The church was facing one of its most serious challenges since slavery over the role of women, the conference was told. "We argued then too that slavery was the will of God for some people," said Sister Joan Chittister.
Sister Chittister, a US Benedictine nun and author of 20 books, said women were "most of the poor, most of the refugees, most of the uneducated, most of the beaten, most of the rejected in the world. Even in the church, educated, dedicated, committed women are ignored even in the pronouns of the Mass.
"How is it that the church can call other institutions to deal with women as full human beings made in the image of God when their humanity is precisely what the church itself holds against them in the name of God?" she asked.
To preach a theology of equality "and at the same time maintain a theology of inequality, a spirituality of domination that bars half of the human race on the basis of gender from full participation and [which] in the name of God says that women have no place in the dominion of the church and the development of doctrine, is to live a lie," she said.
In a global age, what was once a hierarchy of human kind "is coming to be seen for what it is: the oppression of human kind," she said.
"To most of the world, the colonisation of women is as unacceptable now as the colonial oppression of Africa, the crusades against the Turks, the enslavement of blacks and the decimation of indigenous peoples in the name of God," she added.
Only in "the most backward, most legalistic, most primitive of cultures are women made invisible, made useless, made less than fully human and, therefore, less than fully spiritual," she said.
"The church that preaches the equality of women but does nothing to demonstrate it in its own structures, which proclaims a theology of equality but insists on an ecclesiology of superiority, is out of synch with its own best self and dangerously close to repeating the theological errors that underlay centuries of church-sanctioned slavery," she said.
Dr John Wijngaards, who resigned the Catholic priesthood over the Vatican's 1998 declaration, Ad Tuendam Fidem, which said those who continued to disagree with the church on the issue of women priests were effectively excommunicating themselves, told the conference that "many Catholics would be appalled if they knew how much pressure Rome was putting on bishops, religious superiors, heads of colleges, theologians, editors, publishers and writers" on the issue.
"Rome often succeeds because it simultaneously imposes a duty of `silence'.
"No one is supposed to know" and this secrecy played into the hands of those who abused their power.
"The answer lies in openness and in revealing publicly what is happening," he said.
