December 13, 2006

His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI
00120 Via del Pellegrino
VATICAN CITY

Dear Pope Benedict XVI,

            The Women's Ordination Conference (WOC) applauds the statements within your message, “The Human Person, The Heart of Peace” for the World Day of Peace, in which you connect peace with respect for women.  We urge you to take this one step further and relate it to the way women are treated within the Church.  We invite you to work with us to increase respect for women by fully integrating women in all levels of the Church, including ordained priestly ministry.

            At a time when it is clear that celibate male priests are not able to meet the needs of Catholics worldwide, you must reconsider the Church’s position against women’s ordination and work to create new egalitarian forms of church where the ministries of all of the baptized are respected and encouraged.  Moreover, all of the reasons given against women’s ordination have been refuted theologically and shown to spring from discrimination against women.

            We believe that the fundamental reason women are banned from ordination is that women are valued less than men and are treated like second class citizens around the world.  For example, in Darfur, women are being raped as a strategy of war.  In the border city of Juarez, Mexico, hundreds of women have been raped and murdered with impunity.  In China and India, female babies are killed in hopes that the next child will be male.  In many countries around the world, women are dying from AIDS that they contracted from sexual intercourse they did not have the option to deny.  The global attitude that women are less than men enables women to be excluded, disrespected, underpaid, ignored, abused, beaten, raped and killed.  This is a matter of life and death.  Excluding women from full participation in the decision-making and sacramental life of the Roman Catholic Church is simply another example of the same attitude with equally damaging results on the spiritual and psychological lives of women.

            While the U.S.A. has made great strides toward women’s justice and equality, there continues to be a devastating amount of violence against women in this country.  Women are the vast majority of victims and survivors of domestic violence in the U.S.A.; 85-95% of all domestic violence victims and survivors are female and 5.3 million women are abused each year, according to the American Institute on Domestic Violence.  In addition, one in six women is a victim or survivor of sexual assault, in comparison to one in 33 men, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. 

            What are you doing to improve the lives of the over 500 million Catholic women?  What are you doing to address violence against women—one of the most pressing issues of our church and world?  We believe that if women were truly respected and valued equally, women’s issues would be addressed with the attention they deserve and women would be welcomed as full and equal members in all aspects of ministry in our Church, including ordained ministry. We request answers to these questions and we stand ready to dialogue with you on them. In any case, the whole church expects you to act on them. 

            One of the items the U.S. bishops addressed at their recent meeting that concerns women is the creation of a “Directory for Music and Liturgy” to establish a group of “doctrinally correct” hymns.  In the Agenda Report Documentation for the meeting, there is an admonition against the “consistent replacement of masculine pronominal references to the three Divine persons.” This would effectively remove feminine pronouns and imagery for God during Mass, which is a clear example of exclusion. The use of non-sexist language and imagery to describe God allows women to live out our spirituality in a way that reflects the fact that both women and men are created in the image of God, as stated in Genesis 1:27.  Removing inclusive language and female imagery for God makes women invisible in our spiritual home.

           Yesterday, on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, our members sent letters and emails to you to urge the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments not to give the necessary recognito for the Directory.  We urge you to pay attention to these emails and withhold the recognito.

            As you may know, WOC represents the majority of U.S. Catholics who support women’s ordination to a renewed priesthood.  A 2006 National Catholic Reporter survey of U.S. Catholics found that 62% of respondents support ordaining women as priests, and 81% support ordaining women as deacons.  An Associated Press/Ipsos poll conducted in April 2005 found that 64% of U.S. Catholics support women’s ordination.

            We request that you address the issue of women’s full equality and justice in a way that reflects your concern with creating a just church as well as a just society.  You can choose to lead the way in presenting a fair and equitable model of how women should be treated in our world by choosing to open all doors to the presence of women in the Roman Catholic Church.  The Church can affect society by acting justly within its own ranks.  We will continue to attempt to dialogue with you about the issues that women face on a daily basis.  We await and will appreciate your reply in the spirit of Advent.

                                                Your Sister in Christ,

                                                Aisha S. Taylor, Executive Director