Bishop stirs row over women

BY VIVIANE HEWITT IN ROME AND CRISTINA ODONE
CATHOLIC WOMEN SEE the Vatican bar on their ordination as a "new act of violence against them", the head of the German Bishops' Conference has proclaimed.
In an address that has stirred a storm of controversy from Germany to Rome, Bishop Karl Lehmann of Mainz, President of the German Conference of Catholic Bishops, said that "questions on the structure of the Church and the priesthood arc linked to the problem of violence against women". The bishop told the Ecumenical Council of Churches last weekend that Rome should make "decidedly more effort" to enhance the role of women, and to allow women to take on "positions of responsibility".
The bishop's warning raised fears this week that the Vatican was facing another round of grassroots protests in northern Europe against the fundamentals of Catholic ethics.
The German bishop's controversial statement came in the wake of the removal of French Bishop Jacques Gaillot from his Normandy diocese of Evreux last month on grounds of rebelling against Church teaching.
Within 24 hours of his address to the Ecumenical Council, the German Conference of Bishops issued a special statement in a bid, said German Episcopate sources in Rome, to "defuse" Rome's inevitable "irritation" at Bishop Lehmann's words. The Conference said the bishop was not expressing personal opinions but merely reporting the general view. "It cannot be said," Bishop Lehmann said in a new statement issued this week, "that the Church in our country or the bishops in this country rebel against the Pope. We defend ourselves against such anti-Roman and anti-papal positions."
But Hans Kung, the German dissident theologian, said that the "majority of Catholics in Austria, Switzerland and Holland", as well as in Germany, saw women's ordination as "inevitable".
The Tubingen theologian told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera this week that there were two principal theological arguments for women priests: "The first is the implicit role of women in the Scriptures: the extraordinary relationship which Jesus had with the female world, the fact that the
first witnesses of the Resurrection were women, and their key role among the first disciples in particular in the case of Mary Magdalen.
"The second line of argument deals with the development of theology, and the need of the Church to constantly adapt to the times when there is a pastoral need to do so."
Despite the immediate back-pedalling by the German Bishops' Conference, Bishop Lehmann's statement turned the spotlight on growing dissent from certain aspects of Catholic teaching among the faithful and some of their clergy in Germany.
Many agree with Hans Kung that "under this pontificate nothing will change. But if a future Pope should follow the same reactionary line, we shall face a fundamental crisis
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Bishop Leh of three Ge: ann was one an bishops summoned to Rome towards the end of last year over an open letter on the status of remarried divorcees in the Church. Although the Vatican has not issued a reply to the German bishop's warnings, observers felt that Pope John Paul II's Angelus message on Sunday was designed as a rebuke for the German prelate. The Pope, celebrating the annual Day for Life in Rome, re-launched the message contained in his 1988 Apostolic Letter on women, Mulieris Dignitatem.
He urged that women's social, labour and political rights he guaranteed and he condemned all forms of violence against women. He made no mention of the question of women priests. John Paul II went on to say that women should look to such "models" as Our Lady and St Bridget of Sweden who was a "mother of eight" but actively "committed" to society.
Bishop Lehmann's statements come just a week after assurances from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, that dialogue towards a greater understanding of the status of re-married divorcees "would continue".
His declaration, in an interview with a German magazine, was interpreted as a gesture of "reconciliation" in regard to Karl Lehmann and fellow German bishops Walter Kasper and Oscar Saler who had contested the Vatican's ban on Communion for re-married divorcees.
The three bishops expressed their desire for a greater sympathy by the Church in an open letter to faithful.
Following its distribution, the trio was summoned to Rome on three occasions for discussions with Cardinal Ratzinger, who then issued a declaration re-asserting Rome's position. In Britain, meanwhile, at last week's annual meeting of religious men and women of England and Wales at Swanwick, Sr Pia Buxton, President of the Conference of Religious, said that "We religious do have an extraordinary freedom in the Church".
"There is bound to be tension at times," she acknowledged, "but there is a great deal of creativity in tension, even if it is painful."