The Second Reformation

By Richard N. Ostling

Not since King Henry VIII broke with the papacy 458 years ago has the normally decorous Church of England known such passion as it did last week, when it swept away by a margin of two votes the rule that only men may serve as Anglican priests. Despite pleas for prayer and calm, the controversy will echo throughout the Anglican Communion, and reverberate through all of Christianity, for years to come. On one side are those who believe that the mission of Christ's church is damaged when half its members are denied the chance to use their God-given gifts. On the other are those who are equally devout in their faith that the male priesthood was instituted by Jesus Christ himself 19 centuries ago when he called 12 men as his Apostles.

The debate over the status of women, with all its theological and personal dramas, represents a larger clash between venerable religious beliefs and social movements that have affected much of the world over the past generation. Last week it was the Anglicans; this week the Roman Catholic Church faces its own gender battles as the U.S. bishops meet in Washington to wrestle with the church's controversial policies on women. Activists believe they are caught up in one of Christendom's great and historic transformations. "The last time there was such a ground swell that was not heeded was the Protestant Reformation," says feminist Sandra Schneiders, an Immaculate Heart sister teaching at California's Jesuit School of Theology.

Among Christians inspired by feminism, especially in English-speaking countries, a threshold was crossed last week; but the broader cultural shift has been occurring for decades and is fast gaining momentum. In permitting the ordination of women, the Church of England joined a transformation that has altered other Protestant denominations since the early 1950s and that has already been embraced by the independent Anglican churches of Canada, New Zealand and the U.S., with Australia almost certain to take the step this week.

In the vote's angry aftermath, rumblings of schism erupted not only in England but all across the Anglican Communion, with its 70 million members worldwide. Outside the synod hall, while women and their male supporters cheered and hugged, angry conservatives warned that thousands of members and clergymen would leave the church in protest. "I have become more and more disillusioned with the Church of England," declared Ann Widdecombe, an M.P. and junior minister in the Conservative government who quit the church after the vote. "Its doctrine is doubt, its creed is compromise, and its purpose appears to be party politics. This was just the last straw."

The central players in England's decision are the 1,300 women deacons who will now be eligible for the priesthood. A far larger audience, however, watched the drama unfold and braced for the repercussions. The great churches of Eastern Orthodoxy were silently dismayed. The Vatican looked on with alarm, having vowed that Catholicism would never accept women for ordination. The decision in London sealed the fate of a 22-year effort to undo King Henry's legacy and reunite the Anglican and Catholic churches. "The problem of the admission of women to the ministerial priesthood," declared a Vatican spokesman, "touches the very nature of the sacrament of priestly orders. This decision by the Anglican Communion constitutes a new and grave obstacle to the entire process of reconciliation."

Just as interested are the American Catholic bishops gathering in Washington. For nine years they have tried to produce a coherent document on women to straddle the demands of conservatives in Rome and of feminists in the U.S. At issue is everything from whether women can serve as priests or deacons to whether sexism is "sin." Among the characterizations of the bishops' efforts: "almost laughable" (from the angry left), "an embarrassment" (from the angry right). The document has been diluted so thoroughly that reformers hope that the hierarchy will throw it out and start all over again.

The women's reformation continues to shake up the Protestant churches as well. Fierce conflicts have occurred in the 15 million-member Southern Baptist Convention. Since local congregations have power to ordain, there is a sprinkling of women pastors and lay deacons. But the rising Fundamentalists who run national agencies passed a 1984 resolution against the practice and do all they can to discourage it. Even in the more progressive Presbyterian, Methodist and United churches, leaders worry about the implicit "patriarchy" that excludes women from the powerful pulpits and relegates them to small parishes or associate positions.

Then there are the issues that go beyond ordination, ones that touch the faith of women and men who arrive in church on Sunday morning and find controversy where they least expect it. Words to prayers and hymns they have cherished since childhood are gradually changing. Denominations that once would not tolerate divorced ministers now find themselves debating whether to accept avowed lesbian ones. Feminist theologians are searching for new ways of conceiving God himself -- or herself -- as Mother, Wisdom, Sophia, Goddess.

The women's movement, especially within Catholicism, is often linked to other emotional positions, including acceptance of birth control, abortion and homosexuality. It is by no means only men who view these developments with alarm. The movement's goal, warns traditionalist Donna Steichen, author of Ungodly Rage, is nothing less than "the overthrow of Christianity. It's not about advancing women in positions in the church. It's about a complete change in theology. Are we talking about a church founded by the Son of God made man? Or are we talking about simply a social gathering that we can rebuild as we wish?"

She and others point to women who have formed separatist "Women-Church" worship, a New Age blend of feminist, ecological, neopagan and Christian elements. One book offers liturgies to celebrate the coming-out of lesbians, teenagers' first menstrual period and cycles of the moon. In an Ash Wednesday rite, women repent not of their own sins but of the sins the church commits | against women. Last month, 30 members of Chicago Catholic Women gathered to chant, "I am a woman giving birth to myself; bless what I bring forth," and then shared eucharistic bread and wine -- without once uttering the name of Jesus.

MASCULINE THEOLOGY

Beneath all the political battles is a basic theological dispute about the role God intends men and women to play in his service. Catholic officials insist that they recognize women's gifts and full spiritual equality but want to preserve distinct roles for each gender. All sides note that for his time, Jesus bestowed uncommon dignity upon women and that in the New Testament church they were remarkably visible as speakers, teachers and deacons.

But then there are St. Paul's dictums: "I permit no woman to teach or have authority over men" (I Timothy 2: 12), and "the women should keep silence in the churches" (I Corinthians 14: 34). Though some conservative Protestants feel bound by those words, a sizable body of their leaders holds that the commands were not universal but related to specific 1st century situations. Catholicism no longer cites these words in its arguments, and is eager to forget the embarrassing chauvinism of patriarchs such as Thomas Aquinas, who said males enjoy "more perfect reason" and "stronger virtue."

Traditional Catholic theology holds that because God was incarnate as a man, only men can serve as representatives of Jesus Christ at the altar. In its 1976 Declaration against women priests, the Vatican said that although the incarnation "took place according to the male sex," this does not imply superiority of gender. The document added, however, that there is a "profound fittingness" in having priests with "natural resemblance" to the male Jesus Christ, since they represent him in the Mass. "If you were staging a Nativity play, would you have Cary Grant or Nick Nolte play Mary?" asks Ronda Chervin of St. John's Seminary in California, one of two women advisers who have lasted throughout the U.S. Catholic bishops' work on the pastoral letter.

The primate of world Anglicanism, Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, said last year that "the idea that only a male can represent Christ at the altar is a most serious heresy," but backed down when Anglo-Catholics objected. Those who support women's ordination insist that what matters theologically is that God became human, not that he became male. Sister Joan Chittister, a feminist Benedictine in Erie, Pennsylvania, says focusing on ) males "flies in the face of the theology of the Incarnation that says Jesus became flesh, your flesh and mine just as well." She calls this "a theological tragedy, far deeper than any sort of social oppression."

Exclusion from the priesthood may seem humiliating, a source of suffering to women who feel a calling. But Catholic theology exalts humility as a virtue and teaches that men and women can find redemption through suffering. Bernadette Counihan, a Franciscan nun in Iowa, believes that Christian truth is at stake. "Jesus never said if you want to be my disciple, go out and fulfill yourself. He said take up your cross, deny yourself and follow me." Feminists may nod knowingly, sensing paternalism, or propose that ennobling pain could also be produced by leaving cherished tradition. "Very often, what we're called to do within the promptings of the Holy Spirit is very painful," says Nancy Wuller, a progressive lay leader in California. "Look, we're following somebody who was crucified. There is pain inherent in change, and I think we have to recognize the discomfort that might be asked of each one of us in this journey."

THE LANGUAGE OF FAITH

If Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Son of man, is incontestably male, what about addressing God as the Father? The debate over inclusive language touches Protestants and Catholics alike. An inclusive-language Mass will soon be proposed for Catholics in all English-speaking countries. Churchgoers of many traditions find profound comfort in singing hymns and reciting prayers that are shared across generations. Many are not prepared to sacrifice majesty in the name of fairness, to replace the resounding "Our Father . . ." that opens the Lord's Prayer with this rendition from the United Church of Christ press: "God, our Father and Mother, who is in the heavens, may your name be made holy . . ." Even parishioners who are eager to see women play a more visible leadership role may feel that making the language more inclusive comes at too high a price, in principle and in poetry.

But language, as secular and sacred scholars have been arguing for a generation, carries immense symbolic power. "The fact that God continues to be thought of as a male God means people begin to equate power with maleness," says the Rev. Joan Campbell, the first clergywoman to be chief executive of the National Council of Churches. When noninclusive words crop up during Mass, asserts Sister Francis Bernard O'Connor of the University of Notre Dame, women "sit there and say, Why am I here?" She argues that "God does not have gender, and there are a number of ways God can be addressed without calling God a he or a she."

Citing doctrinal grounds, conservative theologian Donald G. Bloesch of the University of Dubuque, Iowa, rejects many neologisms that feminists use to avoid the traditional Father, Son and Holy Spirit. "Heavenly Parent," for instance, makes God more a world soul than a Person, he contends, while "Father and Mother" smacks of dualism or paganism. God includes masculinity and femininity within himself without having sexual gender, Bloesch explains, but "the God of the Bible is not androgynous." San Francisco Jesuit Joseph Fessio, editor of Catholic World Report, is more direct. "If you change the language of the liturgy and prayers and feminize it," he says, "you're ultimately changing the religion."

THE PROTESTANT REBELLION

Back in 1853, Antoinette Brown, a U.S. Congregationalist who later became a Unitarian, was the first woman to be ordained in a mainline Protestant church. But for the next century, most Protestant women had to content themselves with unofficial roles. They gradually built their own empires through intertwined efforts for evangelism, Sunday school, foreign missions, abolition of slavery, Prohibition and woman suffrage.

Until Protestant barriers began to fall in the 1950s, most women leaders were in Pentecostal or Holiness churches or groups where local congregations ordain clergy. Admission of women pastors in Sweden's Lutheran Church caused a stir across Europe because its clergy claim common lineage with Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox priests. In the U.S., African Methodist churches had previously allowed women clergy, and in the 1950s white Methodists and Presbyterians followed suit. The first woman rabbi in the U.S. was ordained in 1972. Today U.S. Protestant seminary enrollments are nearly one-third female. But there is strong opposition among most local congregations, in not only the Southern Baptist but also the National Baptist (black) conventions, the Church of God in Christ (a huge, black Pentecostal group) and other denominations. In the Mormon religion, with its unique doctrines, the lay priesthood is limited to men.

Change came with great difficulty for the Anglican Communion. During World War II, the bishop in Hong Kong ordained a woman as a priest, but she resigned when the Archbishops of Canterbury and York objected. Matters moved quickly after a 1968 conference of the world's Anglican bishops ruled the theological arguments on women priests "inconclusive." In the mid-1970s the Episcopal Church -- the U.S. Anglican branch -- elevated its first women priests. The early ordinations, when 11 women were ordained in a blaze of publicity by retired bishops who had little to lose, were illegal. By 1976, when the Episcopal Church officially authorized ordination, Canada had already done so, and 12 more of the 30 Anglican provinces worldwide followed suit. About 80% of the 1,500 Anglican women priests are in the U.S.

Last week's vote in England ensures that within world Anglicanism, where clubbish amiability was once the 11th Commandment, the issue will remain unresolved. Those who oppose female priests vow to organize schisms and semischisms. Numerous bishops and almost 3,000 of the country's 10,500 priests have declared themselves unalterably opposed to change. "We have ceased to march in step with one another," says London vicar Christopher Colven, "although we still share a broad approach and are bound together by affection."

The details in England's legislation almost guarantee future flare-ups. Traditionalists are angry at a rule that says a current bishop can refuse women priests in his diocese but his successor must approve them. The bishop of London, David Hope, said in anguished tones that opponents "will inevitably and increasingly find themselves ignored and marginalized." Laywoman Elizabeth Miles, who runs an antiordination group with 6,750 members, hopes last-ditch lobbying will cause Parliament to reject the women's measure, but that appears unlikely.

There is division within America's Episcopal Church as well, even as it moves this week to consecrate Anglicanism's third female bishop, Jane Dixon. At least five U.S. dioceses and various parishes still refuse to recognize women priests. Far more divided is Australia, where the largest diocese (Sydney) is staunchly conservative. Since traditionalists believe women simply cannot be valid priests, they do not recognize female priests or sacraments they perform.

THE CATHOLIC WOMEN'S REVOLUTION

For years Catholics have watched the Anglican drama and felt the issues and arguments seeping into their own debates. More than theology, it is everyday experience that has reshaped the perceptions of men and women alike. The crucial turning point came with the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), when the world's bishops emphasized, among other reforms, the equality of the sexes and the importance of the laity. Church members were to be no longer mere assistants to the clergy but full-fledged participants in the church's mission.

Thus inspired, women began studying theology and filling leadership posts as the number of priests began falling. The Women's Ordination Conference and nuns' groups began open agitation for women priests. "Prior to the Second Vatican Council, women never did anything in the sanctuary," says the Rev. Thomas Rausch of Loyola Marymount University. "But now for 20 years Catholics have become used to seeing them proclaiming the Scriptures and sometimes even presiding at noneucharistic liturgies. That means that the whole consciousness of the church begins to change."

Then the new possibility arose that laywomen (and laymen) could fulfill most priestly functions. Under the Vatican's canon law code of 1983, parishes could be run by nuns or laity under the supervision of priests who visit to celebrate sacraments. Nearly 300 U.S. parishes are without a priest, reports Ruth Wallace of George Washington University, and three-fourths of them are led by women. If present patterns continue, the number of male priests will have fallen 40% between 1966 and 2005, which will increase the demand for women substitutes.

The women leading parishes do everything from preaching to counseling to serving Communion hosts previously consecrated by a priest. Once church members become accustomed to a female presence at the altar, they tend to make the argument for ordination on practical rather than theological grounds. "We have a shortage of male priests," says Michele Clark, a leading laywoman of American Martyrs Church in Manhattan Beach, California. "We have three priests now; we're looking to have just one by the year 2025 -- and that's for 4,500 families. There's definitely a pastoral need for women in the priesthood."

A solid majority of American Catholics now favor women priests, in contrast to 29% in a 1974 poll. But if parishioners are pleased with women leaders, the women are not universally impressed with church work. Barbara Flannery, a mother of three, led a parish in Palmer, Michigan, for seven years but finally quit last year. "It was too many hours and also too much responsibility for too little financial compensation and too little emotional support from the male end of the hierarchy," she says. When clergy gathered, she adds, she suffered quietly from "the feelings, looks, innuendos. I was never quite a part of the group."

For some women, who feel irresistibly called to do more, the only choice is to find a vocation outside Catholicism. The Rev. Marianne Niesen, 41, is the pastor of two small Montana Methodist churches. She loves what she does and feels a powerful calling to her ministry. But she still misses the Catholicism that shaped her life for her first 36 years, including 18 years as a Franciscan nun. "I was as Catholic as you can get -- Catholic family, Catholic grade school, Catholic high school -- even before becoming a nun," she says. "And I loved being a nun. I didn't become a Methodist because I hated being Catholic. I wanted to stay a nun and be a minister at the same time. That was my dream." Though fellow nuns supported her decision to go to a Protestant seminary to become a minister, her Franciscan superiors inevitably expelled her last year. Niesen thinks women pastors like herself will change the thinking of Catholic parishioners. "All of a sudden, they ask, why does our church not recognize these gifts?"

THE BATTLE OF THE BISHOPS

The cynical joke is that there is only one thing in common between the feminists and conservative women in the church: they both distrust the bishops," says Ronda Chervin, the consultant on the U.S. bishop's letter. "The conservatives think the bishops have been bending before the feminists, and the feminists think the bishops have caved in to Vatican pressure." After agreeing to prepare the document in 1983, the bishops made an elaborate effort to hear out alienated women. Some 75,000 women offered written and oral testimony, and the first draft in 1988 was filled with accounts of their distress. That version urged rapid study of the idea of allowing women to be deacons, who perform many ministerial functions, and more leisurely consideration of priesthood.

Under pressure from reformers, the American bishops also faced a surprise countermovement among traditionalist women. St. Louis, Missouri, housewife Helen Hull Hitchcock, 51, gathered five friends at her dining-room table in 1984 to write a petition defending the Pope's teachings and attacking ideologies that "seek to eradicate the natural and essential distinction between the sexes." They passed the petition along and found themselves with an astonishing 50,000 signers. Hitchcock now runs the lay lobby Women for Faith & Family, which has prodded the hierarchy rightward. Their efforts are complemented by a coalition of antifeminist nuns that received Rome's recognition and went into business last month, undercutting the exclusive status of a rival nuns' organization that has pressed for wider women's roles.

The succeeding versions have been pored over by bishops, priests, consultants and parishioners and picked apart by censorious Vatican clerics who summoned bishops to Rome and sent the Americans two secret letters warning against principles they thought too progressive. A priest who has seen the letters says they would be very upsetting to American women.

Pope John Paul II addressed the subject with his 1988 letter On the Dignity of Women, which is quite progressive by Vatican standards. Examining Genesis, the Pope blames Adam and Eve equally for original sin, and says the famous curse "your husband . . . shall rule over you" is not God's will but evidence of humanity's fall into the sinful state. The Pope also declares that in marriage, husbands and wives must be in equal submission to each other.

Conservatives still dislike this week's fourth draft because they oppose calls for inclusive language and local women's commissions, which they see as permanent nests for feminist activism. Liberals are far more infuriated, because the bishops' writing panel backed off on allowing female deacons, much less priests; dropped the assertion that inability to relate well to women should bar a man from the priesthood; and even shelved the declaration that sexism is "sin."

The prevailing view among middle-of-the-road Catholics appears to be that no letter at all would have been better than the tepid lip service embodied in the fourth draft. "It has been revised and qualified into insignificance," says theologian Rausch with a shrug. On the left, Ruth Fitzpatrick, leader of Women's Ordination Conference, finds it "pitiful that after nine years of work, this shoddy piece of paper is the best they can come up with." Feminist Schneiders argues that "you cannot say, 'Sexism is a sin except when we practice it.' Sexual apartheid is not acceptable, and it's not going to get acceptable by explaining it or claiming that it was God's idea."

The Vatican is officially silent on the latest disputes, which it considers a peculiarly Western phenomenon. But a prelate explains that Rome does not want to "blanket everything in the course of everyday life with the charge of sexism." As another Vatican official sees it, sin is concrete, premeditated action, not an ideology: "Americans, under the influence of the feminist community, wanted a broader definition, that merely thinking of women as different from men is sinful." Catholicism, the prelate maintains, "is defining and protecting the value of the feminine -- not the feminist -- in an age when it is under assault." The Vatican feels it has stretched as far as possible to accommodate women.

From the lofty vantage of the Holy See, perhaps, feminism is a faddish outside force that will dwindle one day. But in the U.S., and to a lesser extent in Western Europe, it is an entrenched force in secular society and, increasingly, in Catholic agencies, campuses and parishes. In some liberal Protestant churches, the women's movement is on its way to becoming the single most important influence over how members worship and what they believe.

Given the human-rights preachments that all churches deliver, a good case can be made that accommodation of women's demands is not only just but also essential for the church's well-being. Last week Anglicanism's world leader made just that argument. "We are in danger of not being heard," declared Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, "if women are exercising leadership in every area of our society's life save the ordained priesthood."

However, the women's rights crusade increasingly is enmeshed with divisive projects of social, moral and theological reconstruction. Many devout Christians, multitudes of women among them, cling ever more fervently to the old ways when all that is hallowed seems in danger of eroding. That perhaps explains why conservative churches that defiantly oppose the ascent of women are still thriving. In order to succeed in the long term, the new Christian feminism must not only claim power and authority for women but also demonstrate that gender equality enhances the church's spiritual and moral strength.

With reporting by Jordan Bonfante/Los Angeles, Helen Gibson/London and Ratu Kamlani/New York