Pope’s Letter May Chill Ecumenical Relations : Catholicism: Papal statement against women as priests may impair dealings with Anglican Communion, some fear.

Pope John Paul II’s apostolic letter reaffirming church doctrine that women cannot become priests continues to reverberate around the globe, with some observers worried that relations between Catholics and non-Catholics will suffer as a result.

“This is a moment of sharply diminished ecumenical expectations,” said Father Richard John Neuhaus, the Catholic priest who heads the New York-based Institute on Religion and Public Life.

“To the surprise of nearly everyone, this (issue of ordaining women) has been a big question ecumenically,” said Neuhaus, who believes the Catholic Church is still committed to ecumenical dialogue.

“Ten years ago, people didn’t think women’s ordination would be such a divisive issue on ecclesial reconciliation,” said Neuhaus, who converted to Catholicism from Lutheranism three years ago. “This shows that none of us controls history, including Rome.”

Public concern has been particularly pronounced among those of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which for years has engaged in highly publicized church unity discussions with the Vatican.

However, the Church of England--the mother church of the Anglican Communion--began ordaining women as priests in March, and speculation by church and ecumenical observers has been rife that the Pope’s letter, dated May 22 and released May 30, was a signal that he is deeply unhappy with that development.

Others, including Neuhaus, have speculated that the Pope was trying to settle any confusion over the Vatican’s announcement earlier this spring that Catholic girls could assist priests during Mass, serving as equals with boys at the altar. Some saw that announcement as a signal that the Vatican might reconsider the long-held doctrine that women cannot be ordained as priests.

The Anglican Communion’s spiritual leader, Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, said Wednesday that although dialogue between the two churches has resulted in “substantial agreement on a number of matters which previously divided us,” the Pope’s letter calls into question continuing dialogue between the two churches on the issue of ordaining women as priests.

In his letter, the Pope said that in order that “all doubt may be removed” regarding the issue of ordaining women, he was declaring that the church “has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”

Carey, who tartly assailed the Pope’s letter for advancing theological arguments that other churches, including his own, have not found convincing, also said that “some clarification is required of the Roman Catholic Church as to how it sees the future of the ecumenical endeavor.”

In a June 1 statement, Gunnar Staalsett, the general secretary of the Lutheran World Federation, expressed surprise at the tone, though not the content, of the Pope’s statement.

Staalsett, who heads a federation of 114 Lutheran churches representing about 54 million Lutherans worldwide, joined Carey in discounting the theological arguments for not ordaining women--including the fact that Jesus did not have female disciples--saying that Catholic and Lutheran theologians have found them wanting.

He also echoed his Anglican colleague in wondering whether the pontiff’s letter “will undermine the ecumenical dialogue by its rigid claim regarding truth and by what seems to be an attempt to remove the question of ordaining women as priests from the ecumenical agenda.”

“It is our conviction that it is precisely in ecumenical discussion that the Holy Spirit can lead us to new insights into the Holy Scriptures,” he said.

Brother Jeffrey Gros, associate director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the intensity of reaction to the Pope’s statement among Protestants caught him by surprise.

“People have known this for 30 years,” Gros said of Protestant churches entering into dialogue with the Catholic Church, knowing all the while that women’s ordination would be an issue of disagreement.

“I don’t expect this will be throwing cold water onto this process. If there are problems, it will say more about those making the criticism than about the Catholic Church,” he said.

Calling the matter a “tempest in a teapot,” Gros added that the tempest began in the Reformation four centuries ago, and that ecumenical dialogue has to be seen over a large span of history.

While not minimizing the differences between the churches on the issue of women’s ordination, he said Pope John Paul II is not signaling a cooling off of dialogue between the churches.

“Talks of unity will continue at a steady pace. We’re still at an early stage, and we move in increments,” said Gros, who previously served as director of the Faith and Order unit of the National Council of Churches.

But J. Robert Wright, a professor of church history at the General Theological Seminary, an Episcopal school in New York City that has participated in international Anglican-Catholic dialogues, said the effect of the Pope’s letter on ecumenical relations cannot be minimized.

“The Pope has upped the ante,” he said. “He has made the dialogue hinge on this issue in a way that it didn’t before. Never before has the Roman church said it couldn’t even discuss this matter. That presents a real ecumenical problem.”

Although John Paul’s statement fell just short of being a matter of papal infallibility, Wright said, it is likely to have the effect of ending debate on the issue within the highest level of the church for decades at least.

History, Wright added, provides some clue about where this might lead. At the time of Council of Trent, held between 1545-63, Pope Pius V issued the Roman Missal, or book of prayers for Mass, which was declared to be authoritative for all time.

But the missal was eventually changed, during the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.

“Absolute papal statements sound very absolute at the time they are delivered,” Wright said. “But over the centuries, they change.”