Catholic Women’s Group Meets in Unsanctioned ‘Equal Rites’ Quest

While an estimated 20,000 Roman Catholics were attending official workshops Saturday at a convention in Anaheim, another 50 crowded into a small room on the bottom floor of the Anaheim Marriott Hotel a few hundred yards away.

They said they are not an “underground” group, but acknowledged that their unsanctioned gathering would probably please neither the bishop, the archbishop or the Pope. Their topic: the woman’s movement in the Catholic Church. Or as one of their buttons proclaimed, “Equal Rites For Women.”

The workshop’s organizers, a 3,000-member Catholic women’s rights group, had not tried to join the main program, said Mary Ann Cejka, who has a master’s degree in divinity from Yale University. “You have to be invited. They wouldn’t invite people who are speaking of equal access to the ministry.”

“I don’t care to comment on that at all,” said Adrian Whitaker, coordinator of the main event.

That event, at the Anaheim Convention Center, was the Archdiocese of Los Angeles’ three-day Religious Education Congress. The unsanctioned workshop was sponsored by the regional chapter of the National Assembly of Religious Women.

Some participants in the workshop belonged to Women-Church, a group of mostly Catholic women, including nuns, which meets twice a week in private homes and in one undisclosed public building, said member Ellen Wright of Costa Mesa.

Perform Own Liturgy

The women pray and perform their own liturgy, avoiding the use of male words for God and humanity. They bless their own bread, juice, and “existence,” a rite church doctrine restricts to priests, Wright said.

“We don’t need a man to do it,” she said.

But she added, “We’re not thumbing our nose at the bishop. People had a need that was not fulfilled in the parish.

“We’re not trying to confront the clergy, we’re trying to educate them.”

Sister Mario Barron of Los Angeles told workshop participants that Roman Catholic treatment of women is stuck in the Middle Ages, when Thomas Aquinas led a debate on whether women had souls. Some of Jesus Christ’s disciples could have been women, she said.

Those opposed to female clergy often cite Scripture as the reason, but Barron said there is no scriptural basis for denying women positions of leadership in the church.

Women are becoming resentful, she said. As one woman in East Los Angeles told her, “They want us to make the tamales, but won’t let us sit on the parish council.”

Most women in the room had experienced some form of rejection by the Catholic Church, said Margaret Arnold of Los Angeles. Archbishop Roger M. Mahony wrote in a letter to her that that he had “no time” for the group because his time was taken up with the “active faithful,” Arnold quoted. “There’s a feeling the doors are closed to us.”

Women, she said, “are very hungry to find other people of faith to have discussions like this and worship together.”

The group plans to meet and pray at noon today in the Orange Room of the Anaheim Convention Center. “If we don’t get in, we’ll find something,” Arnold said.

The National Assembly of Religious Women does not take a position on abortion, but does seek ordination for women and a change in the male-dominated leadership structure of the church, Arnold said.

“The problem now is a handful of people--all men in the Catholic Church--are telling the vast majority how to live,” she said.

Bobi Keenan, 44, of Westminster said it was canon law, not the church officials which caused her to choose a painful annulment of her marriage when she divorced four years ago. The only way her husband could remarry in the church was for her to agree that their marriage was “defective at the beginning,” she said.

“I still feel we had a sacramental bond. We were a witness of God’s love for many years. When I was confronted by the annulment papers, I felt betrayed.”

She said she has forgiven her husband, but still has trouble forgiving the church.

Two men attended the meeting. “I firmly believe the future of the church is getting in touch with the anima of the church,” said one.

To a chorus of “amen,” one woman told the group that her problem was not just with men, but also with women in the church who don’t support other women.

Many women are threatened, too, by the idea of women as priests, said JoAnn de Quattro, a nun on the staff of the Los Angeles-based Peace and Justice Center. “It shakes their foundational learning and teaching,” she said.

She chuckled at the notion that she might ever see change in the system. “I see hope in the women themselves,” she said.

Workshop speaker Barron admitted that taking on what is perceived to be final bastion of male supremacy, the Roman Catholic Church, is formidable. “What chips away at it is reason.”

Another nun in the alternative workshop said she is sure the church will change eventually for a different reason: “We are the church.”