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with women who were early Christian leaders. Their history, erased from Catholic memory, was her focus at the theologate. The girl-mothers she helped to give birth were unconsciously socialized into seeing their value as an extension of the boy-fathers. Catholic women had historically seen themselves as a rung below men as sacred figures of worship. Yet now, many women took classes alongside the men who were on track to become priests. Many of the young men were gay, some in harmony with their sexual identities, others not. Ratzinger in 1986 had deemed homosexuality “an intrinsic moral evil,” but he could not explain (nor bishops openly discuss) why the priesthood had become a huge closet, or address the complexities of a pronounced gay priest culture.33

“I commend unto you Phébe, our sister,” Paul writes in Romans (16:1), calling her “a servant of the church … at Cenchreae.” As Chris Schenk found on deeper reading, Phoebe was a diakonos, or minister, who had hosted Paul at Cenchreae, a seaport at Corinth.34 In When Women Were Priests, the scholar Karen Jo Torjesen writes that Phoebe “carried Paul’s letter to the Romans. She was a woman of some wealth and social status.” Paul acknowledged Phoebe as a patron (prostatis) to Rome’s Christians. Of the twenty-eight distinguished people Paul singles out in his letter to the Romans, ten were women.

Among these women leaders of the Roman congregation was a woman apostle, Junia, whom Paul hailed as “foremost among the apostles” (Rom. 16:7). She and her husband, Adronicus, traveled teaching and preaching from city to city. The turmoil and riots occasionally provoked by Christian preaching landed her and her husband in prison, where they encountered Paul. She was a heroine of the fourth-century Christian Church, and John Chrysostom’s elegant sermons invoked the image of Junia, for the Christian women of Constantinople to emulate.35

As a female priesthood emerged in the Anglican Church, John Paul in 1994 issued Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, a letter forbidding women’s ordination. Although he acknowledged a “debate among theologians and in certain Catholic circles,” the pope ignored the issues in explaining, simply, that because the Blessed Virgin Mary was not a minister, it “cannot mean that women are of lesser dignity, nor can it be construed as discrimination against them.”

In calling only men as his Apostles, Christ acted in a completely free and sovereign manner. In doing so, he exercised the same freedom with which, in all his behavior, he emphasized the dignity and the vocation of women, without conforming to the prevailing customs and to the traditions sanctioned by the legislation of the time …

Moreover, it is to the holiness of the faithful that the hierarchical structure of the Church is totally ordered.36

Pared to the essentials, John Paul said that it was Jesus’s intent that only men—through all of time to come—should serve as priests. But as scripture scholars pointed out, the New Testament never says that Jesus “ordained” His own apostles. Nor does scripture say that Jesus banned women, who were vital figures in His public life, from the ordained ministry. By evading the scriptural findings, John Paul’s stance is antihistorical. In that sense he echoes Paul VI’s 1967 encyclical on celibacy, which calls clerical chastity the “brilliant jewel” of the church, with “a maximum psychological efficiency.” Pope Paul cited no psychological studies on maximum efficiency because none existed.37 Like celibacy, the male-priests position is not doctrine, but “legislation of the time.” John Paul wanted legislative permanence: “I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”

Sixteen months after John Paul’s letter, Cardinal Groër “retired” as archbishop of Vienna, engulfed by accusations that he had made sexual advances on young men in a monastery years before. Admitting nothing, Groër provoked a huge scandal. John Paul was silent. The financial impact