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By GARY STERN
THE JOURNAL NEWS

(Original publication: March 8, 2007)

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Former advocate for female priests now explains Vatican's stance

YONKERS - Polls generally show that 50 percent to 60 percent of Roman Catholics in the United States believe that women should be eligible for the priesthood.

Sister Sara Butler understands this impulse - because she once felt the same way. In 1978, she headed a task force of the Catholic Theological Society of America that came out in support of female priests.

But as she continued her work as an increasingly prominent theologian, her thinking began to change. Now, in a new book - "The Catholic Priesthood and Women: A Guide to the Teaching of the Church" - she attempts to explain the underpinnings of the all-male priesthood to doubters and skeptics who think the way she used to.

"The tradition is traced to the will of Christ, not to decisions made by the church," Butler said last night at St. Joseph's Seminary, where she has taught for four years.

The church's teachings must be better explained, she said, because many Catholics see the all-male priesthood as a symbol of patriarchal power and sexism, and many more who stay silent are probably befuddled.

"Their confidence in the church's teaching authority has been badly eroded," she said.

Several hundred priests, nuns, seminarians and lay visitors greeted Butler with sustained applause, a measure of their respect for her and their approval of the church's position.

Critics of the all-male priesthood were in short supply.

Butler made Catholic history two years ago when she became one of the first two women appointed to the Vatican's International Theological Commission, an influential group that advises the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

"This appointment places Sister Sara among the highest-ranking women in our church today," Monsignor Peter Finn, rector of the seminary, said when introducing her.

Butler made the case last night that the all-male priesthood is grounded in Jesus' choice of 12 male apostles and the Catholic Church's sustained understanding of what this meant for the priesthood.

"The answer is discovered in a tradition of practice that is traced back to the Lord's choice of the 12," she said.

To change the church's traditional understanding of the priesthood, she said, would be to change the priesthood itself and disconnect the church from the apostles, ending what Catholics believe to be their church's God-given power to teach.

In recent decades, Butler said, "Christian feminists" have seen many Protestant denominations and Anglicans bring women into ministry. As a result, she said, many have lost sight of the Catholic Church's different understanding of the priesthood.

She also discussed theological arguments that she explores in her book, that the priest is a sacramental sign of Jesus - "who is and remains a man" - and that Scripture presents Jesus as a "bridegroom" wedded to the church, a role exclusive to men.

Butler also dismisses the popular notion that women have no leadership roles in the church, saying they can serve as volunteers or professionals at the parish and diocesan levels, as well as at Catholic institutions.

The book is largely a defense of Pope John Paul II's 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, in which the pontiff famously declared that "the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful."

The following year, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said the pope's letter required "definitive assent."

In 1997, the Catholic Theological Society of America - to which Butler still belongs - dissented, saying there were serious doubts "that the Church's lack of authority to ordain women to the priesthood is a truth that has been infallibly taught and requires the definitive assent of the faithful."

Polls continue to show that Catholics are divided. But Cardinal Francis George of Chicago hopes that Butler's book will alter the conversation. "If this book is well used," he writes in a blurb, "it will change the presently sterile discussion of who can be ordained to the Catholic priesthood."

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