Virgin / Whore

Illustrations by Patrick Martinez

Heard the one about the liberated Catholic girl? Still pregnant, still barefoot, but she gets to wear snowshoes on Sunday. In the USA, where many consider Hillary Clinton and Condi Rice credible presidential candidates, it may look like the battle for women’s rights has been won. Well, the mission ain’t accomplished. Women didn’t even get the vote here until 1920, they still get paid less, and their right to govern their own bodies stands under growing threat. Over most of the planet, women remain virtual slaves. And the Catholic Church, though it can look like Germaine Greer Estates compared to clitoris-hacking Islamic backwaters, has been a steady manufacturer of the shackles.

Pity the pope? It’s tempting — you never saw a garbage man with arms as trash-encumbered as Benedict XVI’s. Catholic Church membership: down heavily in Western Europe and the Americas. Clergy: dwindling to less than a skeleton crew. Mood: sour. Pope John XXIII’s Vatican II Ecumenical Council of the 1960s, hyped at the time as a window on revitalization, looks like a fake-out now that successive pontiffs have retreated behind ancient bulwarks of dogma and mysticism. Most of the faithful worldwide, grappling against real-world pitchforks of overpopulation, tribalism, political chaos and economic collapse, are giving the big finger to Rome’s medieval pronouncements on birth control. And you might’ve heard a word or two about priests and boys — kind of a pain in the ass, not to mention the wallet. The Holy Father’s even under legal assault for molester shielding. Pity the pope.

More on women and the Catholic Church Immigrant Women Speak About Leaving the Church My Life With the Radical Nuns by Kate Sullivan

Or, what the hell, piss on the pope. Especially if you’re a woman. The Catholic Church, the world’s largest non-governmental property owner, is also the world’s most entrenched patriarchy. Among the articles of faith set down in its 800-page catechism lie the much-contested tenets that a woman may not be ordained as a priest, and that couples may not practice any form of mechanical or chemical contraception. Not only do women get left holding the baby, but it’s the church’s official position that use of condoms is forbidden even when a husband is HIV-positive. And the person most visibly responsible for holding the line during the last 24 years, as Pope John Paul II’s chief monitor of dogma and as the chairman of the aforementioned catechism’s compiling committee, is Joseph Ratzinger, a Bavarian priest we now call Benedict.

Gender issues are hardly the only gripe that’s caused millions worldwide to flee screaming from Roman Catholicism; lots of people just aren’t locating much God of Love in it. But women, who’ve always (always) been the primary keepers of the religious flame, have led the stampede. In Los Angeles, many come from immigrant communities; you’ll hear from some of them in the accompanying interviews (“Women Talk About Why They Left”). And in another sidebar, Weekly music editor Kate Sullivan remembers her time in a Catholic girls’ school during an era of feminist-inspired upheaval.

Why is the Catholic Church nailed to the image of women as separate and unequal? When Ratzinger took the steering wheel, I started thinking about that. And I came to believe the church is a prisoner of its own history, of its own traditions, and even of the unacknowledged myths from which it sprang.

It’s not like there hasn’t been progress. When I was a pimply altar boy in the early ’60s, I scraped my fingers raw in preparation for Palm Sunday, cutting up the palm fronds that would be displayed and distributed to commemorate Christ’s triumphal donkey ride into Jerusalem. I helped Father Willenborg haul the stiff, dry foliage over to the ugly modern church, where an old woman was reverently depositing flower arrangements by the altar rail. Why, I asked the pastor, didn’t she just put the posies up by the tabernacle, where they belonged? Well, he said, women weren’t allowed on the altar. (That’s changed; there have even been female Mass servers since 1994.) He never quite got around to explaining.

I remember kneeling for daily Mass in seventh grade at St. Leo’s School. I would jockey into the row behind lovely Sue Bortoluzzi and meditate on the downy back of her neck below her bobbed hair, which was surmounted by a mysterious white doily. The doily was a relic of the days when women, as brides of Christ, had to wear veils in church. Boys and men, as always, could bare their Brylcreemed locks to God. Today, American women can go either way.

Covering heads is an outward sign for placing women at a comfortable distance — which makes sense if you want to reinforce a male hierarchy whose priests have taken a vow of chastity. Funny: When it comes to sexual and marital conduct, the celibate clergy are the ones stuck with the job of expounding the church’s rules. And the head cleric, Joseph Ratzinger, is a special case — chosen, perversely it seems, for his lack of such qualifications.