Catholic Bishops Face Dilemma as They Draft Document on Women

A question mark hangs over the long struggle of Roman Catholic bishops to formulate their views on the rights of women. Will the result ever be acceptable? The bishops seem caught in an odd dilemma.

As some bishops note, if they simply give up and say nothing, they’d appear to be shirking their duty to teach.

But even if they wanted to allow equal ecclesiastical status to women, Vatican policy wouldn’t permit what surveys indicate most Catholics favor: women’s admission to the priesthood.

“In many ways we’re in a no-win situation,” said Bishop Michael D. Pfeifer of San Angelo, Tex. He said bishops confront an issue “about which we cannot speak and are not ready to speak.”

Bishop Pierre DuMaine of San Jose, Calif., in the bishops’ first open debate on the long-considered subject at their recent meeting at the University of Notre Dame, put it this way:

“We’ve gone about as far as we can go.”

However, a growing number of bishops would like to go further, as indicated in the new book, “A Church Divided,” by Terrance Sweeney, a former Jesuit priest expelled for refusing Vatican orders to suppress his data.

He says confidential surveys of U.S. bishops found those favoring ordaining women to the diaconate rose from 28% in 1985 to 40% in 1990, and rose from 8% to 14% for admitting them as priests.

Also, he says, the findings show bishops favoring optional celibacy for priests--allowing marriage for those who choose it--rose in that period from 24% to 32%.

Sweeney, of Los Angeles, said in a telephone interview that “more and more bishops want change and more and more Catholics (also want it).”

Among U.S. Catholics generally, the latest Gallup Poll finds 67% favor ordination of women and 75% support optional celibacy for priests.

For the bishops, still striving after nine years of work to produce an equitable document about women, the effort is like trying to “balance a paradox,” said Bishop Enrique San Pedro of Brownsville, Tex.

In affirming full equality of women, he said that principle “affirms what cannot be affirmed” in regard to the priesthood.

Retired Bishop Charles A. Buswell of Pueblo, Colo., said the bishops, by having to deny ordination to women, express the “concern of the Vatican rather than the concerns of women.”

Some bishops wanted to junk the whole 18,000-word proposal, stitched together over years of consultations, hearings, a Vatican intervention and three revisions. Many women’s groups also wanted it scrapped.

However, by a close vote, bishops asked for still another revision, to be considered at a meeting in November.

Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago said “just to walk away” from the project and “drop it” would be a serious mistake, implying “we have nothing to say” or “don’t know what to say” and “don’t have the courage to be teachers.”

But even with continued work, he said the results “cannot heal all the hurts, or affirm all the positions being sought,” but will affirm equity for women in general and “signal that we must move in a new direction.”

Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee said the present document would “be an embarrassment” to the church. “So many are hurting out there, and this would not be healing of their wounds,” he said.

Archbishop William J. Levada of Portland, Ore., said the proposed authoritative teaching letter may be downgraded only to a “statement,” but he still is confident it will survive in some form.

But Weakland said, “They’re still not going to be happy with it down the road.”