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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.