Pope Calls for Equality for Women, Assails Injustices : Religion: Surprised Catholic feminists praise his statement. But pontiff still opposes abortion, female priests.

In a ringing defense of the equality of women that surprised even Catholic feminists, Pope John Paul II on Monday condemned injustices against them and called for a universal recognition of the dignity of women.

The unprecedented letter to the world’s women called for equal pay for equal work, protection for working mothers, fairness in career advancement, equality for spouses when it comes to family rights, and laws to protect women from sexual violence and exploitation.

But at the same time, the Pope restated the church’s opposition to abortion--even in the case of rape--and to the admission of women to the Roman Catholic priesthood.

Even so, Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice--which opposes the Pope’s view on abortion and the ban on women priests--called the letter the Pope’s strongest statement ever of solidarity with women and support for their rights.

“That is new to me,” Kissling said. “I haven’t heard this before.”

The letter also represented his clearest acceptance of the church’s responsibility for institutional discrimination against women, she said.

The letter, released in Rome on Monday, is being widely viewed as part of a larger diplomatic initiative by the Vatican to influence the agenda at the upcoming United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing in September.

Contentious policy differences have already marked talks leading up to the conference. Last March, the Vatican and the Chinese government each moved separately to silence their critics by asking the United Nations to deny credentials to some groups seeking to attend the meeting. Among the groups that the Vatican tried unsuccessfully to keep out was Kissling’s Catholics for a Free Choice, based in Washington, D.C.

Decrying the Beijing agenda as “ideologically unbalanced,” the Vatican earlier complained that the word “gender” appears almost 300 times in a conference draft document and that the words sex, sexuality and sexual appear 100 times.

In his letter, the Pope called for an effective worldwide campaign “concentrating on all areas of women’s life and beginning with a universal recognition of the dignity of women.”

The church has long been alarmed by what it considers to be a narrow, secular view of women--one preoccupied with reproductive issues while overlooking the basic dignity of women, especially that of wives and mothers.

That unique role is threatened in some developing countries where forced sterilization and abortion and a lack of educational opportunities are the rule, the church contends.

In those nations, cultural factors have relegated women to “the margins of society and even reduced [them] to servitude,” the letter said. “This has prevented women from truly being themselves and it has resulted in a spiritual impoverishment of humanity.”

John Paul apologized for the church’s role in furthering cultural norms that have held women down. “If objective blame, especially in particular historical contexts, has belonged to not just a few members of the church, for this I am truly sorry,” he said.

Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity College in Washington, D.C.--the nation’s oldest Catholic women’s college--said the Pope’s letter would be especially welcomed in developing countries.

“He offers a lot of affirmation of women in those sections of society throughout the world where women are terribly oppressed,” McGuire said. In Third World countries, the burning issue is not admitting women to the priesthood, but protecting them from sexual and physical abuse, as well as remedying the lack of education and poverty that allows oppression.

“The preoccupations of people in the United States are not the preoccupations of the vast majority of women in the world, for whom the very fundamental notion of dignity as a human being is not affirmed,” McGuire said.

But she said that it will be more difficult for women in this country to accept the letter as a plea for equality.

“It all sounds very good, very affirming,” she said. “But . . . [his] tough message is that women’s roles are not men’s roles, and there will be no priesthood for women in the church.”

In his message, John Paul II again defended the church’s tradition of excluding women from the priesthood and emphasized that while women and men must be considered equal, their roles are complementary, not competing.

He noted that Jesus chose men as his disciples, even as he included women in his ministry in ways that were not common to the culture of the time.

Excluding women from the priesthood is not discriminatory, the Pope said. An all-male priesthood in no way detracts from the role of women, and “the ministerial priesthood, according to Christ’s plan, is an expression not of domination but of service.”

Despite their achievements in science, the arts, education and history, the Pope lamented that women today are still “valued more for their physical appearance than for their skill, their professionalism, their intellectual abilities, their deep sensitivity; in a word, the very dignity of their being!”

“This journey must go on,” the Pope said, acknowledging the progress that women have made in fighting for basic social, economic and political rights. He called equal pay for equal work and fairness in career advancement a matter not only of justice but of necessity.

But more important than career and public success “is the social and ethical dimension, which deals with human relations and spiritual values,” he said. Much of the “genius of women” is to be found in the ways they nurture children, as wives and mothers, as well as teachers.

“Wherever the work of education is called for, we can note that women are ever ready and willing to give themselves generously to others, especially in serving the weakest and most defenseless,” he said.

“In this work they exhibit a kind of affective, cultural and spiritual motherhood which has inestimable value for the development of individuals and the future of society.”