Dead letter.

Draft IV of the U.S. bishops' pastoral letter on women's concerns, recently released, has become a pastoral letter on the concerns of the bishops over what the Vatican will tolerate their saying on the question of women. It is hard to know what examples from Draft IV would fully convey the muddle that has come of the bishops' decade-long letter-writing process. Perhaps attention to what has been removed offers the best clue. Draft I, as readers may recall, had selected quotes from women who had testified before the bishops' committee. Some of those testimonies were quite remarkable:

As I reflect upon my experience as a Catholic woman what stands out the most

for me is that I choose to participate in an institution that is discriminating

against me as a woman. As a black woman, I would never even consider participating

in any group that was blatantly racist--yet, I maintain membership

in a church that is blatantly sexist. That's a mystery to me in and of itself! And,

it strengthens my commitment to do anything I can to help my beloved church

move toward a position of justice in regard to the status of women [a woman

from the Diocese of Savannah].

That woman's voice, so forceful and so faithful, is gone in Draft IV--along with all the other voices. In Draft I sexism was described as a moral and social evil whose pervasiveness, it was acknowledged, reached even into the church:

Some men, clerics included, assume they have the right to dominate women.

In direct conflict with the essential elements of our heritage, sexism breeds an

oppressive mentality that divides and destroys. Such attitudes when found in

the church only serve to reenforce society's depersonalization of women. For

example, some women reported that priest counselors told them to "offer up

to God" the abuse of their husbands.

In Draft IV, sexism appears as a remote and distant problem: "women name the evil of sexism"; and its definition ("unjust discrimination based on sex") is drawn from Webster's dictionary. The bishops no longer seem to know as much about sexism as they did in Draft I. Nor is it any longer to be found, at least in the text, among the clergy. It just seems to be something women want to "name."

Draft I virtually endorsed opening the diaconate to women and pointed to the serious doubts many scholars had about the arguments raised against ordination of women to the priesthood. Draft IV returns to those very arguments, which were made in Inter insigniores (the Vatican Declaration on the Admission of the Women to the Ministerial Priesthood), and repeats them as if the doubts had vanished.

Elsewhere in this issue (see page 11), Bishop P. Francis Murphy provides other comparisons and contrasts between and among all four drafts of this pastoral letter. Bishop Murphy utters his own cry of dismay at what has come of the bishops' efforts to respond to the concerns of women, and there seems little point in our upping the volume on his.

The whole process is a sad and sorry commentary on the state of Vatican attitudes about women and on the divisions among the bishops themselves--divisions as much about what constitutes loyalty to Rome as about women, sexism, and discrimination. From the beginning women never expected much from this pastoral process. And in this they will not be disappointed.

True, there are parts of the fourth, as of all the drafts, that are unexceptionable--at least when it comes to enumerating the social and civil forms of discrimination against women and acknowledging the contempt and violence visited upon women by men who refuse to see women as their equals. (There is in the fourth draft--as in Vatican documents on homosexuality--a motif of blaming the victim that is unconscionable.) No, when it comes to our society's problems with sexism the bishops can see them as clearly as any group of men. Draft I showed that they could even see the beam in their own eye.

What has happened in Draft IV is clear enough; it reverses the direction of concerns. Thus, Vatican opposition to the ordination of women, rather than the concerns of women expressed in hearings and testimony, has become the governing principle and major premise of the pastoral letter. The less-than-convincing arguments and assumptions used to bolster opposition to women's ordination have been read back into the pastoral process and it is that argument which now shapes the whole perspective through which the bishops analyze the civic and social questions.

The underlying formula "different, yet equal," used to define the differentiating masculine and feminine character of human nature, and "complementarity," said to characterize the relationship between men and women, may go a long way with those opposed to the ordination of women. But it sounds a familiar and discredited theme in American ears. As the bishops themselves must see, such formulas and definitions finally can offer no credible opposition to the discriminatory practices and attitudes the bishops plainly see in our society, but from which they have been forced to avert their eyes when it appears in our church. And at least in this regard those who care about women's concerns should be disappointed. As Bishop Murphy says, "the last state is worse than the first."

Lest the messengers be killed, kill the message. Stop the pastoral. That is the only decent thing to do or, rather, the only decent course that is politically (ecclesiastically) possible. We urge the bishops to vote down the letter when they meet in November and to consider other proposals, some offered in these pages by Bishop Murphy.

And there are others. In particular, if the opposition to women's ordination is not to be counted simply as discrimination, then the bishops need to go to work in their own diocesan offices, pastoral councils, and canonical processes to separate the connection between ordination and church governance. Women--as well as unordained men--should be given voice and authority in helping to run the Catholic church. Nothing less will do.