Women: Second-Class Citizens?

By Otto Friedrich

"The Pope doesn't understand American women," says Donna Quinn. "This is our church, and we are not going to let a few men who work at the Vatican make it un-Christian."

"There was a time when the church sanctioned slavery and cheerfully burned heretics," says Maryann Cunningham, "and the patriarchal church still does not see that there is anything to be sorry for in its treatment of women."

"The bishops are all hunkering down in the grass like a bunch of guinea hens," says Margaret Traxler. "Wait a minute, I don't want to insult the hens. They (the bishops) don't stir a feather because they fear for their own tails."

These passionate outpourings of indignation come from dedicated women religious of the Roman Catholic Church, to which they have pledged lives of poverty, chastity and obedience. They are among the 24 sisters who signed a statement that ran as a full-page ad in the New York Times last October, in the midst of the election-campaign dispute over abortion between Democratic Vice-Presidential Candidate Geraldine Ferraro and New York's Archbishop John O'Connor. Declared the ad: "A diversity of opinions regarding abortion exists among committed Catholics."

The Vatican soon struck back. The Sacred Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes charged that the religious signers were "seriously lacking in 'religious submission' " and must publicly recant their view or be expelled from their orders.* Of the four priests and brothers among the 97 signers, three have recanted. But so far not one of the sisters has backed down. On the contrary, at a strategy meeting in arctic Chicago last week, they considered an array of countermeasures: another ad soliciting support for free speech, a series of nationwide prayer services, counterhearings to coincide with the bishops' planned hearings in Washington in March on the role of women. "This is a pivotal moment in the history of the church," says Maureen Reiff, one of the lay signers of the ad. "We all feel that the attack on us appears to be a rescinding of Vatican II."

*The first actual disciplining took place in Los Angeles, where Catholic welfare officials were instructed to cease referring anyone to a shelter for the homeless run by Signer Judith Vaughan.

To many leaders in the church hierarchy, the sisters' activity is misguided and muddleheaded. Any support of abortion, which the Second Vatican Council branded an "unspeakable crime," is "not a debatable view or opinion," according to a pastoral letter by Philadelphia's John Cardinal Krol. "When it comes to speaking about the doctrine of the church, we are not free to make up our own minds," says Archbishop John May of St. Louis. "For a sister or priest to deny the teaching of the church is a scandal . . . a flagrant, flashy and deliberate affront."

The sisters' public fight for a more liberal policy on abortion is only one of several such controversies between the church's hierarchy and Catholic women, both lay and religious. No less emotional is the issue of birth control; no less deadlocked is the question of whether women may be ordained priests. Underlying these disputes is a disagreement over the basic role of women in the church and in the world at large.

"The major issue facing the Catholic Church in the U.S. is how it deals with women," says Eugene Kennedy, a former priest who teaches psychology at Chicago's Loyola University. "A fair argument could be made that the Catholic Church in this country is what it is because of women. The whole parochial school system was built by women. So if you lose women, you sustain a loss that you can't make up." That is exactly what is happening in women's religious communities now, says Pat Reif of Immaculate Heart College Center in Los Angeles: "Women are voting with their feet. It's a sharing of power we're after." The statistics, however, are ambiguous. The number of sisters has fallen from 180,000 to 120,000 since 1966, but the drop leveled off in 1978, and the total has even risen slightly since then.

Women represent, of course, about half the nation's 52 million Catholics, and their feelings about their place in the church are of great importance to its welfare. The signing sisters' strong views are far from shared by all women religious, or even by Catholic women in general, but there is a growing conviction among large numbers of U.S. Catholic women that they are second- class citizens in the church--and that something must be done to correct that situation soon.

This view has taken strong hold among a significant segment of women religious, who are in the vanguard of the drive for fuller rights for women. American women religious have changed greatly since they began shedding their wimples and bibs and emerged from the convents into the streets. For one thing, many are now highly educated, even more so than their bishops. Sixty- five percent have master's degrees, and 25% have earned doctorates (vs. 24% and 10% among bishops). They are also more mature; most became novices after age 24. And their social views have changed. Says Sister Marie Augusta Neal, who has polled tens of thousands of other sisters as a sociology professor at Boston's Emmanuel College: "If you asked what the primary mission was in 1966, most would have listed their work. If you ask the sisters that today, they would say the mission of the church is justice and peace."

Such shifts reflect the changes in U.S. society. According to one poll taken in 1982 by the National Opinion Research Center, 41% of Catholic men and 57% of Catholic women could be considered feminists. Among Catholics ages 18 to 30, 42% of men and 47% of women approved of women priests. The Rev. Andrew Greeley, whose writing ranges from pop novels (The Cardinal Sins) to detailed sociological surveys (The American Catholic), believes the figures indicate that hundreds of thousands of young women are not attending church regularly because of discrimination against females. "For a church that has spoken repeatedly in recent years about the need to 'evangelize,' " Greeley writes, "this very large number of alienated young women represents a significant evangelistic challenge."

Many parishioners prefer the old traditions, however, and so do perhaps one- third of the nuns. Sister Mary Helen of Boston's Daughters of St. Paul is editor of a religious monthly. She wears a black habit, devotes three hours daily to prayers and believes that a Vatican decision means "it's a finished issue, and to keep hacking over it is like digging up somebody after they're buried." Says Sister Claire Patrice Fitzgerald, principal of a Catholic parochial school outside Los Angeles: "The Mother herself was obedient to her son, Christ. The authority of the church comes from Christ, who gave it to St. Peter and his successors, the Popes. If we truly believe that's the origin of authority, how can we challenge the Popes?"

They cannot, according to the Vatican. Officials in Rome tend to regard the American women's criticisms as a peculiarity of U.S. society; they hear relatively few such complaints from the rest of the world. The church's new code of canon law, which took effect in December of 1983, spells out the rules for all orders, down to such details as living in "their own religious house" rather than an apartment and wearing some kind of religious clothing "as a sign of their consecration." The constitutions of all 300-odd U.S. orders of sisters must conform to the new code. "The issue is simple," one official in the Vatican says of its rulings, "either (the sisters) accept the church's teaching or they don't. Either they are in or they are out."

Many dissenting U.S. women Catholics, however, feel the Pope is out of touch. Joan Leonard, who teaches theology at Emory University in Atlanta, recalls meeting John Paul at a philosophy congress in Switzerland. "We were wearing slacks, and he was having difficulty with that, I could tell," she says. "He tried to ask us about it in a very light, offhand way, saying something like, 'Do all sisters in the United States wear slacks?' I told him that we sometimes did, at least when it was appropriate, on campuses. He didn't seem pleased by my answer. I remember that we were both drinking wine and looking at each other across a small table, when it dawned on me that he simply didn't understand the dynamics of the American church, much less American women. We were from two different worlds, and we both knew it."

Leonard is not the only one who blames the disagreements about women partly on the Pope's personal background. "He thinks of nuns as a servant class," says Rosemary Ruether, professor of theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill. "He brought nuns with him to Rome to cook his sausages. All his statements about women have only one thing to say: motherhood." The Pope got a taste of such criticisms on his visit to the U.S. in 1979. Sister Theresa Kane, then president of the Sisters of Mercy of the Union, declared in his presence that the church should ordain women; John Paul remained unmoved. "The joke went around," says Suzanne Hiatt, an Episcopal priest, "that he had been told he should step on the ground and kiss the women, and instead he kissed the ground and stepped on the women."

The demand for ordination is perhaps the most fundamental conflict between the church's hierarchy and its militant women critics. "It is the central issue because without it, there is no route to power within the church," says Mary Gordon, a lay activist and author of the novel Final Payments. Arlene Swidler, who teaches religion at Villanova, says simply, "Ordination remains the central issue because it includes everything."

Church officials insist that the matter of ordination has nothing to do with discrimination. Says Archbishop John Foley, president of the Pontifical Commission for Social Communications in Rome: "The ordination of women (is) not a concept emerging from sociological considerations. Jesus clearly did not ordain women to the priesthood, nor did he authorize the church to do so." As for further discussion, another Vatican official says categorically, "The verdict is in. It is simply not worth discussing for the duration of this pontificate."

More than 1,000 American women have publicly declared their ambitions to become priests, and some of them plan to gather later this year to discuss their goal. "The people who feel some kind of call have an obligation to witness to that call," says Kathy Larson, director of religious education at a parish in Roswell, N. Mex. She has wanted to be a priest since childhood. She worked at an Episcopal church but felt thwarted: "I know in my bones that I am a Catholic, and I always will be. I feel that I have an obligation to witness within my own church."

One trend that aids such an ambition is the acute shortage of priests. Already thousands of women fill in by doing chaplains' work, counseling, Bible readings, indeed, all the tasks of a priest except consecrating the Eucharist, hearing confession, confirming members and administering last rites. Some feminists complain that such assistants are underpaid and exploited, but the more important criticism is that they are still forbidden to conduct the central rituals of the faith.

Some Catholic women have responded by organizing religious ceremonies of their own. In an apartment 88 floors above Lake Michigan, 13 women in slacks and sweaters sat in a circle last week and sang, "Lean on me, I am your sister." They read the passage from Luke in which a group of women told the Apostles that Christ had risen, and the Apostles did not believe them. Then, although the women do not regard such ceremonies as Eucharists, they passed a loaf of French bread and two pottery mugs of wine. "We share this wine now," one of them prayed, "knowing that we are walking with a lot of people in their lives of joy and pain . . ."

Despite the seeming impasse, a number of thoughtful bishops are trying to find ways to respond to women's cry for dignity in the church without weakening church doctrine. "What we need today is a very frank exchange on religious life," says Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago. San Francisco's Archbishop John Quinn has already been assigned by the Vatican to undertake a major study on the future of all religious orders, and Sister Margaret Cafferty, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, credits him with providing "a forum for the religious to sit down with the bishops and talk about change." Bishop Joseph Imesch of Joliet, Ill., is planning a meeting with both church leaders and women's groups in March to begin drafting a bishops' letter on women in the church, a major project that will take until 1988. "I think the leadership realizes that it needs to listen to people," says Imesch.

Listening and "dialoguing" are commendable, but they have limits. Says one authoritative conservative, Notre Dame Philosophy Professor Ralph McInerny: "The idea that we have moved into a populist church, that doctrine should be arrived at by consensus and dialogue, is wrong. That's not how it is at all."

With reporting by J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago, with other bureaus