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HEAVEN MAY OFFER THE SWEETEST REWARDS, BUT AT TIMES they are difficult for mere mortals to imagine. Visiting a parish in Rome this month, POPE JOHN PAUL II explained a key difference between heaven and earth: on the far side of the pearly gates, there is no sex. Residents of paradise need no mates, said the Pontiff, because "they are like the angels...
Just as interested are the American Catholic bishops gathering in Washington. For nine years they have tried to produce a coherent document on women to straddle the demands of conservatives in Rome and of feminists in the U.S. At issue is everything from whether women can serve as priests or deacons to whether sexism is "sin." Among the characterizations of the bishops' efforts: "almost laughable" (from the angry left), "an embarrassment" (from the angry right). The document has been diluted so thoroughly that reformers hope that the hierarchy will throw it out and start all over again...
...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...
...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...
...Vatican is officially silent on the latest disputes, which it considers a peculiarly Western phenomenon. But a prelate explains that Rome does not want to "blanket everything in the course of everyday life with the charge of sexism." As another Vatican official sees it, sin is concrete, premeditated action, not an ideology: "Americans, under the influence of the feminist community, wanted a broader definition, that merely thinking of women as different from men is sinful." Catholicism, the prelate maintains, "is defining and protecting the value of the feminine -- not the feminist -- in an age when it is under assault...