Barriers Remain : Catholic Women Push for Power

Joan Dotter, tall and slender in her floor-length priestly robe, stood behind the altar of St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church and held up the host, the thin circle of unleavened bread that Catholics believe is transformed during consecration into the body of Jesus Christ.

“This is Jesus, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,” she said, reciting the liturgy that represents one of the most significant moments in the Catholic ritual.

Although the spectacle of a woman performing this sacred ritual--an act that for 2,000 years had been officially restricted to male priests--was striking, it was in fact an illusion.

Poor Parish

Dotter’s parish is too poor to afford a resident priest, so every week a visiting priest drops by and says Mass, making sure to consecrate enough hosts to keep Dotter in supply until a priest returns the next week. Dotter, known in the church as a “pastoral administrator,” performs weekday and occasional Sunday communion services that superficially resemble the Mass.

That the church would allow Dotter to go through the motions of Mass and yet not perform the consecration illustrates the dilemma of an institution whose policies on women increasingly conflict with its needs. Faced with a shortage of priests, the church is offering women greater opportunities than ever. But their tantalizing closeness to the work of the ordained underscores for many women the barriers still remaining.

Dotter, 48, is as close to the altar as a Roman Catholic woman can get: a fill-in lay pastor distributing consecrated hosts in a parish without a priest. Gratified to be called, she nevertheless feels her limitations.

“It hurts to be excluded; it stings,” she said. “You can take that hurt and go away and nurture bitterness, or you can live through it and still remain open to your relationship with God.”

Divisive Issue

The role of women in the American Catholic Church has become one of its most divisive issues, as a growing number of lay women and nuns press for changes to bring them into the ranks of the policy makers. On Friday, Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Mahony released a pastoral letter warning that women are becoming increasingly alienated from the church and calling on priests to give them greater responsibilities in parishes.

On a national level, U.S. bishops have agreed to try to respond to women’s concerns through a pastoral letter and have assigned five women to help write it. Their audience will range from feminists who have forsaken the Mass to celebrate underground liturgies with other women outside the church to traditional Catholics satisfied with the church’s emphasis on women as wives and mothers.

When Pope John Paul II returns to the United States next month for his second pastoral visit in eight years, the role of women in the church will be on his agenda. A bishop is scheduled to make a presentation to him on women’s issues during a meeting in Los Angeles--a meeting that will include no women.

Catholic feminists hope to use his visit to dramatize their grievances in protests and picketing wherever he goes. In San Francisco, a leader of nuns is expected to raise the issue of women’s ministries during a face-to-face presentation.

“Relatively speaking, we would have to say that little or no progress has been made,” said Sister Theresa Kane, 50, who headed an organization of American nun leaders when John Paul visited the United States in 1979.

During that visit, Kane stood before the Pope in a Washington cathedral and politely asked him to reconsider his stand against women in the priesthood. It was the first public challenge of a Pope by a fellow Catholic during modern times, and it brought a storm of conflicting responses from Catholics around the country.

The Pope gave Catholic feminists little encouragement then, citing opinions that many thought regressive. He reiterated his opposition to women in the priesthood, saying that Mary, Jesus’ mother, was not an apostle. He told Catholic couples that they should have more than one child and urged nuns to return to their traditional habits of long robes and veils instead of the street clothes many opted for two decades ago.

Increased Visibility

Despite the pontiff’s admonitions on ordination, American women slowly have increased their visibility in the American Catholic Church since his 1979 U.S. visit. A handful run dioceses as administrative officers, and many are department heads reporting directly to bishops. Thousands of nuns have left teaching and have become church administrators, prison chaplains, social workers and lobbyists for the poor.

In the Mass, more women than ever are serving Communion as eucharistic ministers or reading Scripture as lectors. When the Pope serves Mass in Los Angeles, there will be women reading Scripture but only men serving Communion. The Vatican has directed the American church to give first preference to the ordained.

Although it is doubtful that the bishops’ pastoral letter will go so far as to declare sexism a sin--as some Catholic feminists have called for--some see the mere act of writing a letter about women as progress. The letter has brought bishops to the table with women to discuss such issues as birth control, sexism in the language and feminist theology. Some of the bishops are reading radical feminist literature for the first time.

“They are having to come to grips with things they have been sheltered from,” said Toinette Eugene, provost of an ecumenical divinity school in New York and one of five women assigned to help the bishops write the letter.

Bishop Joseph Imesch of Joliet, Ill., chairman of the committee, said the panel is “battling over the approach” to take on the question of women’s ordination.

‘Strong Tradition’

Imesch said many rank-and-file Catholics oppose women in the pulpit, and he believes that the church will drop its requirement that priests remain celibate before it consents to women’s ordination. “There is a strong tradition of maleness,” he said.

The church surveyed Catholic women before starting the pastoral letter, which the bishops hope to complete in 1989. Women’s dissatisfactions ranged widely, from complaints about pastors who will not let women participate in parish councils to the frustration of women theologians who feel a calling to the priesthood but remain shut out because of their sex.

“Our hope,” Imesch said, “is not to change the church overnight but to make people aware of the need the church has to allow women to function in legitimate roles. Some places it is not happening due to individual bishops and individual pastors. We hope to say that is wrong.”

The number of women who seek ordination has not grown substantially in the last decade, as many became discouraged by Vatican intransigence and reports of inferior treatment of women Protestant clergy, according to a national group that lobbies for women’s ordination.

For many feminists, however, ordination for women is the key to equality. “Women don’t have access to the power, and the power is focused on the bread and the wine,” said Diann Neu, 38, a former nun who runs a feminist theological advocacy group in Washington.

Dramatic Increase

Surveys show a dramatic rise in the number of American Catholics who favor women’s ordination. A 1986 telephone survey by the Catholic University of America found 47% favoring women’s ordination, up from 29% in a similar poll in 1974. A New York Times/CBS News poll in 1985 found that 52% of American Catholics believe that women should be priests.

In 1976, a little-publicized report by the Vatican’s Pontifical Biblical Commission found that there was no scriptural basis for denying women ordination. But the next year, the Vatican published a declaration reaffirming its opposition to women in the priesthood. The prohibition cited two primary reasons why women cannot be priests: There were no women at the Last Supper, and women do not resemble Jesus physically.

As recently as 1980, the Vatican reiterated its ban against girls serving with boys in assisting priests at the altar. It is a prohibition that some American churches routinely ignore.

The church has indicated openness, however, on the question of women one day being ordained deacons. Called “permanent deacons,” these 7,500 ministers receive orders similar to those of a priest and can perform baptisms, marriages and funerals. They usually hold full-time jobs outside the church and can be married.

Marilyn Fitzgerald, 59, selects and trains men for the diaconate in the San Bernardino diocese even though, as a woman, she does not qualify for the ministry.

‘Very Little Patience’

“I have very little patience that women are not ordained to the diaconate,” she said. “I think the church is really being deprived. Many of the wives of our deacons are definitely called to the diaconate. Many of them work right alongside their husbands, and many deacons will freely admit that it was their wives who got them into the ministry in the first place.”

Fitzgerald got her job the way many Catholic women get such administrative church positions: by default. Her late husband was a deacon and, as his spouse, she was required to go through a three-year diaconate training program. When the San Bernardino diocese was formed in 1978, there was no priest familiar enough with the program to head the diaconate office and no deacon who could afford to give up his regular job.

Stacy Schumacher, 46, a eucharistic minister permitted to serve Communion at St. Robert Bellarmine parish in Burbank, studied theology in her “idealistic” days 12 years ago and hoped to one day be a deacon. Those hopes are gone, “but perhaps my daughters might have that option,” she said.

She sees the church’s tendency to change slowly as a weakness as well as a strength. “We don’t leave that many behind when we change slowly,” she said. But at times, she admitted, she has been “extremely frustrated.”

“At some point, you decide to accept what is and work for change or get out,” she said. “I’m just Catholic. It’s in the marrow of my bones.”

Woman as Pastors

In parts of the West and the South, a shortage of priests has propelled many women, most of them nuns, into the role of parish pastors. There are no firm statistics on pastoral administrators, but the Catholic Pastoral Institute, a Kansas City-based training program for lay ministers, says their numbers are rapidly growing. The institute received more than 100 applications for 80 openings in a pastoral administrative program this summer.

They cannot say Mass, hear confession or perform any other sacrament. Priests, dubbed “circuit riders” or “supply priests” in these parishes, drive in on weekends to say Mass, consecrate hosts for the women to distribute and perform baptisms and marriages. These women run the day-to-day business of the parish, taking Communion to the sick, presiding over Communion services during the week and counseling the troubled.

Even with the support of the church hierarchy, women in these roles sometimes get a cold initial reception, with their ultimate acceptance often limited by their inability to say Mass or perform the church’s most sacred rituals.

Sister Carol Kopff, 51, began running Queen of Peace Catholic Church in Ewing, Mo., five years ago when the highly popular priest was promoted to a position elsewhere. Her rural parish, which includes 125 families over 300 square miles, did not immediately welcome her.

“You’d say hello to some people and they would not respond,” Kopff said.

‘They Wanted Pat’

She moved into the rectory, the former priest’s residence, and renamed it the parish house. Life was lonely. She had come from a large family and entered the convent at a young age. It was her first time living alone.

Father Pat Dolan, a priest from a nearby parish, came every Sunday to say Mass. When the parishioners gathered outside church after Mass, they ignored her and went to him for advice on parish matters. He faithfully told them to talk to Kopff and, over time, they did.

“Within my first month there, the voluntary Fire Department had a pancake and sausage supper, and Father Pat and I went,” Kopff recalled. “Father Pat and I got our plates and were walking by a table and this family from our parish said, ‘Come and sit down.’ Father Pat says, ‘No, I’m going on a bit,’ but I sat down. They ignored me. If I said something, they would respond, ‘Yes,’ or, ‘No,’ but nothing more. They wanted Pat.”

Gradually, she won acceptance. She said she organized an ecumenical group that has led to celebrations with the region’s many fundamentalist churches, which previously “hadn’t worked well with Catholics.” She also established a food pantry for the poor.

The diocese learned from her experience. Now, when lay women are sent to replace priests, the bishop goes for Sunday Mass and commissions them as pastoral administrators in front of the congregation, giving the women the stamp of church authority.

‘A Dumping Ground’

At St. Mary’s in the Portland archdiocese, a history of uneven pastoral care paved the way for Dotter, a longtime parish leader. Parishioners said their church had become “a dumping ground” for priests, including a mentally ill pastor whom the congregation had to struggle to remove.

Before choosing Dotter, a married woman with grown children and grandchildren, the parishioners considered advertising for a retired priest, hoping to persuade one to accept low pay by promising good fishing and hunting. In the end, however, they decided they could not afford even the lower salary a nun would command.

They hired Dotter because “we didn’t have much choice,” admitted Earl Vandehey, 53, one of four members of a pastoral team that runs the church with Dotter. She said she initially received $200 a month in addition to expenses for her work. She now receives $400 a month.

Some church members initially were offended by Dotter’s presence at the altar. “They thought it was Protestant,” she said, laughing. Many parishioners say their pastoral care has never been so good, but her inability to perform sacrament makes her services second-rate. “The ultimate is still the Mass,” said Lani Vandehey, 38, Earl Vandehey’s wife.

Dotter said some priests in other parishes seemed to resent her at first. “For clergy to see someone like myself doing things like they’re doing, they can’t help but feel a loss--what is celibacy and ordination about if a lay person who is married is doing something comparable?”

Archbishop’s Concern

Pastoral administrators remain substitutes, their positions subject to change with the arrival of a new bishop or entry of a priest.

A now-retired bishop began the Oregon lay pastoral program after a 1985 study projected that there would be up to 40 parishes without priests in the diocese by the year 2000, even with no new parishes.

Portland Archbishop William J. Levada, who went into the archdiocese from Los Angeles a year ago, had qualms that Mass was not being said in every parish every Sunday. Under his direction, Jesuits were provided to say Mass every Sunday at St. Mary’s, and a priest was found to run the parish in Monroe, about 100 miles south of Portland, which also had no priest.

For Dotter, it meant giving up the two Sunday services she presided over each month, although she continues to fill in during emergencies and on weekdays.

For Sister Eunice Hittner, 67, who has run St. Rose’s parish in Monroe for two years, it almost meant her job. She said she was told in April that she would be replaced within a few months by a priest. One priest went to the parish house where she lives to look it over.

“I felt I was treated rather shabbily,” Hittner said. “I didn’t think it was fair.”

Neither did her parishioners. In letters to Levada, they said they are pleased with Hittner’s work and angry that they had not been consulted about the change. Levada, who blamed the incident on a communications problem, relented, and Hittner will continue to preside over St. Rose’s parish for another year.

‘Boys’ and Women

Hittner, warm, spirited and at times jovial, referred to the bishops as the “boys,” confided in a low voice that their problem is not with the lay pastor system but with women and explained the framed picture of Levada in the back of the church this way: “There was a mural there I didn’t like very much and I needed something for that spot.”

Ronda Chervin, 50, a professor at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo and a member of the women’s panel working on the bishops’ pastoral letter, believes that the church should offer women like Hittner an official status or commission to make their jobs more secure. She does not, however, propose their ordination.

“Just as we would never use grape juice and graham crackers instead of bread and wine, we would not use a woman instead of a man as priest,” said Chervin, a convert to Catholicism and the most conservative of the bishops’ women advisers.

She traces agitation for women priests to the “illusion” of a more masculine church in recent years. For example, she said, nuns have lost their visible prominence in the church because most no longer wear habits or run Catholic schools, and the church stopped emphasizing veneration of Mary in a liberal trend two decades ago that John Paul is reversing.

With such division among women Catholics and a Pope firmly opposed to their ordination, few Catholic leaders today expect to witness any sweeping changes in the near future.

Kane, the nun who stunned the church by publicly confronting John Paul during his last U.S. visit, said, however, that the atmosphere in the church is far from discouraging. She notes that such issues as women’s ordination remain new in the 2,000-year history of the church.

“It is like we are just begining to break open the shell and look at it,” Kane said.

Kane is not certain that she would like to be a priest.

“But the role of bishop is something I would be interested in,” she said.

Times researcher Lauri Shorten contributed to this story.