"With their elegant clothes and gray coiffures, the women who gathered in the quiet, tree-lined grounds of University College Dublin in Ireland...hardly looked like a fighting force. But as they sipped chardonnay by the lake, they were drawing up battle plans to defy the Vatican by demanding an end to its prohibition against women priests in the Roman Catholic Church."

So described Time magazine's Lucy Fisher the participants in the first Women's Ordination Worldwide Conference of June 30, 2000, under the title "Sisters of Defiance."

Among the 345 participants, mostly "middle-aged and older," there were 30 nuns. Two of them had been asked by the Vatican not to attend: the chief organizer, English Sister Myra Poole of the Notre Dame de Namur Sisters in London, and keynote speaker American nun Joan Chittister. Sister Myra was in the vicinity of Dublin's but stayed away from the conference, though she did make a brief appearance near the end. Sister Joan, on the other hand, gave a rousing address on what is wrong with the evil Church which refuses to ordain women.

The Church's view
The Church has never ordained women. Jesus did not do it, the Apostles did not do it, nor has the Church ever accepted the reasoning put forward in its behalf. When after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the question was broached for the first time in modern times, the Church examined it, discussed it, and then formally closed the debate by solemnly upholding the two-thousand-year tradition.

In May 1994, after 25 years of discussion and deliberation, Pope John Paul II issued the decree Ordinatio sacerdotalis, explaining why in the Catholic Church priestly ordination is restricted to men only. It is a teaching, the decree stated, which must be held definitively. Since it is the will of God, and the Church has no authority to change it, further discussion about the possibility of ordination for women should now cease. The fact that non Catholic denominations (such as the Church of England in November 1992) had accepted women priests was disappointing but did not alter the teaching of the Church that God's will is ordination for men and not for women.

In October 1995, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) issued a theological note (Response to a Doubt) confirming that the Church's teaching on the priesthood belongs to the deposit of faith and, therefore, is de fide; that is, requiring definitive assent from the Catholic faithful.

Three years later, in the summer of 1998, Pope John Paul II signed the Apostolic letter Ad tuendam fidem (To protect the faith), adding a few points to the text of the Code of Canon Law, and setting forth in the accompanying Commentary the degrees of faith commitment required of Catholics with respect to different points of doctrine taught by the Church. Under the category "Faith in definitive statements," which require full assent on pain of loss of full communion with the Catholic Church," the list includes the teaching "that only men can be ordained." This, in brief, is the recent history of the debate.

Who is Joan Chittister?
Sister Joan Chittister is a member, and former prioress, of Mount Saint Benedict priory in Erie, Pennsylvania; she's also a former president of the American Benedictine priories. These houses are independent of one another. The Erie priory counts 129 sisters.

Joan Chittister has been a nun since the mid-fifties, is the author of some 20 books, and has been a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter of Kansas for years. She is a frequent speaker at conventions and conferences where the theme is usually the inequality of women in the Church, with the demand for women's ordination playing a key role.

Contemporary with the advancement of women in politics and in society in recent decades, Chittister first championed radical reforms of women's religious congregations following the original initiative of Vatican II. Always popular among Catholics itching for change-whatever it may be-she is always in demand as a speaker. She has also visited Canada. In March 1988, she spoke at St. Jerome's College, Waterloo, ON, and in April 1997, she was welcomed and hailed as a prophet by the diocese of Saskatoon and the Prairie Messenger, Saskatachewan Catholic weekly. Her idiosyncratic, provocative, "litany of women for the Church" has circulated among Catholic women in Ottawa and elsewhere.

Already decades ago, Chittister began to call for constant questioning of the Church, implying wrongdoing and hardness of heart on the part of the hierarchy. In her 1983 book Women, Ministry and the Church, she charged that women were being "denied their full humanity and remain in an inferior and oppressed position." In 1985, she rejected the Church's strictures against the 23 nuns who in an advertisement in the New York Times, together with 5,000 other Catholics, had attacked the Church's teaching against abortion, on the grounds that this was taking away their freedom. It was, she thought, a false use of authority, contrary to the "theology of tolerance."

As time went by, she came to believe that authority in the Church is tied to ordination and that by not allowing women to be ordained, the Church in fact refuses to accept women as true human beings. "Equality in the literal sense is the hinge on which everything turns," she wrote in 1993.

In April 2000, Sister Joan Chittister was the keynote speaker at the National Catholic Education Conference in Milwaukee. At least three bishops discouraged their teachers from going there. She told an applauding audience that educational leadership means posing questions that Church authorities do not want asked. Question, question, question, she insisted. All her own questions concern the feminist agenda of "spiritual responsibility" for women, meaning of course their ordination. We are being denied "the fullness of the spiritual life," asserted Chittister, to more applause.

Defiance as obedience
Then came the question of whether Sister Joan was going to attend a Women's Ordination Conference in Dublin, Ireland, at the end of June. The Vatican's Congregation for the Consecrated Life wrote her superior, Sister Christine Vladimiroff, the current prioress of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, asking her to keep Sister Joan at home. Sister Christine declined to do so. She read her answer explaining to her community why she was unable to comply to her community, and invited all 128 nuns to add their signatures to hers. All did, except one. Indeed, 35 of the younger nuns signed a request that any punishment given to Sister Joan be given to them as well. Then she travelled to Rome while Sister Joan was already on her way to Dublin.

Sister Christine's statement explaining her reasons for disobeying the Vatican is a most extraordinary document. It was "out of the Benedictine tradition of obedience," she says, that she formed her decision. The Vatican notion of authority exerts power and control out of a false sense of unity inspired by fear. Benedictine obedience and authority, on the other hand, are achieved through dialogue between a community member and her prioress in a spirit of co-responsibility. Obedience has a higher meaning than merely following orders from a legitimate superior. "Sister Joan Chittister, who has lived the monastic life with faith and fidelity for fifty years, must make her own decision based on her sense of Church, her monastic profession, and her own personal integrity. I cannot be used by the Vatican to deliver an order of silencing."

She continued: "I do not see her participation in this conference as 'a source of scandal to the faithful,' as the Vatican alleges." I think the faithful can be scandalized when honest attempts to discuss questions of import to the Church are forbidden.

"Benedictine communities," Sister Christine claimed, "were never intended to be part of the hierarchical or clerical status of the Church, but to stand apart from this structure and offer a different voice. Only if we do this can we live the gift that we are for the Church. Only in this way can we be faithful to the gift that women have within the Church."

Thus, Sister Christine argued that her direct disobedience was an act of obedience-a paradox if there ever was one. According to this understanding of obedience, Benedictine nuns can only be faithful to the Church when they are schismatic or nearly so. But as others see it, if they are not part of the hierarchical structure of the Church, they are not part of the Church at all.

In her talk at the Dublin conference, Sister Joan contended that the Church preaches the equality of women but does nothing to demonstrate it in its own structure. It maintains a theology of inequality and a spirituality of domination. She proposed that the understanding of God "as Father" and the all-male priesthood have become obstacles to a healthy Catholicism.

Modern Catholics, she charged, "need community, not patriarchal clericalism; they need the human, not the homophobic; they need more prophets of equality, not more pretenders to a priesthood of male privilege; they need discipleship, not canonical decrees."

She continued with more deliberately outrageous statements: "True discipleship is not membership in a clerical social club called a church. To preach a theology of equality and at the same time maintain a theology of inequality, a spirituality of domination that bars half of the human race on the basis of gender from full participation...is to live a lie." According to her, the Benedictines have been around for 1,500 years: "We survived the Dark Ages, feudalism, two world wars. We're not going to let a little letter from Rome get us down."

Comment:
Martin Luther could not have put it better; like him, Sr. Chittister and also her community (minus one perhaps), do not seem to understand that they are cutting themselves off from their 1,500-year-old tradition as a branch can be cut off from the vine. This fact was borne out graphically when the Dublin conference ended not with the celebration of Holy Mass but with a mock eucharistic service: "There was no official celebrant. Instead, all participants joined in blessing the bread and wine." Noted Time magazine, underneath a picture of women one of whom beat a drum, "women lead a new-age liturgy in their drive to change Vatican policy."

If Time understands what's going on, how is it that Joan Chittister doesn't? Sadly, her false rhetoric seduces others to the brink of the abyss, including her entire priory of 128 persons.

Postscript:
After the Dublin conference was over, The Tablet of London, which dubs itself "The International Catholic weekly," once again-as is its custom-attacked the Vatican. The editorial "Freedom to disagree" (July 14, 2001) accused the Vatican of a "flawed circular argument" behind its efforts to "police" (The Tablet's term) theological discussion in the Church which it claims, "convinces no one." The use of authority is just a "resort to bullying." The Tablet further argues that the ordination controversy is an issue of freedom of speech, as well as of gender equality.

What is missing in these remarks is any sense or belief that the Church is a divine institution, that Catholic doctrine is of divine origin, and that divinely-guided leaders have the duty to preserve the deposit of faith as well as protect the beliefs of the faithful.

Aside from all this-and despite The Tablet and Sr. Chittister-the vast majority of women live out their faith with joy and dedication and have long since learned to ignore the constant whining of the "liberated" few.

Fr. de Valk is the editor of this magazine. He is a priest of the Congregation of St. Basil, C.S.B.