The Vatican issued a document (English – Deutsch) which explicitly compares the sexual abuse of children with the ordination of women as priests as equally grave "delicts":
1° With due regard for can. 1378 of the Code of Canon Law, both the one who
attempts to confer sacred ordination on a woman, and she who attempts to receive
sacred ordination, incurs a latae sententiae excommunication reserved to
the Apostolic See.1° Unbeschadet der Vorschrift von can. 1378 des Kodex des kanonischen
Rechts zieht sich jeder, der einer Frau die heilige Weihe zu spenden,
wie auch die Frau, welche die heilige Weihe zu empfangen versucht, die
dem Apostolischen Stuhl vorbehaltene Exkommunikation als Tatstrafe zu.
There was, of course, anger at the suggestion that ordaining women as priests was somehow just as egregious a crime as raping a child:
But what astonished many Catholics was the inclusion of the attempt to
ordain women in a list of the “more grave delicts,” or offenses, which
included pedophilia, as well as heresy, apostasy and schism. The issue,
some critics said, was less the ordination of women, which is not
discussed seriously inside the church hierarchy, but the Vatican’s
suggestion that pedophilia is a comparable crime in a document billed a
response to the sexual abuse crisis.
But this is just a natural extension of the doctrine of priestly
celibacy which is at the core of the epidemic of sexual child abuse in
the church and the traditional hostility towards women. This has been
analyzed extensively by Eugen Drewermann in his seminal work Kleriker: Psychogramm eines Ideals.as well as by the theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann in her 1990 book Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven . Ranke-Heinemann writes eloquently on the celibatarian oppression of women in the Roman Catholic Chuch:
To
anyone taking an overall view of the repression and suppression of women, their
denigration and disparagement, the whole of ecclesiastical history seems one
long series of narrow-minded, arbitrary male impositions upon the opposite sex.
This tyranny still endures. The subjection of woman to man has remained a
theologian's postulate throughout, and the male-dominated Church of today
continues to regard that subjection as a God-given dogma. It has never grasped
that the reality of the Church is founded on the common humanity and fellowship
of man and woman. The apartheid practised against women by the rules of the
Church is as much of an affront to justice as political apartheid. Far from
improving matters, their invocation of divine authority merely imparts a
blasphemous flavour to an unjust mode of conduct. Above all, though, a purely
masculine Church has long ceased to be a church in the full sense, however it
may style itself, because masculine arrogance has prompted it to dispense with
one vital aspect of the catholicity – the universality – of which it should be
a living example. (…)The
masculine Church has reduced Christianity to a shrunken relic of its original
self, a desiccated celibatarians' credo.
There is an Austrian site supporting the ordination of women: Initiative
"Weiheämter für Frauen in der
römisch-katholischen Kirche"
And many resources can be found on Women can be Priests.
