Catholic Debate Over Vatican Ban on Ordination of Women Breaks Into Open

Catholic debate over whether women should be admitted to the priesthood and other officially settled church questions have surfaced again both nationally and in the Los Angeles archdiocesan weekly paper.

More than 4,500 Catholic priests, sisters and lay people signed a “call for reform” in the Catholic Church, advocating ordination for women and married priests, lay-person input into bishops’ selection and academic freedom for Catholic theologians. The statement and names appeared in a full-page ad in the New York Times on Ash Wednesday.

The 417 California signers included Jesuit theologian-sociologist John A. Coleman of Berkeley, Sister Joann De Quattro of Los Angeles, Franciscan Father Emery Tang of Malibu and groups such as the San Bernardino Diocese’s Commission on Women in Church.

Call to Action, an activist group in Chicago, said the ongoing signature drive started from a meeting of six groups called in January, 1989, by controversial priest-theologian Matthew Fox of Oakland, who was then starting a year of silence imposed by his superiors.

In Los Angeles, divergent views on the all-male Catholic priesthood emerged Feb. 23 in the archdiocesan newspaper, The Tidings. Syndicated Catholic columnist Dolores Curran, not normally controversial, in a column printed Feb. 9, discussed the priesthood shortage, a dilemma that some feel would be eased by allowing women and married priests. “Reduced to its simplest form, Rome has decreed that maleness and celibacy are more important than the Eucharist,” Curran wrote.

Father Joseph Shea, the vocations director for the archdiocese, wrote a rebuttal article, saying Curran was “unfair” in presenting the church position.

The Tidings also printed nine letters from priests and lay people on both sides of the issue. The Father Kolbe Missionaries of the Immaculata were distressed because “in our diocesan newspaper we found an open attack against the teachings of the church.” But four staff priests at St. Joseph’s Catholic parish in Hawthorne applauded Curran’s “courage and prophetic wisdom on an issue that has yet to be honestly and carefully confronted.”