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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."