By Denise Smith Amos
The Cincinnati Enquirer

MOUNT AUBURN - Jessie Thomas works around restrictions on Catholic women in the church.

She has been a lay minister at two Cincinnati churches during the past 30 years. She has helped serve Communion, led the church in prayer and Bible readings and, in recent years, delivered "reflections" on the Gospel.

Armed with a master's degree in religion studies, she takes the pulpit at Holy Name Church in Mount Auburn about once a month.

But she's careful not to call her reflections a sermon or a homily, because only priests or deacons can "preach."

"I'm really careful about the words I choose," she says.

"I'm not trying to be a priest; I just love to do the reflection. It's from a different perspective...from an African-American woman and mother of two. I want to continue to be able to do it, because it's so hard for women to get over the barriers."

As the church confronts a future with fewer priests, women are finding ways past the barriers to ministry. Yet women cannot be priests, a restriction that is unlikely to change.

The restriction comes from church doctrine, which says that priests represent Christ on Earth and, like the Apostles, should always be men.

Only men can be ordained priests or deacons, and only they can baptize, marry couples and conduct burials. Only priests can bless the bread and wine in the Eucharist, hear confessions and anoint the dying. Only priests can be called pastors.

Nuns, though they make lifetime vows of service, are considered lay ministers, as are other Catholics, male and female, who get training.

"The theological leadership of the church has discerned that it is not possible to ordain women to the priesthood," Cincinnati Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk says. Yet church women keep Catholicism thriving, he adds.

"The priest does not generally see lay ministers as competition. He sees them as collaborators, if he's got his head screwed on right," the archbishop says.

Nuns run two parishes in the Cincinnati archdiocese, where they're called "pastoral administrators," and three parishes in the Covington diocese as "parish life collaborators."

An informal tally of parishes shows more than 240 women listed in leadership roles - from business managers to pastoral associates to directors of religious education - in Hamilton, Butler, Clermont and Warren counties.

Last year, St. Simon the Apostle in Delhi enlisted lay ministers, including women, to hold Communion services for several weeks as its pastor recuperated from surgery. A priest blessed the bread and wine ahead of time.

Says Dolores Bruggeman, former director of a lay-ministry program at the Athenaeum of Ohio, a seminary in Mount Washington: "There isn't much that we can't do."