Allen on Women in the Church

John Allen's latest NCR column includes this interesting reflection on the role of women in the Church.

What will we see first: a woman president or women priests?
That's an easy one. Since there's no doctrinal bar to a woman president, it's simply a question of a female candidate being able to get enough votes - and whatever eventually happens to Hillary Clinton in 2008, the evidence of this campaign would suggest we're probably not that far away. On women priests, however, there is a serious doctrinal obstacle. Without entering into the merits of that question, it seems clear that given today's strong pressure surrounding Catholic identity, women won't be ordained anytime soon.

What I suspect we will see throughout the 21st century, however, is a continuing effort to empower women in the church in all ways short of sacramental ordination. In the United States, 48.4 percent of all administrative positions in dioceses today are held by women, and at the most senior levels, 26.8 percent of executive positions are held by women. Perceptions of patriarchal bias aside, the Catholic church actually does better in this regard than many other institutions. A 2005 study of Fortune 500 companies found that women hold only 16.4 percent of corporate officer positions and just 6.4 percent of the top earner positions. Similarly, a 2007 study by the American Bar Association found that just 16 percent of the members of the top law firms' governing committees are women, and only 5 percent of managing partners are female. According to a 2004 report from the Department of Defense, women held just 12.7 of positions at the grade of major or above.

Even in the Vatican, there are signs of movement. No woman at all worked in the Roman Curia until 1952, when Pius XII created the Permanent Committee for International Congresses of the Lay Apostolate and appointed Australian lay woman Rosemary Goldie as its Executive Secretary. Things changed significantly over the following half-century. According to a 2005 report from the Catholic News Service, by the end of John Paul's pontificate women were 21 percent of Vatican personnel, even if they rarely broke through to the most senior levels.

Under John Paul II, two barriers for women in the Vatican where shattered. In 2004, he appointed Salesian Sr. Enrica Rosanna to the position of under-secretary in the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, the first time a woman had ever been named as to a superior-level position in the Vatican. Also in 2004, John Paul tapped Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon as the President of the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences, the first woman to head a pontifical academy. (Glendon is now the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See.) None of this augurs a revolution, but it is an indication of things to come.

The rise of the Charismatic impulse will also push Catholicism in this direction, since it encourages spontaneous, non-institutional participation that's as open to women as it is to men. There's an implicit egalitarianism in the Pentecostal movement that has allowed women to assume new roles in surprising ways. One of the most powerful Pentecostal pastors of the 20th century, for example, was Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of the Foursquare Church. "Sister Aimee" was, among other unusual accomplishments for her time, the first woman to own a radio station west of the Mississippi River. As Catholicism across much of the global South is progressively "Pentecostalized," we'll likely see more of this informal, charismatic leadership by women.