "There will be more and more women
confidently within leadership positions. It will be taken for
granted that women will teach in seminaries, manage finances or
act in diocesan or parish leadership roles."

    The bishops are pressing ahead on another much discussed
matter. The proposed pastoral letter endorses removal of
gender-slanted language, and the process is already well along.
In mid-May, the Vatican approved use of the New Revised Standard
Version of the Bible (an example, from Psalm 8:4: "What are
human beings that you are mindful of them?"), and work is under
way on other such translations. The proposed new liturgy for
English-speaking countries would revise the Nicene Creed, which
is recited at every Mass, to state that Jesus Christ "became
truly human" rather than "became man."

    Such changes may not win big points in the parishes,
however. TIME's poll shows that only 36% of Catholic women (but
48% of men) think worship should shun terms like "men" in
referring to humanity. A mere 22% of women (and 27% of men) want
the church to eliminate "he" or "Father" in praying to God.

    At the same time, the demand for women's rights and the
bishops' halfway efforts to accommodate it have goaded female
traditionalists into action. In 1984, Helen Hull Hitchcock of
St. Louis met a few friends to write up a complaint about
feminist inroads in the church. Today 50,000 people have
endorsed their manifesto, and Hitchcock is the full-time
director of Women for Faith & Family. If the left sees the
church dominated by oppressive males, Hitchcock contends that
"the power structure in the church has been largely subverted
by people who no longer accept the very basic dogmas of the
faith."

    Conservative theologian Joyce A. Little of Houston's
University of St. Thomas interprets feminism as one aspect of
an insidious cultural attack against all traditional restraints
and beliefs in favor of asserting individual desires. Little
wants the American bishops to draw the line and insist that "the
personal beliefs of priests, religious or laity which run
contrary to the public faith of the church will not be tolerated
in liturgy or instruction on Catholic doctrine." She recognizes
that such a crackdown would cause "extraordinary public
fragmentation of the Catholic community." However, the U.S.
hierarchy's current policy of benign inaction, she contends,
"benefits only those who have already rejected the public faith
of the church and the authority of the bishops."

    Women on the left in effect ratify Little's worst fears,
asserting that the church is at the beginning of massive
disruption. Sister Anne E. Patrick of Carleton College in
Minnesota says that "we're dealing with cultural change on the
scale of the 1st century, when Gentiles entered the Christian
faith without adopting Jewish practices." Similarly, Rosemary
Radford Ruether, a radical Catholic who teaches at a Methodist
seminary in Illinois, says the church could be facing its most
intense conflict in centuries. As she sees it, the choice is
between "genuine transformation into an open community" and
"retrenchment as a Roman sect."

    At the moment, the American bishops can take comfort in
the bedrock loyalty and surprising contentment among women
parishioners. But the tug-of-war over the bishops' pastoral
letter is only a foretaste of more severe conflicts that lie
ahead. Hammered by new views of morality, authority, personal
rights, the family and motherhood, the Catholic tradition is
increasingly being cast on the defensive in Western nations.
Women, whether or not they ever become priests or bishops or
Popes, will help determine the outcome.