Women who wish to be priests `not radicals'

A Survey in the US has found that 52 per cent of a sample group of 265 Catholic women who said they would like to be priests or deacons are already employed full-time in paid positions with the church. The survey was conducted by the Women's Ordination Conference (WOC).

"Women who experience a call to priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church today are not radicals on the fringe of the institution," wrote the survey's authors, Sister Maureen Fiedler, a Loretto nun and director of the Quixote Centre, and Ms Karen Schwarz, a WOC board member.

"They are mature, well-educated, regular churchgoers active in their faith communities . . . not a group to be taken lightly."

Called Benevolent Subversives, the survey report does not purport to reflect views of the general Catholic population in the US. Instead it documents how a sample group inclined to ordination feels about women's roles in today's church.

The 265 women were among 894 respondents to a questionnaire sent by WOC to 10,000 woman members of seven organisations.

Three of these groups, WOC, FutureChurch and Dignity/USA, represent liberal opinion among US Catholics. The four others do not. They are the National Association of Catholic Chaplains, the National Association of Lay Ministers, the Catholic Campus Ministry Association and the National Association of Parish Directors and Administrators.

More than 80 per cent of the women respondents who are employed by the church hold master's or doctoral degrees in theology, pastoral studies, liturgy, education or canon law. "These are women who any diocese would scramble to attract if they were male," said Sister Fiedler.

Some 97 per cent of them agreed "it is possible to be a good Catholic and publicly disagree with church teaching". They also said the church should welcome back married priests to active ministry.

Last June the US Conference of Catholic Bishops noted that women held nearly half of the diocesan, administrative and professional positions in the church.