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                                                                                COVER STORY, Page 52

The Second Reformation


Admission to the priesthood is just one issue as feminism rapidly
emerges as the most vexing thorn for Christianity

By RICHARD N. OSTLING -- With reporting by Jordan Bonfante/Los
Angeles, Helen Gibson/London and Ratu Kamlani/New York


    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 clergy woman 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 semi schisms.
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.