Women Equal but May Not Be Priests--Pope

Pope John Paul II firmly proclaimed the dignity and equality of women Friday, but as forcefully ruled out any chance of their joining the Roman Catholic priesthood.

In a 28,000-word apostolic letter entitled “On the Dignity and Vocation of Women,” John Paul also reasserted the church’s insistence on priestly celibacy and its condemnation of adultery, divorce and abortion.

“The personal resources of femininity are certainly no less than the resources of masculinity; they are merely different,” the Pope said in an exposition celebrating marriage, motherhood and virginity.

The papal letter, known as Mulieris Dignitatem after its opening words in Latin, is bound to disappoint those American Catholics who seek equal participation for women in their church.

Immediate reaction ranged from criticism of the Pope’s theological argument that, by choosing only male apostles, Jesus intended to reserve the priesthood to men, to praise for John Paul’s strong denunciation of all forms of discrimination against women.

Although it only briefly touches on the institutional role of women in the church, the paper provides a highly nuanced theological and biblical framework likely to set the tone for all decisions on women made during John Paul’s papacy.

More Liberal U.S. View

The document is more conservative than the first draft of a pastoral letter on women prepared last spring by U.S. bishops. That letter recommended that women be accorded stronger leadership roles within the church. The final version of the American pastoral letter is expected to be voted on by the U.S. hierarchy in the fall of 1989.

In publicly presenting the Pope’s document here Friday, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Vatican’s Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, said the message is not intended to convey infallible dogma. Rather, Ratzinger said, it is a “biblical meditation” on the role of women, designed less to answer practical questions than to establish a context in which to encourage study and reflection.

Bishop Jan Schotte, secretary general of the worldwide Synod of Bishops, said the document “contributes to the secular debate on women’s rights in that the Holy Father brings the questions of woman’s identity down to fundamentals.”

John Paul, whose opposition to women as priests is well known, wrote the meditation in response to a request from a 1987 synod of bishops, which criticized sexual discrimination and called for further study of the anthropological and theological “meaning and dignity of being a woman and a man.” A subsequent papal study based on the synod conclusions will focus on the pastoral role of women, John Paul said Friday.

The church, he said, “maintains that beneath all changes there are many realities which do not change and which have their ultimate foundation in Christ, who is the same yesterday and today, yes, and forever.”

Only Men Named Apostles

It was Jesus himself who reserved the priesthood for men, the Pope said in an analysis of the church’s interpretation of the Bible. Jesus chose only men as apostles and to them reserved the right of ministry, John Paul said in a key passage on the Eucharist in which he implicitly rebuked critics who argue that the exclusion of female apostles was more a comment on the times than on divine intent.

“In calling only men as his apostles, Christ acted in a completely free and sovereign manner,” the Pope said. “In doing so, he exercised the same freedom with which, in all his behavior, he emphasized the dignity and the vocation of women, without conforming to the prevailing customs and to the traditions sanctioned by the legislation of the time.”

At the Last Supper, the Pope said, Christ created the institution of the Eucharist, granting the Apostles a mandate to consecrate bread and wine into his body and blood.

“They alone received the sacramental charge . . .,” the Pope went on. “If Christ, in instituting the Eucharist, linked it in such an explicit way to the priestly service of the apostles, it is legitimate to conclude that he hereby wished to express the relationship between man and woman, between what is ‘feminine’ and what is ‘masculine.’ ”

The Eucharist, the Pope said, represents the essential ingredient in Christ’s redemption of the church. A priest, he said, is to his church as a bridegroom is to a bride.

‘Clear and Unambiguous’

“This is clear and unambiguous,” he said, “when the sacramental act of the Eucharist, in which the priest acts in persona Christi (as Christ), is performed by a man.”

The Pope’s interpretation was immediately challenged by liberal Catholic theologians and advocates of a broader role for women in the church.

Father Charles Curran, whose disagreements with church doctrine resulted in his dismissal from a teaching position at Catholic University in Washington, disputed the Pope’s reasoning that Jesus was not influenced by sociological factors of his day.

“The problem is that since Jesus incarnated in a particular time and culture, he’s bound to be influenced by that culture,” Curran said in a telephone interview from USC, where he is a visiting lecturer.

Ruth Fitzpatrick, national coordinator of the 3,000-member Women’s Ordination Conference, an organization of Catholics and others supporting the right of ordination for Catholic women, noted: “The argument that, because Jesus was a male, women cannot represent Christ in the priesthood, is like a bad penny that keeps coming up again and again.

“What the Pope is saying is that women should be treated equally except when it comes to ordination, yet Scripture scholars and theologians have demolished that argument,” Fitzpatrick added.

In 1976, a Pontifical Biblical Commission appointed by Pope Paul VI concluded that there is nothing in Scripture to bar women from the priesthood. However, the conclusion of the commission was overridden by both Paul VI and John Paul.

Still, the Pope insisted that while men and women have different vocations, they are equal and equally created in God’s image. From the beginning of time, he said, man and woman appear together as “unity of the two.”

In considering the issue of women’s rights, that unity explicitly means equality of dignity and vocation of men and women, although their roles are different, he said.

He went on to say that there are two dimensions of any woman’s vocation: motherhood and virginity. Like Mary, the mother of Jesus, and like the church itself, he said, woman is “virgin-mother-spouse.”

Montalbano reported from Vatican City and Chandler from Los Angeles.