by Joan Chittister
National Catholic Reporter<\/p>\n
The story is an old one and I\u2019ve told it before, but never has it felt so ominous as it does right now.
It happened this way:
About 15 or 20 years ago, I gave a series of conferences in a parish in Canada.
I like Canada a lot \u2014 its beauty, its pace, its seeming patience with conflict and its apparent calmer approach to otherwise disruptive subjects \u2014 subjects that lead to almost immediate choosing up of sides down here. Maybe it\u2019s the Brit in them. Or maybe, given their smaller population and more far-flung population centers, wildfire simply isn\u2019t as wild north the border as it is here. Whatever.
At any rate, what was already euphemistically called \u201cThe women\u2019s issue\u201d here appeared at that time to be a great deal less of an issue to our neighbors to the north.
So I was surprised when the topic came up at lunch from the couple hosting my visit. More than that, I was surprised at what triggered it.
It wasn\u2019t the dearth of theology around the question of the ordination of women that piqued them. It wasn\u2019t the growing statistic on the coming decline in the priesthood that worried them. It wasn\u2019t the fear of merging parishes that troubled them.<\/p>\n