“Can you imagine,” Tom Roberts, editor of NCR, asked Professor Adriana Valerio of Naples, “a forum in which this discussion (about women’s issues)  could take place?”

The response, I thought, stung a bit in its directness. “Six hundred women theologians of Europe work constantly to bring the debate of these questions to the world,” she said.

The implications of the simple answer were themselves damning. Women are publishing, researching, holding public and professional discussions, talking about these things every way they know how, but institutions, especially the church,  refuse to address the issue. As a result, every day more and more women become conscious of the inadequacy, the disinterest, of the very groups that claim to protect their rights, to guard their dignity, to honor their very beings

“This is not a woman’s problem,” she went on. “This is about the Church and its unity. We don’t speak about women; we are talking about the church.” When you look at the issue from that point of view, it is clear that you are using the topic that regards half the population of the globe as a measure, not of the value of women, but as a gauge of the basic morality of the institutions that deal with them, including the church.

A reporter from the Catholic News Service asked: “In regard to the revision of textbooks (which you are calling for) what women would you put in them and is this being done?” I thought instantly of the present hagiography of women saints written almost entirely from the point of view of the virtues defined for them by men their chastity, their obedience, their self-sacrifice, their devotion and waited myself to hear who or what she would include. I wasn’t surprised to hear her take another direction entirely. “Women have spoken and written texts that are invisible today,” she said. “They are lost to the historical memory of the church. The first thing a new pope would have to do is to give people freedom of speech. Women theologians have none in the church. If she speaks in public, it’s because she speaks at a secular university. If she taught in a Catholic university and said these things, she would be punished. This includes males who themselves support women's ideas, as well.”

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A reporter from Reuter’s News Agency pushed the question to its obvious end: Did Pope John Paul II hear these demands and questions directly? Did the things you want happen?

Valerio’s answer to this one went to the core of the problem. “This question relates to the bishops as well as the pope,” she said. “Of course the pope could meet with us. We would be more than happy to do so but the bishops have a responsibility (to take this issue to the center of the church) and see that the studies are begun.”

In three questions that would have been seen as innocuous if applied to almost any other social issue, the whole situation was laid bare for all to see:

First, women are trying to be heard and are being ignored.

Second, women’s ideas are being smothered in Catholic circles by being pushed to the outside edges of the institution.