By Stephen Brown
Harare, 7 December (ENI)--Member churches of the World Council of Churches (WCC) have been challenged to repent for violence against women and to declare such violence to be a sin.

A plenary session at the WCC's eighth assembly, which is meeting in Zimbabwe's capital, Harare, was told today 7 December by Bertrice Wood, a minister of the United Church of Christ in the United States, that the "one experience which women have in common with each other, regardless of their status in the church or society, is the experience of violence, in our homes, our societies and even our churches".

The plenary session was considering the results of the Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women, which was launched by the WCC in 1988 to promote solidarity by churches with women. Wood co-moderated the Decade Festival, which was held in Harare immediately before the eighth assembly and marked the conclusion of the Ecumenical Decade. More than 1100 women took part in the festival.

"Women know that violence against them, in whatever form, is a sin and call on the churches to take the bold step of stating so, just as the churches have ecumenically denounced other social sins as being contrary to the very essence of the church, the body of Christ," Wood said.

A letter drawn up at the Decade Festival and submitted to the eighth assembly refers to violence against women, and also to women's "secret pain" of "isolation, economic injustice, barriers to participation, racism, religious fundamentalism, ethnic genocide, sexual harassment, HIV/Aids and violence against women and children".

However the letter also listed a series of sensitive issues that "have implications for participation and which are difficult to address in the church community" - the ordination of women, abortion, divorce, divorce and "human sexuality in all of its diversity" - an oblique reference to homosexuality.

During today's plenary debate about the decade, Vsevolod Chaplin, from the Russian Orthodox Church, said that while he welcomed concern about the position of women in society - particularly given the economic conditions in eastern Europe, and the Commonwealth of Independent States, including Russia - "radical feminism is alien to Christianity".

Chaplin, who is an official in the Moscow Patriarchate's Department of External Church Relations, criticised the ordination of women and "especially inclusive language which I personally regard as blasphemy". The ordination of women, he said, was one of the reasons why it was probable that "eucharistic unity is a dream which will never come true".

However, the Ecumenical Decade received the support of Orthodox Metropolitan Ambrosius of Oulu, Finland, who in a presentation to the assembly described the work of the decade "not as a threat, but as a positive method of action inside our churches".

"We gradually discovered that the decade was not a feminist movement - though such a movement probably has a role to play - but something that concerns the whole church, her self-understanding and ecclesial nature."

Asked at a press conference today about Chaplin's criticisms, Wood said that "too often women have become the point of contention in ecumenical discussions around church unity." She added: "You can't have unity if you don't have the participation of more than 50 per cent of your church members.

"When justice for women is held hostage to church unity, it is not church unity. It is not church unity when anybody is held hostage."

Asked what it meant to declare violence against women to be a sin, Wood said that the ecumenical movement had declared racism to be a sin, since it was "in direct violation of God's intentions. So it is with sexism."

 A group of more than 40 Roman Catholic women from 22 countries who participated in the Decade Festival have called on the Roman Catholic Church to "truly own the agenda of the [Ecumenical] Decade and to continue with its unfinished work", to encourage "the setting of local, national and international goals" and "to commit the necessary financial and other support to this project". In a statement distributed at the WCC's assembly in Harare, the group said that they "witnessed how the churches belonging to the WCC have been enriched by the evident emergence of the gifts of women during the Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women". [722 words]

Photographs of the assembly are available from Photo Oikoumene

Related sites:

WCC Assembly Web Site

Photo Oikoumene

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