Hidden Agenda
What Do Feminists Want? Does the Bishop Know?
by Donna Steichen
Over the past two years, Touchstone and its readers have intelligently and charitably addressed the subject of women’s ordination, advancing and rebutting theories with such thoroughness that there seems little need to entertain further arguments for or against ordination, those against having, quite properly, triumphed.
Still, it seems useful to raise two practical questions, tangential to debate about the propriety of ordaining women but important to Roman Catholics trying to read the signs of the times in the light of faith. The first: Do religious feminists want women’s ordination? The second: Have Catholic leaders responded appropriately to feminist demands?
Do religious feminists want women priests?
It is common knowledge that a civil war is underway for control of the Roman Catholic Church in North America. Feminists are prominent among the rebels, and most Catholics assume they know why. Feminists, they think, are angry because they want to be priests, or at least want priesthood opened to other women, but are thwarted by a Church they see as oppressive, intransigent and misogynist. Because feminists keep saying so, even members of the hierarchy who ought to know better seem to believe this. But it isn’t true.
Catholicism, authentically lived, does not oppress women but liberates them. If, as the Catholic Magisterium maintains, Jesus Christ intended it, an exclusively male priesthood cannot be evidence of oppression because Jesus the God-Man cannot be an oppressor. Those who claim otherwise implicitly deny the most central of Christian doctrines, and so have no business clamoring for ordination. But oppression is not, in fact, what drives Catholic feminism, nor is longing for priesthood.
Admittedly, there are women who mistake some other impulse for a call from God and conclude that they must become priests. One example is Marianne Neisen, who after 18 years with the Franciscan Congregation of Our Lady of Lourdes in Rochester, Minnesota, asked her religious superiors for permission to remain a nun after her impending ordination as a Methodist minister. Her superiors denied her request, with apparent reluctance, but Sister Neisen went on to become Reverend Neisen anyway. At last report she was serving as pastor of two small churches in Montana. Her case surely is not the only one of its kind, but it seems to be rare; I could find no other to cite by name in Ungodly Rage. Women like Neisen are undeniably nontraditional, but they also may be devout and well-meaning. In any case, they are not representatives of the Catholic feminist movement, but exceptions to it, of a kind particularly alarming to feminist leaders. The truth is, the feminist movement doesn’t want priesthood, for its members or for anyone else; the movement is not striving for ordination but for the obliteration of priesthood. Anyone who examines the statements of feminist leaders over the past generation can find ample evidence that ordination is not their goal.
Consider, for example, Dr. Rosemary Radford Ruether, the best known tactician in the feminist movement, and one of the frankest. In her writings, she dismisses such essential Catholic doctrines as the Incarnation, the Virgin birth, Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist and even the immortality of the soul.1 For 20 years she has publicly expressed contempt for the theory and practice of priesthood. When WomenChurch held its first “convergence” in 1983, Ruether said in her address:
Most Roman Catholic women neither can nor wish to be ordained within priesthood as presently defined.2
In 1983, Mary Hunt became founder and co-director of Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual, better known as WATER, a group on the uttermost fringe of organized feminism. Hunt is not only a feminist theologian, but also a long-time director of the abortion lobby Catholics For a Free Choice (CFFC), a leader in the Conference for Catholic Lesbians, in the Women’s Ordination Conference, and WomenChurch Convergence. Of priestly ordination she said in 1987:
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Subscribe (Print + Online) 
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Subscribe (Online Only) 
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
32.2—March/April 2019
on Preserving Physical & Spiritual Nourishment by Nathanael Devlin
25.3—May/Jun 2012
Calls for Freedom, Democracy & Secularism End Up with None of the Above by Hunter Baker
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
Support Touchstone
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
