A Door Still Locked to Some : Women one day may find the way opened by a shrinking male priesthood

Rome thinks in centuries, according to an old saying about the Roman Catholic Church. Many are the foes on whose graves it has, if not quite danced, then at least trod.

The longest-lived religions are the most durable institutions known to humankind, and their durability owes much to their conservatism. Right or wrong, they look and sound impressively the same as the years, the decades, the centuries pass.

When Pope John Paul II declares his foursquare opposition to the ordination of women to the Roman Catholic priesthood, as he did most recently last Monday, he may speak from an intuitive grasp of this facet of an ancient tradition’s appeal.

However, the sacramental function that the Pope would reserve to ordained, celibate men may shrink in importance within the American Catholic Church if the number of such men continues to drop as precipitously as it has in recent years. And dwindling of the traditional priesthood may one day begin to bring increased importance to the activities that church law allows women or married men to perform.

What are these activities? They include such functions as public Scripture reading, public or semiprivate preaching and meditation on Scripture, teaching, counseling and other kinds of non-sacramental ministry.

With the passions of the 17th-Century wars of religion faded into history, the difference between Roman Catholicism and many strands of Protestantism seems to many American observers to be largely a matter of emphasis. Catholicism emphasizes liturgy and sacraments, though its faithful also read the Bible. Protestantism emphasizes the Bible, though it also performs liturgy and administers sacraments.

By ordaining married men and by ordaining women, the Pope could guarantee that the emphasis within American Catholicism remains liturgical and sacramental. By refusing to do so, the Pope may unintentionally shift the emphasis to the Bible and accelerate a Protestantization already discernible for other reasons.

Whether this would be good for Catholicism is not for a secular newspaper to say. Suffice it to say that it seems a distinct historical possibility.

Rome thinks in centuries.

But God writes straight with crooked lines.