Bishops Meet on Women’s Issues, AIDS

Catholic bishops gathered Friday for a national conference on such issues as women’s concerns in the church and society and disagreements about a statement on the use of condoms to stop the spread of AIDS.

More than 250 bishops from across the country were expected at St. John’s University for the fourth meeting in six years of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Father George Speltz, former bishop for the St. Cloud area and a spokesman for the diocese, said he thinks that the pastoral on women will generate the most discussion, followed by a proposed statement on the morality of nuclear deterrence and the AIDS issue, which will be debated behind closed doors Monday.

“I think they will be rather heavy discussions because they’re all sensitive” issues, Speltz said.

The report on the morality of U.S. nuclear policy is the result of two years of work by a bishops’ committee commissioned as a follow-up to their 1983 peace pastoral. The committee is recommending that its “conditional acceptance” of nuclear deterrence be retained, according to a pre-conference news release.

Speltz said he does not think that the position of the original document will be altered after talks on the new report.

He said “conditional acceptance” could be viewed as a psychological deterrence to nuclear war. “I have always felt it’s like bluffing in poker,” he said.

Some people, Speltz said, will find the first draft of the women’s pastoral inadequate because it does not discuss ordaining women to the priesthood. But that issue will not come up.

The Pope has said there “is no possibility of it and the U.S. church does not want to contradict that,” he said.

The draft calls sexism a sin, asks that key church positions excluding ordination be open to women, urges an end to the economic inequities women suffer and says men need to be more responsible in marriage and family relationships.

The closed-door discussion Monday on AIDS is a follow-up to December’s dispute about a statement in a paper that discussed church policy on AIDS. The paper mentioned the use of condoms in public education programs as a way of stemming the spread of the deadly disease.

Some bishops feared the statement would be misinterpreted as condoning sex outside marriage and the use of artificial birth control, which the Catholic Church opposes.