Perform Many Priestly Functions but Can’t Be Ordained : Women Adding to Their Power in the Catholic Church

During the 1980s, American Catholic women have increasingly attained more significant leadership roles in their church--up to a point.

More and more laywomen are joining layman as “extraordinary” parish ministers, distributing Communion, serving on parish councils, or administering church finances. In short, they are doing many things formerly reserved for ordained, celibate male priests. In some seminaries, Catholic women preparing for lay ministries are as numerous as men studying for the priesthood.

Other parishes have team ministries in which nuns not only teach and counsel but occasionally preach. They also serve in campus ministries and as chaplains to hospitals and prisons.

New Forms of Mass

And, sometimes as a protest against what they perceive to be male domination of the church and to suit their own needs, growing numbers of Catholic women are devising new (and often unauthorized) forms of the Mass.

But they can’t be ordained as priests.

Although the U.S. bishops in an upcoming major pastoral letter on women in church and society will attack sex discrimination and inequality, they won’t go so far as to support women’s ordination. Pope John Paul II has decreed that question closed.

Still, the six bishops writing the letter, which isn’t expected to be completed until 1988, heard a cacophony of women’s voices recently from nine Catholic women’s groups invited to give their opinions.

They ranged from docile to defiant.

Maureen Reiff, testifying for the National Assembly of Women Religious, told the bishops that reconciliation for many women within the church is “not possible if the power equations are not changed.”

Pastoral Letter

Meanwhile, a group of 2,100 Catholic priests, writing a “pastoral letter” of their own, want their sisters to share the full rights of the rites--including saying Mass, hearing confessions, confirming members and administering last rites--tasks now reserved for priests.

Noting that the Second Vatican Council declared that sexual and other forms of discrimination are “contrary to God’s intent,” Priests for Equality said: “Our failure to implement this teaching in the structures of our church is producing scandal. It undercuts our credibility to speak of justice in other vital areas of human need.”

But in the great middle is the National Council of Catholic Women, with 121 diocesan councils and several million members. Representatives of the group also appeared before the bishops’ committee in March, where council President Mary Ann Schwab summed up: “Women are not at full potential in the church . . . but that potential doesn’t have to be achieved in ordination.”

A move toward giving women more power was recently made in the Archdiocese of San Francisco, where Archbishop John R. Quinn appointed Sister Mary Bridget Flaherty as chancellor--the highest position ever attained by a woman in a major U.S. diocese. A chancellor, traditionally a priest, manages the diocese’s day-to-day operations.

Pressures Mount

As the clergy crisis deepens, pressures for women’s ordination mount.

Father Thomas P. Sweetser, a Chicago theologian-sociologist who heads a national project to study attitudes in parishes, thinks ordination of both women and married men may not be far off.

The priest shortage, especially in smaller, rural dioceses, will force the present restrictions to be lifted, he wrote in St. Anthony Messenger, a monthly magazine published by the Franciscans. People will soon see it as inevitable, beneficial, practicable and mutually supported, he said.

Monika K. Hellwig, a Georgetown University professor, thinks ordination of women eventually will be approved. But meantime, she said in a recent lecture, it is more important to work for changes that make power in the church communal rather than hierarchical. Ironically, she said, that kind of reform could, in time, be the very thing to open the way for women priests.

“When the priesthood is stripped of its status,” she said, then that will be the time when women will get their chance to serve on an equal footing with men.

Nothing in the Way

Said Father Thomas P. O’Malley, the Jesuit president of John Carroll University in Cleveland: “Catholic theologians claim there is nothing theological in the way (to women’s ordination) but that it is a matter of discipline, sociology and culture.

“But, right now,” O’Malley added, “it would tear the church apart.”

“Women priests?” snorted sociologist-analyzer Father Andrew Greeley. “The possibility is zero. They (the Pope and his advisers) don’t talk about it . . . . They’ve decided to tough it out.”

In any case, laywomen and laymen already occupy more than 80% of the leadership roles and nearly 60% of paid positions in U.S. Catholic parishes, according to a recent study by the University of Notre Dame.