Last week a new Christian movement called Focolare held a major conference in Rome, attended by more than 1,300 participants from 44 countries. It was addressed by three cardinals and by its founder, an Italian lay woman.
Organisations like Focolare are attractive to bishops, priests and lay people because they are renewing the church, helping Catholics to take seriously evangelisation of the world.
Many people seem to assume that as a young woman studying theology, I must be furious that the Catholic Church still ordains only men. I believe such views reflect an old-fashioned clericalism which sees priest hood as the only way to serve the church, linked to an outmoded feminist view of equality as meaning that women do everything that men do, regardless of the different gifts and qualities of the genders.
On a social and political level, this is limiting, because it pretends that there are no fundamental differences between women and men. Nor does it meet the needs of Catholic women today because it ignores the particular gifts of women and the actual growth within the Catholic Church which they can bring about.
The Catholic Church teaches clearly that it believes in the equal dignity of men and women. The only reason it gives for not ordaining women is that it has not been mandated by Christ to do so. The church cannot invent the authority to make up new teachings. It was Christ who decided to choose only men for the priesthood, and down through the centuries the church has consistently followed his practice. It is not that some Pope has made his own decision on the matter which might change in the future.
Of course, Christ also chose only Jews. The inclusion of non-Jews caused the first major controversy in the church. The Bible records the debate, including one stand-up row between St Peter and St Paul on the issue. Non-Jews were included because the Apostles were quite clear on the difference between the essence of Christ's message on the one hand and their own cultural baggage on the other.
Could a male priesthood be just another piece of cultural baggage, as those who call for women's ordination claim? Maybe Jesus did set it up, they say, but only because women would not have been acceptable as priestesses at that time, today he would do it differently.
This argument ignores the firm historical evidence. Jesus had radical, culturally taboo relationships with women, including being financially supported by them, so why would he suddenly back down when choosing the apostles?
St Paul often worked with women as evangelists, yet as the language and structures around ordination became standardised, there was never a suggestion that these able and active women were ordained priests.
In the first century, many religions had priestesses and not male priests, so if the apostles had not known it to be an important teaching, they could have easily ditched it as the church expanded.
What is needed in our time is to make sense of why Jesus instituted a male-only priesthood, particularly given the new focus on women and rights. Many Catholics, including leading theologians, are grappling with this, and what is emerging is a deeply enriched understanding of the importance of the body as the way in which the person is expressed or enfleshed.
Male and female can then be understood as two distinct but complementary ways of being human. Sexual differentiation is the carrier of deep meaning and truth about what it is to be human, including the value of difference, the call to give ourselves as gift to each other and the centrality of relationship in human values, as opposed to a narrow individualism.
All the sacraments draw from what is already given in creation. The sacrament of Holy Orders cannot ignore the meanings of sexual differentiation, but instead draws on them to deepen and express our understanding of the church as a family.
Ordained priesthood is not a right, but an office given to those whom the church authorities discern are called by God. Priests are not chosen because of any idea that they are better than the rest of us. In the past we made the mistake of putting priests on pedestals. True power in the church comes from holiness, not from office. That holiness is not the sole preserve of priests, but something we must all work at.
Earlier in this century, women were questioning their exclusion from certain careers and public roles. In the process they asserted, quite rightly, that women and men could equally well perform various tasks. But today, young women are looking for female role models, not androgynous stereotypes. Though the church and society both say Yes to women's equality, the Catholic Church is playing a prophetic role by insisting on the richness of differing and complementary roles.
Those who campaign for the ordination of women have, I believe, done much to slow the development and understanding of the variety of ministries in the church by focusing too narrowly on ordination, when our real and urgent need is to develop lay ministry.
Rosemary Swords is pursuing postgraduate studies in theology at Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy