WOC in USA Today
WOC was featured in the following USA Today article:
Do women have a prayer?
By Mary Zeiss Stange
When it comes to being religious, do women have a prayer? The Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life certainly thinks they do. In anticipation of Women’s History Month, the Pew Forum in late February released a report that suggested women "outperform" men in several key measures of religious belief and practice. Working from data collected for the Forum’s massive 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, the Pew Forum came up with several significant gender differences.
Most striking among the findings are that women are far more apt to believe with absolute certainty in a God or universal spirit, as well as to believe that this supreme being is a personal one. More American women than men are affiliated with a religion. Two-thirds of women say religion is a very important factor in their lives, as opposed to roughly half of men — percentages that are about the same for those who say they pray on a daily basis. Forty-four percent of women attend weekly religious services, as opposed to just a third of men.
One would think that these facts would translate into women’s rise to positions of spiritual leadership — surely the mark of genuine equality — in the various denominations. Alas, as a glance at some of the largest organized religious groups in the country shows, the picture is at best mixed when it comes to women’s ability to break that stained-glass ceiling.
The hurdles
The United States is a predominantly Christian nation. The Roman Catholic Church, whose more than 66 million members make it the largest U.S. Christian church, remains adamantly opposed to the ordination of women to the priesthood — so adamantly, indeed, that in May of last year, the Vatican decreed the automatic excommunication of any person involved in the ordination of a woman to the priesthood, in addition to the woman herself.
The church’s logic is biblically rooted. As Pope John Paul II pronounced in 1994, and Pope Benedict XVI reaffirmed in 2006, women cannot become priests because the original apostles were male. In other words, had Christ intended to admit women to the apostolic succession, he’d have done so. Mary Magdalene fans, eat your hearts out. Nonetheless, Catholic women have made substantial gains at the parish level, and the Women’s Ordination Conference continues to work toward change in church policy on ordination.
To read the full article, click here.