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	Women Watching Papal Conclave ...from the Sidelines By William Bunch Philadelphia Daily News [Philadelphia PA] April 18, 2005 WHEN PHILADELPHIA lawyer Patricia Dugan was a child, her parents took her to the 1964 World's Fair in New York City, where she saw Michelangelo's Pieta in the Vatican Pavilion. While Dugan was impressed by the famous Renaissance work of art as well as her first-time experience of air conditioning, she was most struck by the uniformed Swiss Guards, and the other rituals and customs that dated back centuries. "I was just hooked on the 'smells and bells' - all the rituals," recalled Dugan. She still is. And nothing fascinates Dugan more than a papal conclave - the meeting of Catholic cardinals to select a pope that will meet today inside the Vatican for the first time in more than 26 years. She's so interested in papal politics that she's designed a Web site called Electapope.com, where thousands of people have visited to cast on-line votes for who they think will be elected. Even though Dugan is a highly trained expert in the church's Canon Law, Dugan knows that her Web site is the closest that she - or someone like her - will ever come to choosing a pope. In a church in which only men can become priests and thus cardinals, the conclave is arguably the most visible election in the world with no role for women. "It's so disheartening," said Dugan, as she spoke of watching Pope John Paul II's funeral on TV earlier this month, with no women playing a role in the procession other than the five nuns who cleaned the pope's clothes and performed other chores. She said "I wonder what young [Catholic] girls think of that." Angela Bonavoglia, the author of the new "Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church," said that for progressive American Catholic women, as she is, the way the papal conclave is conducted is "extremely upsetting." "I think a medieval spectacle to see all these men - not a woman in sight, not a family in sight," said Bonavoglia, a longtime writer on church issues who lives in the New York suburbs. "All these men in a secret conclave deciding who will lead the church - it's extremely upsetting." Experts believe that more than half the world's 1 billion-plus Catholics are women. To the church's activist women here in the United States - both nuns and lay people - the notion that the papal conclave is all-male is a fact of life. But it symbolizes their anxiety over how Pope John Paul II's successor will deal with the issue of expanding women's role in the Catholic life and hierarchy. John Paul II strongly believed that women should not be ordained as priests. Since all but three of the 115 cardinals who begin meeting tomorrow were appointed by the last pontiff, and most reflected his conservative views on social and doctrinal issues, few progressive women expect that to change soon. What they do hope for, and expect, is a growing recognition and encouragement of the increasing role that women already play in the church, especially here in America where during John Paul II's reign more lay people than clergy were involved in running parishes, and many of those, including Eucharistic ministers who dispense Holy Communion, are women. These advocates hope the next papacy might help realize an even greater role for women in positions they are already beginning to gain footholds, such as diocesan chancellors, canon lawyers and theologians. "Pope John Paul II attempted to model a way of relating to women he hoped would penetrate deep down into the capillaries of the church," American-born Mary Ann Glendon, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and considered the most prominent woman in the Vatican, told reporters there last week. "The pope has women friends," said Glendon, a former Harvard law professor. "You have to search through history to find a pope who was as comfortable with women. And he brought women into very high levels of church administration." While many in the Third World, where the church is growing the fastest, seem to accept more traditional roles for female Catholics, most women activists in North America and in Europe are hoping to see an even faster pace of change under the new pontiff. Sister Mary Scullion, the Philadelphia activist for the homeless who runs the Project H.O.M.E. organization in North Philadelphia, said that the church's historical bias against women has continued through the present, "and I do think that's problematic." But Scullion said that she also believes that "God's grace and power is often revealed to us outside of the temple," and that women can still achieve great things working within the present Catholic system. She also noted that in the long run it may prove more important if the new pope works toward social and economic justice, and peace, because "if he accomplishes progress in these areas, then women will have to benefit." But other women, such as Philadelphia attorney Dugan, would like to see more specific changes in traditions and procedures that would strengthen the role of women. Dugan is one of a just a handful of women in history who has practiced canon law. She spent most of the 1980s studying in the Vatican at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome – the same university from which Pope John Paul II gained his degree. Three years ago, she became the first lay person to chair the canonists' annual convention. "I'm a canon lawyer, but I can never be a judge, because only priests can become a judge," Dugan said. And in some cases she has handled, such as defending a priest whom she says was falsely accused of sexual abuse, she has had to wait for a special dispensation to act as canon lawyer. She said: "You're a lawyer and you can't be a judge because you're a girl? That's wrong." Author Bonavoglia, while noting that "the church has closed women out of the highest level of public life," said that the greater issue may be the decisions that affect the private lives of Catholic women, on matters such as birth control or divorce. "The most important virtue [of the new pope] is that he be willing to listen," Bonavoglia said. "During the last 25 years, during Pope John Paul's papacy, we have had a sense of the closing of doors." The bad news for progressive Catholic women is that the current front-runner, with over 21 percent, is Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany, considered the most conservative candidate when it comes to church traditions and doctrine.