SOME PRACTICAL OBSERVATIONS

...If we don't wish to follow through and demand equality, then mere conversation must cease-lest our critics accuse us of getting our highs on rhetoric...

...Men have been taught to repress any signs of weakness or vulnerability, because these are "feminine" traits...

...Middle-class reformers who joined the marches and sit-ins in Selma and other cities across the South have been studied and analyzed exhaustively by a whole battery of psychiatrists and psychohistorians who, regrettably, found that all too often white, middle-class civil rights activists were responding to severe problems of their own which they attempted to work out by submerging themselves in a larger reform movement...

...Two trends need to be reversed: 1) closing schools, particularly in ghetto areas, and spreading our efforts thinly over a wide spectrum of professions, thus dissipating our collective clout, and 2) allowing fund-raisers, finance boards, and administrators-predominately male-to co-opt control of our institutions, again relegating women to a subordinate position...

...when the coalition collapsed, oratory replaced further legislation...

...The Progressive movement, when sponsored by a coalition in the Congress, instituted reform legislation...

...Political tactics have become so debased within our culture, that few reformers are willing to accept them as inspired by the Holy Spirit...

...As long as Catholic women merely talk about the priesthood, that bastion of male smugness and superiority is perfectly safe...

...One easily concludes that the Avignon Popes lent sensitive ears to the wishes of their French hosts...

...Words such as boycotts and pressure tactics, nevertheless, sound pretty brutal to people whose ears have been attuned to hearing innocent discussions of "giftedness," right to be "tested," discernment, etc...

...One of these bases is the Catholic schools, still largely staffed by religious and lay women...

...Women who seek the Catholic priesthood could profit from the experience of those who have participated in earlier reform movements...

...Demanding an equal quota of membership on church boards and all policy-making groups, both on a parish and a diocesan level, is the logical next step in exploiting our power position...

...WOMEN IN THE CHURCH SOME PRACTICAL OBSERVATIONS LOIS SPEAR Profiting from those who participated in earlier reform movements Given its depressed economic status and Bible-belt fundamentalism, not many reform movements begin in the South...

...Hopefully, it won't be necessary to close down parochial schools in order to get pastors and bishops to see the light...

...A segregated Wool-worth lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C...

...Though the term liberal, is most often used in a pejorative context today, it is from this group that most Catholic reformers of the past seventy-five years have come, and it is they who can guide this latest reform movement through the pitfalls that waylay the inexperienced...

...If that is the case, it is time to drop the rhetoric and let the action begin...

...A second question consists in the timing and priorities of the movement, assuming that the final, all-encompassing goal is full equality for women, both within and outside the Catholic Church...

...the North Carolina legislature is gearing up to relegislate the death penalty after earlier laws putting 122 on death row were overturned by the Supreme Court...

...Augustine College in Raleigh...

...The ultimate result of this movement is that public facilities in the South now have a better integration record than in the North, and it has been accomplished with a minimum of racial tension and violence...

...Sister Fran Ferder and a group of religious women psychologists, it is encouraging to note, already have begun a study of the spiritual, emotional, and psychological make-up of women desiring the priesthood...

...Pope Paul VI is no different from the rest of us who draw weekly and monthly pay checks...

...It is an education to watch a movement, long since launched in the North, start all over again in the South-like the replay of a football pass on the television set or the rerun of old FBI films currently in progress on the local Raleigh station, WRAL-TV, whose political guru is Jesse Helms...

...finance is a sensitive issue, and American Catholics continue to be generous in their contributions to Rome...

...Liberalism, saddled with responsibility for a movement having sound without substance, will be the recipient of further condemnation...

...Representing as it does the tip of the iceberg of full equality for women sister Lois spear, O.P., teaches in the History Department of St...

...Finally, one further question needs to be raised...

...Despite the reservations and questions noted above, it still remains probable that ordination of women may be the opening skirmish of a revolutionary movement overturning the injustices in a system oppressive of both men and women...

...What is needed is a power base...

...As Rosemary Ruether suggests, Catholic women, like the Presbyterians, do have power bases within the church if they recognize and seek to strengthen them before they slide out of their grasp...

...References to women need a similar evolution-from housewife and drudge, through reluctant assistant, to full partnership...

...Like the Progressive movement of the early decades of this century, it takes at least thirty years of discussion before the reforming groundswell finally reaches the Southern borders...

...A few weeks ago, for example, the Sunday edition of the News and Observer carried the syndicated column by Lee Guthrie on wife abuse which made it clear that this kind of violence is not an isolated incident...

...If, instead, a small nucleus of women are willing to move beyond discussion into the first painful struggle to force concessions from a reluctant, male leadership, the ordination movement, along with full equality for women, will get underway...

...It is a measure of the seriousness of our resolves...

...significant' changes will be implemented only after struggle...

...the middle-class organizations that achieved the nineteenth amendment did not possess an ideology that could serve a thoroughgoing radical movement...

...Crises daily appear all around us clamoring for our attention, but escalating violence probably has first priority...

...Black leaders in the South have observed that, once they began to achieve economic strength, the language of the most die-hard rednecks gave way from "nigger," to 'Negra," to black...

...exposed Operation Abolition, and joined in the condemnation of the Vietnam war and Mr...

...A lot of us are waiting for that leadership to appear-before the whole movement collapses...

...Half of these contributions represent the sacrifice of women...

...It is hard to avoid speculating whether ordination of women in the '70s, like suffrage in the '20s, will be the pacifier destroying a movement demonstrating such strong potential for change in the church affecting, not just a tiny elite of would-be priests, but the entire membership as well...

...The change in language is dependent upon the application of increasingly stronger pressure...

...It is Catholic liberals, sparse though their membership may have been, who spoke out against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, pestered McCarthy and his "fellow-travelers" (Who can ever forget John Cogley being questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee...

...we should be as strong as they...

...in the churches, the news item had a brief stay on the second front page of the News and Observer before being crowded off by the power play of Mayor Jyles Cog-gins who got a friendly county commission to rezone his potentially valuable north Raleigh land as industrial, rather than residential property...

...After sacrificing everything for the suffrage panacea, they found that what they had obtained was worthless...

...With the paroxysms the public schools are going through today-financial problems the decline in standardized tests scores, and functional illiteracy of graduates-we are coming more and more to realize the potential of the parochial schools...

...As a result of oppressive social norms, males have been denied occasions of healthy conflict needed to confirm their own worth and to continue their personal growth...

...Since the church speaks to the Spirit, it would be pleasant to believe that change could be instigated and sustained by appeal, if not to the Spirit, at least to moral persuasion...

...This power base needs to be expanded while, at the same time, consciousness of both men and women needs to be raised before women priests can ever attain a real equality with their male peers...

...Have advocates of priesthood for women studied the earlier women's movement in order to profit by mistakes made by their Sisters in the early years of this century...

...A few cursory observations about earlier reform movements make the point obvious: Slavery was abolished, not as a result of the impassioned rhetoric of a William Lloyd Garrison or a Frederick Douglass, but by a political movement implemented by the armies of the North...

...Once a position has been taken in the parish and diocese, then it will be time to face "the Italian question...

...One of Karl Marx's shrewder observations was that no one willingly surrenders power, and distressingly few are the examples that disprove his contention...

...the violence portrayed on our television sets daily graphically acts out before our eyes, in the phrase of Geoffrey Gorer, "a pornography of death...

...The earlier movement floundered and lost its revolutionary elan because its leadership decided to sacrifice all for the immediate bauble of suffrage, instead of continuing to agitate for equality in hiring and pay, legal rights and decent working conditions...

...Timing of the movement is another consideration...

...the secular, in its own way, is as integral to the Christian life as the sacred...

...It is time we begin using this information as a means of pressuring for change...

...The Apostle Paul, however, was political enough to demand his rights as a citizen by appealing to Rome...

...Elizabeth Howell Verdesi In But Still Out, Women in the Church (Westminster, 1973), points out that Presbyterian women, who bad been granted ordination in 1956, still have not secured for themselves an equal status with men in the church...

...Their achievement of equality would remove from the labor market an ever-ready pool of low-paid workers and would entail drastic reorganization of the family and of the relationships between men and women...

...To carry forward a fight for autonomy, women would need to become aware of their position and to develop self-confidence...

...Within this framework of urgent priorities, the ordination of women hardly holds a high place...

...The reforming impetus, like the earlier woman suffrage movement, will fritter itself away without accomplishing anything-except, perhaps, the hollow bauble of the "right" to ordination without the promise of equality...

...To sustain such a record, it has been necessary to be wary of some "too Catholic" bedfellows, such as the Legion of Decency pickets against films like Lady Chatterley's Lover, pressure groups demanding government aid for parochial schools, and those who seek to make single-issue politics out of opposition to abortion...

...The first question concerns motives...

...To say, "We have been called to the priesthood, and we want to be ordained, not because we want to exercise power [italics my own] but because we are motivated by love and concern for our church," (Rosalie Muschal-Reinhardt, "Women Called to Ordination, in Women in the Catholic Priesthood, Paulist Press, 1976) smacks of utopian-ism...

...That was, and is, a revolutionary cause, and it requires revolutionary thought about society as it exists and about what it must become...

...Power, properly understood, is an integral part of any radical movement, such as the ordination of women priests...

...Paul Cameron reported recently to the annual meeting of Catholic Physicians' Guilds that, based on his samplings, there is a widespread disregard for human life in our society...

...was the site of the sit-in by A and T students that launched the civil rights movement of the sixties...

...In the Women's Board of Home Missions and later, in the Religious Education Movement, they had power, but not recognizing it as such, allowed the first organization to be subsumed into the larger structure of the church and lost the second base through co-optation: They allowed, even encouraged, males to take on leadership positions in the organization...

...The reason for the failure, she says, is that women did not realize that they had a power base...

...Nixon's men...

...Advocates of priesthood for women need seriously to consider if ordination, unless preceded by conscious-raising confrontation over a period of time, may not be more disruptive than conducive to the growth and healing necessary before genuine equality can be achieved...

...Before making cause with the movement for ordination, old-time liberals need to ask some hard questions...

...When completed, the study should, if not clear up, at least clarify the motives behind the movement's membership...

...Recently the newspapers in our state carried the story of the Episcopal Church's decision, at its 65 th convention in Minneapolis, to ordain women...

...The questions should not be construed as a condemnation, either of the movement or of the motives of its members...

...Jean Christie, "After Suffrage: Women in the 1920's" (Decisions and Revisions, Praeger, 1975), observes: True emancipation [as opposed to suffrage alone] required a massive assault on male domination of society...

...Our Sisters in the public schools, it should be noted however, have had to take drastic steps such as going out on strike...

...Power in the church, however, is held by a small elite of male Caucasians of ripe age...

...It hasn't always been this way...

...Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women (Beacon, 1976) reminds us again that the male sex has borne the scars of sexual repression just as deeply as women...