Fury of A Feminist Scorned

By Richard N. Ostling

She was the very model of modern Roman Catholic femininity: wife, mother and the first woman in Germany appointed to teach theology under church auspices. For good measure, Uta Ranke-Heinemann was a convert from Protestantism, the daughter of a West German President and the wife of a first cousin of Poland's Catholic Primate. Nonetheless, in 1987 the German hierarchy forced the University of Essen to oust Ranke-Heinemann from her Catholic professorship and give her another teaching post that would not imply any church endorsement. Her sin: in defiance of Christian teaching, Ranke-Heinemann had concluded that Mary was not a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus.

From her exile, the scorned theologian then produced a sweeping indictment of clerical attitudes toward sex that soared to the top of the 1989 nonfiction best-seller list in Germany. Last week Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven (Doubleday; $21.95) hit U.S. bookstores amid a squall of controversy. In a nutshell, the author contends that Catholicism "strives to impose its own moral dictatorship without regard to the welfare of married people, a dictatorship based on pleasure-hating, celibate contempt for marriage and a maniacal cult of virginity."

The Eunuchs title comes from Jesus' teaching in Matthew 19: 12 about men becoming eunuchs (by which he meant forswearing sex) "for the sake of the kingdom of heaven." Catholicism uses these words as a warrant for requiring priestly celibacy. In Ranke-Heinemann's reading, the saying is linked to the preceding verses in which Jesus directs his disciples not to remarry after divorce. The book asserts that twisted hostility toward sex underlies the church's stand against not only married priests and remarriage for the divorced but also birth control, premarital sex and women clergy.

In blaming celibacy for everything that she dislikes in the church, Ranke- Heinemann follows a path already well trod by Protestants, historians and other feminists. However, she displays a polemical and sarcastic flair ("theology increasingly became the business of bachelors") and merrily marshals rather selective evidence of priestly misogyny through the ages. One 12th century divine urged men to remember that a pretty woman starts as "a foul-smelling drop of semen" and is destined to be "food for worms." Ranke- Heinemann's acerbic wit is less impressive when she turns to the modern era. She cannot, for instance, bring herself to acknowledge Pope John Paul II's praise of sexual pleasure within marriage.

Still, Ranke-Heinemann is not a litmus-test feminist. Although some feminist cults yearn for paganism to supplant Judaism and Christianity, Ranke-Heinemann contends that Catholicism went wrong when it spurned the healthy outlook of the Jewish Bible and absorbed hostility toward sex from certain pagan groups. On abortion, she notes that ancient Judaism and Christianity joined in opposing the pro-choice stance of paganism. Her fury is aimed only at the official Catholic teaching that it is better to let a pregnant woman die than to perform an abortion.

Though the Vatican has kept mum about Eunuchs, New York's John Cardinal O'Connor wrote a column last month branding the book's publisher as a purveyor of "hatred and scandal and malice and libel and calumny" -- strong words for someone who admits that he never read beyond the dust jacket. Stung, Thomas Cahill, who produces a major line of Catholic books as Doubleday's head of religious publishing, counters, "I'm as Catholic as he is." The unrepentant Ranke-Heinemann says the Cardinal must simply be the victim of "hallucinations."

With reporting by Michael P. Harris/New York and Wanda Menke-Gluckert/Bonn