Cut From The Wrong Cloth

By Richard N. Ostling

IT TOOK AMERICA'S ROMAN CATHOLIC bishops three years to develop a scheme for ending the nuclear arms race. They needed six years to produce a master plan for reforming capitalism. But it has become an unending struggle for the men of the hierarchy to come up with a coherent policy on women to guide their flock of 58 million. The bishops are already into their ninth year of trying to agree on a pastoral letter, and the longer it takes, the more rancorous the debates become. Feminist lobbyists, antifeminist lobbyists, even a few bishops, proclaim the project a disaster and say no letter should be produced.

The latest episode unfolds this week when the U.S. hierarchy meets at the University of Notre Dame. The bishops have set aside a full afternoon to air their views on an 81-page third draft of the proposed letter. As the bishops deliberate, the campus will provide space for a simultaneous gathering of liberal caucuses that are dissatisfied with the church, its all-male priesthood and its reigning Pontiff, John Paul II. The counterconference will feature an ersatz Mass, celebrated by women.

American Catholicism's ongoing struggle between the sexes is complex and contradictory. Consider:

-- Despite all the angry rhetoric from the left and right, a TIME poll of U.S. Catholics by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman shows that women parishioners are remarkably content with their lot. In fact, the women are happier than the men.

-- Nonetheless, the poll also shows continuing and widespread lay dissent on the hot-button issues that affect women, including birth control, divorce, female priests and, to some extent, abortion. Although women favor allowing married priests, they are divided over whether this change would make male clergy more understanding toward women's concerns.

-- While Catholic tradition says females cannot be priests, congregations could not operate without women, who do everything from catechism teaching to worship planning to pastoral counseling. Half of U.S. parishes hire salaried laity or members of religious orders to fill ministerial roles, and fully 85% of them (an estimated 17,000) are women. That does not even count women's continuing dominance in parochial schools.

-- These new roles for women are in accord with church law. But conservatives claim that the "feminization" of the church may be causing the slump in men entering the priesthood. TIME's poll also shows a gender gap in Mass attendance, with women outnumbering men.

-- Religious orders, women's centuries-old power bastion, are gradually disintegrating. The number of U.S. sisters, which reached a high of 180,015 in 1964, dropped to 99,337 this year, the lowest point since at least the 1940s. To survive, orders are seeking part-time women volunteers and considering offering the option of sisters' either taking short-term vows or joining for life.

-- Increasingly, Catholic caucuses pressing for women priests and feminism are allying with those that advocate abortion choice and homosexual liberation. In the long run, this could isolate the women's rights crusade from the Catholic mainstream.

The current imbroglio started in 1975, when 2,000 Catholics who favored priesthood for women met in Detroit. The result was the Women's Ordination Conference (WOC), a group with 4,000 members -- and ceaseless debate. In 1977 the Vatican doctrinal office sought to halt the discussion with a decree insisting on an all-male priesthood. In 1979, during Pope John Paul's first U.S. visit, Sister Theresa Kane, then president of the organization for leaders of women's orders, publicly informed the Pontiff of "the intense suffering and pain" many churchwomen experience.

With such currents swirling about, the U.S. bishops in 1983 authorized the preparation of the still pending pastoral letter. Even in these days of participatory churchmanship, there has never been anything to compare with this project. Its chief writer, staff director and consultants are all women. The bishops sponsored open hearings in 100 dioceses and 60 colleges, met with 24 national women's organizations, received 10,000 pages of written testimony and amassed opinions from 75,000 women in all. The text has been revised several times, with drafts made public and debated in 1988 and 1990. The Vatican, leery of the discussion's direction, insisted that representatives from the U.S. hierarchy attend a conference in Rome last year to hear out papal advisers and bishops from 13 other nations on women's issues.

During this arduous process, voices of complaint from American women have been weeded out of the text and papal pronouncements brought to the fore. The current draft proclaims sexism to be a sin, in church or society. Dioceses are asked to establish women's commissions. Willingness to treat women as equals is a criterion of fitness for the priesthood. But the text drops previous urgings that the Vatican immediately consider letting women join the order of deacon, thus permitting them to perform many pastoral functions also filled by priests. The text weakens proposals for allowing women preachers and altar girls, which Rome rules out and American parishes routinely permit. Long gone is the suggestion of serious discussion about women as priests; instead, the ban is restated.

Ordination tops the list of specific issues simply because "all major decision making is done by bishops," notes Ruth Fitzpatrick of Fairfax, Va., coordinator of the WOC. She sees grass-roots protest mushrooming. "We're watching the inward collapse of the whole patriarchal structure of the Catholic Church." Another radical, Sister Maureen Fielder of Catholics Speak Out in Mount Rainier, Md., reports that hundreds of groups of Catholics shun church-as-usual. "I know plenty of women who get together and celebrate the Eucharist together," she says.

Others who favor women priests say feminists must realize that progress takes time. Boston College theologian Lisa Sowle Cahill notes that bishops writing in the 1930s made "a great hue and cry against women leaving the home," whereas Pope John Paul favors women's careers and job equality so long as the centrality of family and motherhood is preserved. Cahill thinks the ordination issue is being pressed by "a small and privileged class" in the West, while women worldwide are struggling just to survive and need Catholicism's help.

Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, the first woman to be chief editor of the respected journal Commonweal, sees no doctrinal reason to prevent women priests. But big "anthropological and psychological barriers" stand in the way, she observes, so "I'm not going to put all my eggs in that basket." Better for now, she thinks, to seize the opportunities for nonordained women to hold positions of administrative power and intellectual influence.

The same point is made by a more conservative thinker, Ronda Chervin, a philosophy professor at the seminary of the Los Angeles archdiocese. Chervin is one of the three official consultants on the bishops' pastoral letter who have remained throughout the project. She does not see the all-male priesthood as an injustice and predicts, "There will be more and more women confidently within leadership positions. It will be taken for granted that women will teach in seminaries, manage finances or act in diocesan or parish leadership roles."

The bishops are pressing ahead on another much discussed matter. The proposed pastoral letter endorses removal of gender-slanted language, and the process is already well along. In mid-May, the Vatican approved use of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (an example, from Psalm 8:4: "What are human beings that you are mindful of them?"), and work is under way on other such translations. The proposed new liturgy for English-speaking countries would revise the Nicene Creed, which is recited at every Mass, to state that Jesus Christ "became truly human" rather than "became man."

Such changes may not win big points in the parishes, however. TIME's poll shows that only 36% of Catholic women (but 48% of men) think worship should shun terms like "men" in referring to humanity. A mere 22% of women (and 27% of men) want the church to eliminate "he" or "Father" in praying to God.

At the same time, the demand for women's rights and the bishops' halfway efforts to accommodate it have goaded female traditionalists into action. In 1984, Helen Hull Hitchcock of St. Louis met a few friends to write up a complaint about feminist inroads in the church. Today 50,000 people have endorsed their manifesto, and Hitchcock is the full-time director of Women for Faith & Family. If the left sees the church dominated by oppressive males, Hitchcock contends that "the power structure in the church has been largely subverted by people who no longer accept the very basic dogmas of the faith."

Conservative theologian Joyce A. Little of Houston's University of St. Thomas interprets feminism as one aspect of an insidious cultural attack against all traditional restraints and beliefs in favor of asserting individual desires. Little wants the American bishops to draw the line and insist that "the personal beliefs of priests, religious or laity which run contrary to the public faith of the church will not be tolerated in liturgy or instruction on Catholic doctrine." She recognizes that such a crackdown would cause "extraordinary public fragmentation of the Catholic community." However, the U.S. hierarchy's current policy of benign inaction, she contends, "benefits only those who have already rejected the public faith of the church and the authority of the bishops."

Women on the left in effect ratify Little's worst fears, asserting that the church is at the beginning of massive disruption. Sister Anne E. Patrick of Carleton College in Minnesota says that "we're dealing with cultural change on the scale of the 1st century, when Gentiles entered the Christian faith without adopting Jewish practices." Similarly, Rosemary Radford Ruether, a radical Catholic who teaches at a Methodist seminary in Illinois, says the church could be facing its most intense conflict in centuries. As she sees it, the choice is between "genuine transformation into an open community" and "retrenchment as a Roman sect."

At the moment, the American bishops can take comfort in the bedrock loyalty and surprising contentment among women parishioners. But the tug-of-war over the bishops' pastoral letter is only a foretaste of more severe conflicts that lie ahead. Hammered by new views of morality, authority, personal rights, the family and motherhood, the Catholic tradition is increasingly being cast on the defensive in Western nations. Women, whether or not they ever become priests or bishops or Popes, will help determine the outcome.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 145 Catholic women, taken for TIME/CNN on June 3-4 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling error is plus or minus 8%

CAPTION: MOST U.S. CATHOLIC WOMEN DISAGREE WITH OFFICIAL CHURCH PRACTICES . . .

. . . BUT THEY ARE NOTABLY CONTENT WITH THE CHURCH