Thu Apr 7, 9:23 AM ET U.S. National - AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Pope John Paul II is credited for some advances by women in the Catholic Church, but his conservative social views have alienated many who have had difficulty reconciling Church doctrine with their everyday lives.

On the eve of his Vatican funeral, religious scholars have praised the role played by John Paul II in urging women to take a more active role than ever before in the Catholic community, as choir directors, catechists, heads of schools and other lay positions.

But over the quarter-century of his papacy, many US women were put off by John Paul II's pronouncements on abortion, artificial birth control and premarital sex -- issues seen as affecting women disproportionately.

This disaffection has caused something of a crisis, some Catholic scholars said.

"The growing alienation of women from the Church is extremely serious, because it is women who, as mothers and teachers, pass on the faith in the next generation," the Reverend Thomas Reese wrote recently in "America," a Catholic weekly magazine.

Many liberal and moderate Catholics also expressed disappointment that John Paul II was so outspoken in his opposition to the ordination of female priests.

America's 67 million Catholics, who have long been more liberal than the pontiff on issues like abortion, extramarital sex, divorce and birth control, also disagree with the Vatican on allowing women to be ordained, according to recent polls.

A USA Today/Gallup/CNN survey this week found that 55 percent of Catholics surveyed believe women should be allowed to become priests.

But the pope refused to be swayed by public opinion.

"I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women, and that this judgment is to be definitively held for all the Church's faithful," he wrote in an apostolic letter issued in 1994.

On several occasions, he urged women to emulate the Virgin Mary as an example of how women can express their religious devotion outside of the realm of priesthood -- feeding the criticism that John Paul II harbored somewhat dated, sentimental views about women.

Scholars said those views might have been influenced by the pontiff's own life: His mother, who was sickly, died when he was just eight years old. Others said that in opposing female priests, he was simply keeping in line with centuries of Catholic tradition.

"I think we have to remember that every pope has to see himself as being loyal to the tradition that he has received," said Monsignor John Strynkowski, rector of St John's Church in Brooklyn, New York.

Still, "what is a bit of a surprise, for a man who had good friendships with women, and who I'm sure was not anti-woman, was that he said ... 'we can't talk about this,'" said Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, co-director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, speaking on US televsion this week.

"I think the fact that you can't talk about it ... means that you have created a very serious blind spot in the Church," Steinfels said.

The Women's Ordination Conference, made up of Catholics who support the rights of women to enter the priesthood, released a statement expressing hope that the next pontiff might be more open to female clergy.

"We mourn the passing of Pope John Paul II. ... We also grieve for the actions the pope left undone for women in the Church," Joy Barnes, the group's executive director, said in a statement.

In barring women from the priesthood, John Paul II "kept women from the highest leadership positions in the Church," she said.

The pope's successor, Barnes continued, "should usher in a renewed priesthood that fully embraces the gifts and talents of women and includes the laity's participation in the governance of the Church."

But Ann Burke, former chair of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops' national review board, said the issue of female clery is not a burning one for most women.

"There's two stories on this. Some women would like to be priests, and others really don't care much about it. I am satisfied, at least at this juncture, that there is movement going forward with regard to women."

She said Catholic women have a vital role in the Church -- even without the possibility of ordination.

"We are all servants of our Church. It's not just a Church for the hierarchy or the priests. It is a Church for everyone. And I think we all have jobs and responsibilities with it," Burke said.

When are women going to stand up and walk out of churches and say, "ENOUGH! No one here is doing God's work! You're playing a fucking game, and you're trampling on me in the process! Fuck you, everyone one of us is leaving and finding God on our own!"

The War on Birth Control
By Caryl Rivers, Women's eNews. Posted April 6, 2005.

The pope's mixed legacy included a consistent assault on birth control.

I was in the middle of writing about the stunning and often stealthy attack on birth control that is going on now when the news broke that Pope John Paul II had passed away.

The ensuing typhoon of coverage pointed out so many of the pope's laudable efforts, from fighting poverty and war to his early days giving courageous support to Solidarity in Poland.

Many of his efforts--at social justice, at opposing the death penalty and at reaching out to Jews and Muslims--deserve all the wide praise they are receiving.

But his policies towards women--including the denial of female ordination--seem stalled in an earlier era. Looking at the event from the perspective of what is going on in pharmacies and state legislatures and science advisory panels in this country, I was astonished to see that the Vatican's attack on birth control was skimmed over.

This is not a minor part of his legacy; it is a major part of the mix.

The war on birth control is being waged on many fronts all over the world, including right here, under our noses in the United States.

Unease on Web Sites

Log onto web sites where feminists offer opinions and you will see great unease about the fact that this facet of a very political man's history is being downplayed.

"Is it driving anyone else crazy that the pope's death is being covered without mention of the fact that he worked fiercely to prevent condoms from being distributed by international forces, thus ensuring that hundreds of thousands of people in the global south would die of AIDS?" reads a post on the Women and Media Conference web site.

Thousands of articles have been published about the pope. (Within the 24-hour period following his death, 35,000 articles were written about him, 10 times more than the number of stories written about President Bush in the 24-hour period following his re-election, according to The Global Language Monitor, an online news- and word-watcher.)

Missing from much of the coverage of the widespread grief over the pope's passing were acknowledgements of grievous parts of the Vatican story.

"Rome" was very slow to acknowledge a worldwide scandal of priestly pedophilia. (Hats off to Thomas Cahill for his op-ed piece on this in yesterday's New York Times and to Jason Berry in the Boston Globe on the same subject.) It also disseminated misinformation claiming that condoms could not stop the AIDS virus and condoned the burning of condoms in Catholic churches in AIDS-racked Africa.

Key Player in Attack on Birth Control

The Vatican is also a key player in a persistent U.S. campaign by Christian conservatives and the Bush administration against birth control.

Bills in this country have been introduced in a number of states to allow pharmacists to refuse to fill doctors' prescriptions for the emergency-contraception pill.

More and more states are mandating that only abstinence be taught in public school sex-education classes, even while misinformation about birth control is rife in such courses.

Information about the effectiveness of condoms has been pulled from government web sites.

The White House has appointed members to federal science advisory panels who oppose birth control on moral grounds.

Legislators in a number of states are trying to define all forms of birth control other than abstinence (including the pill) as abortion.

All of this is promoted and blessed by cardinals obedient to the Vatican.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops proclaim that artificial birth control is sinful, even as they acknowledge that only about 4 percent of Roman Catholic couples of child-bearing age practice "natural" family planning. The church has also opposed bills in several states that would force health-care insurers to cover contraceptives for women.

Ominous Signs

There are ominous signs that the next assault in the war against birth control will be an attempt to remove from the market any substance--including the pill and the IUD--that might have even the possibility of affecting fertilization.

Pro-life Wisconsin, for example, calls "sinful" all types of contraception except abstinence, including "all forms of the birth control pill currently being sold," according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Bills have been crafted in the state to write that notion into law.

Kim Olsen, head of the Missouri Republicans for Choice, notes with alarm that the Republican legislature recently axed the state's highly successful and cost-effective family-planning program. She sees all birth control as being in the cross-hairs of the religious right in her party.

"Reproductive freedoms are being legislated away, piece by piece, by my own party. Like many moderate Republicans, I never thought it could happen. But it has," she says.

American women of all political parties, need to understand that--as Newsday columnist Marie Cocco puts it--we are seeing a "jeremiad against women who want to control every facet of their destiny. The campaign against sex education, against condoms--and now against a tiny pill that sits in the medicine chests of millions of American homes--is a comprehensive assault on modern life."

The battle is no longer simply over abortion.

It is over the most basic rights of women to have any control over when--or if--they will bear children.

We may wake up one day and discover that our rights have been nibbled away by laws consistent with the beliefs of Pope John Paul II and others who have opposed women's reproductive freedom--and their political allies--that have a radical agenda of which few Americans approve.

Caryl Rivers is a professor of journalism at Boston University and author of Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children and Our Jobs (Basic Books).