Religion: Women: Second-Class Citizens?

"The Pope doesn't understand American women," says Donna Quinn. "This is our church, and we are not going to let a few men who work at the Vatican make it un-Christian."

"There was a time when the church sanctioned slavery and cheerfully burned heretics," says Maryann Cunningham, "and the patriarchal church still does not see that there is anything to be sorry for in its treatment of women."

"The bishops are all hunkering down in the grass like a bunch of guinea hens," says Margaret Traxler. "Wait a minute, I don't want to insult the hens. They (the bishops) don't stir a feather because they fear for their own tails."

These passionate outpourings of indignation come from dedicated women religious of the Roman Catholic Church, to which they have pledged lives of poverty, chastity and obedience. They are among the 24 sisters who signed a statement that ran as a full-page ad in the New York Times last October, in the midst of the election-campaign dispute over abortion between Democratic Vice-Presidential Candidate Geraldine Ferraro and New York's Archbishop John O'Connor. Declared the ad: "A diversity of opinions regarding abortion exists among committed Catholics."

The Vatican soon struck back. The Sacred Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes charged that the religious signers were "seriously lacking in 'religious submission' " and must publicly recant their view or be expelled from their orders.* Of the four priests and brothers among the 97 signers, three have recanted. But so far not one of the sisters has backed down. On the contrary, at a strategy meeting in arctic Chicago last week, they considered an array of countermeasures: another ad soliciting support for free speech, a series of nationwide prayer services, counterhearings to coincide with the bishops' planned hearings in Washington in March on the role of women. "This is a pivotal moment in the history of the church," says Maureen Reiff, one of the lay signers of the ad. "We all feel that the attack on us appears to be a rescinding of Vatican II."

*The first actual disciplining took place in Los Angeles, where Catholic welfare officials were instructed to cease referring anyone to a shelter for the homeless run by Signer Judith Vaughan.

To many leaders in the church hierarchy, the sisters' activity is misguided and muddleheaded. Any support of abortion, which the Second Vatican Council branded an "unspeakable crime," is "not a debatable view or opinion," according to a pastoral letter by Philadelphia's John Cardinal Krol. "When it comes to speaking about the doctrine of the church, we are not free to make up our own minds," says Archbishop John May of St. Louis. "For a sister or priest to deny the teaching of the church is a scandal . . . a flagrant, flashy and deliberate affront."

The sisters' public fight for a more liberal policy on abortion is only one of several such controversies between the church's hierarchy and Catholic women, both lay and religious. No less emotional is the issue of birth control; no less deadlocked is the question of whether women may be ordained priests. Underlying these disputes is a disagreement over the basic role of women in the church and in the world at large.