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University Daily Kansan
Thursday, Oct. 24, 1963
Women's Day May Come In Ecumenical Sessions
VATICAN CITY — (UPI) — The day a woman walks in to take her seat at an Ecumenical Council, some 2,000 years of tradition will be shattered.
And that day does not seem too far off.
In St. Peter's Basilica today, Belgium's Leo Cardinal Sunns raised the point that half the Catholic World was unrepresented in the council.
Cardinal Suenens was the first council father to go on record with a question that has been current since the opening of the council's second session last month—why not women?
FROM THE FIRST Ecumenical Council in 325 A.D. until the opening of the second session of the present council, the gathering of church fathers was an all-male affair.
Under canon law, only churchmen with the rank of bishop or higher, could be called to take part in a council. Since women are barred from the Catholic priesthood, none could ever become eligible for a voice in a council.
It was still highly doubtful that a woman would ever be allowed to talk during a council debate but Pope Paul VI has, in effect, opened the door for them to come in and listen.
The Pontiff recently ruled that representatives of the Catholic laity should be invited to the council with the same privileges accorded to the observers from non-Catholic churches attending the meetings.
SINCE WOMEN comprise at least half of the Catholic laity, the ruling poised what some conservatives regard as the thin edge of the wedge under the all-made tradition.
But they could find some consolation in the fact that both canon law and council regulations seem to back up St. Paul's dictum, "It is unseemly for a woman to talk in church."
Only the council fathers have the right to join in debate and vote.
Catholic woman, by church law and tradition, have been barred from the priesthood, which is specifically reserved to "baptized males." They can be members of religious orders but in the structure of the Catholic church, the role of a nun is of a different order than that of a priest.
SOME OF THE outstanding saints of the Catholic Church, however, have been women and Catholics pay special devotion to the Virgin Mary. St. Joan of Arc, St. Theresa of Avila and St. Catherine of Siena, Italy's patron saint, are among the women who have made their marks in church history.
The first U.S. citizen to become a saint of the Catholic church was a woman, Italian-born Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini. The first native-born American to be batified was Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, the Protestant-born native New Yorker who founded the Sisters of Charity in the U.S.
Woman Knocks Lady Preacher
NEW YORK — (UPI)—A woman just promoted to a high post in the hierarchy of Protestantism believes women belong outside the pulpit in fulfilling their religious duties.
"I just think the woman's place is not in the pulit," said Miss Carman St. John Wolff, who is the first woman in the 44-year history of the National Council of the Protestant Episcopal Church to be named a departmental director.
THIS IS THE HOME OF THE FIVE-FOOT JAYHAWK AND THE BIG GALLON
Miss Wolff on Nov. 1, will succeed Rev. Dr. David R. Hunter as head of the council's Department of Christion Education. Dr. Hunter is the newly-named associate general secretary of the National Council of Churches.
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