At the Last Supper, according to scriptural accounts, Jesus broke bread and drank wine with his 12 apostles, all men, and exhorted them to continue this communal practice in remembrance of him. This act is a cornerstone of the Christian tradition and serves as a classic event in the various sacramentalist denominations within Christianity, such as the Catholic, Anglican/Episcopalian, and Lutheran churches.

The meaning of what occurred at the Last Supper is, however, controversial. To some people it is obvious that, since Christ surrounded himself with only men at the Last Supper, only men can enact the memory of this event - as ordained priests celebrating the Eucharist.

To others, it is incidental that it was men who were present. In this view what is important is not gender or for that matter the enthnicity (Jewish) or occupation (fishermen) of the apostles but the fact that Christ entrusted his mission to human beings.

Two thousand years later, the significance of the Last Supper is at the centre of the debate (especially within the Catholic Church) over whether women can be ordained priests. This issue is also part of a broader debate over who has the authority to interpret the Catholic tradition.

More recently, the question of women priests was ignited in the mid-1970s by the decision of the Anglican Church in England to ordain women. The Anglican Archbishop, Donald Coggan of Canterbury, sent a letter to Pope Paul VI in July 1975 informing him of the emerging consensual Anglican view that there were no fundamental objections in principle to the ordination of women priests.

The General Synod of the Church of England had passed a resolution to this effect (in June 1975) and had also called for an examination of the theological grounds for including women in the priesthood. The Vatican expressed a contrary view and since then has unequivocally opposed the idea of women priests, despite the theological and historical ambiguities surrounding the question and the fact that a special Vatican-appointed commission concluded it was not possible to settle the issue on the basis of scripture alone.

The Vatican's exclusion of women from ordination contrasts with the prominence of women both in Christ's revelatory actions and during the founding debates of Christianity. The Irish theologian Dermot Lane, for example, offers many illustrations of women's scriptural presence.

He observes that women "are active as witnesses to the resurrection, as deaconesses of the Church, as prophetesses in the Assembly, as catechists in the community and as evangelists of the good news" (The Furrow, 1985).

Lane concludes: "One cannot fail to be impressed by the extraordinary visibility of women in the mission and ministry of Jesus, especially when one bears in mind the predominantly patriarchal culture that existed in first-century Palestine."

He attributes the decline of women's leadership in the church to a number of societal factors, including the influence of the patriarchal culture of Judaism and Greek philosophy on Christianity, and the early church's strong opposition to the Gnostic movement in which women were prominent.

Dermot Lane concludes that the original vision of Jesus became burdened by social forces which were unprepared "to accept the unity and equality of all human beings before God and in the service of the Church of Christ".

Despite the Vatican's upholding of a male-only priesthood, the impetus in favour of women priests is driven by developments within both church and society. The mid-1970s saw greater economic, political, and social equality for women in Ireland and in Western nations generally, as the barriers hindering women's full participation in society began to be removed.

This new awareness of women's equal status had already been anticipated by Catholic Church leaders who, at the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), affirmed the equal dignity of women and men. Vatican II also elaborated on the baptismal equality between laity and the ordained, and in Lumen Gentium, stated that - as interrelated participants in the one "priesthood of Christ" - the laity should be given "every opportunity" to express informed opinions on issues pertaining to "the good of the Church".

Vatican II's emancipatory vision of the church as an inclusive and dialogical community has been realised only partially. The Vatican's continuing opposition to women priests represents, perhaps more than any other contemporary teaching, its commitment to maintaining the male and hierarchical structure of the church.

The Vatican presents three main reasons for its ban on women's ordination. It argues, first, that to ordain women would contravene the will and intention of Christ who did not call women to be apostles; second, that since women do not physically resemble Christ they cannot mimic the role of Christ in the sacramental consecration of the Eucharist; and third, that a male priesthood is part of the church's constant and essential hierarchical tradition.

In this reasoning, as Pope John Paul II has stated, even if the Vatican wanted to ordain women, it would not be able to do so because of its obligations to maintain what it regards as the institutional blueprint demonstrated by Christ's intentions.

The Vatican has thus defined its opposition to women priests as a settled question which is not open to debate and, as recently as 1995, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared that this is infallibly taught as part of the "deposit of faith".

As many theologians and ordinary Catholics see it, the Vatican's opposition to women priests suggests that women are second-class citizens in the church. The exclusion of women from the priesthood simply because they are women, appears to many reasonable people as an injustice in contemporary times - when efforts are being made around the world to give practical recognition to the dignity of all people.

Although church officials do not see the ban on women priests as discriminatory, many Catholic theologians do. The Catholic Theological Society of America (with more than 1,000 members) has raised the possibility that denying women access to the priesthood may in fact be an immoral practice, and as such, is foreign to the "deposit of faith".

Equally important, the ban on women priests conveys the impression that the maleness rather than the humanity of Christ is what church leaders see as essential to Christ's redemptive message. In light of the current shortage of priests, it also suggests that the celebration of the Eucharist, despite its privileged place in the church's sacramental and communal life, is ultimately less important than ensuring that the Eucharist is not celebrated by a woman priest.

On another level, the Vatican's closure of debate on women priests presents a major obstacle to the achievement of greater unity between Catholic and Protestant churches, a goal that John Paul has prioritised in his vision of the church for this new millennium.

The Vatican's stance on women priests also undermines its own doctrinal emphasis on the fundamental value of women's sexuality. Over the last several years Pope John Paul II has frequently condemned the "sin of sexism" and the arbitrary ways in which women are discriminated against in society.

Although John Paul (in The Gospel of Life) advocates the promotion of a "new feminism" which transforms culture by rejecting "male" models of domination, his vision of a "culture of life" excludes the possibility of a church in which women as priests may embody the life-ethics of Christ.

While the Vatican argues for the complementarity (and equality) of gender role differences, in practice however, institutional rules that uphold categorical differences - whether with respect to gender or, for example, ethnicity - have been shown to breed invidious comparisons whereby one group is seen as inferior to the other. Independent, therefore, of whether or not the demarcation of gender differences on ordination is intended to be discriminatory, it inevitably is.

It is noteworthy that the majority of Catholics in Ireland, as in Europe and the US, favour women's ordination. Some people who advocate greater equality for women have simply left the church because they view official church teaching on the priesthood and issues such as sexuality as hopelessly patriarchal and beyond change.

Many who remain involved in the church, however, actively engage the reasoning offered by the Vatican for its opposition to women priests. In my research with American Catholics I found that the vast majority of those who favour women priests ground their arguments in Catholic doctrine and specifically in the Jesus paradigm.

Whereas official church arguments defend a male-only priesthood by pointing to the single act of Jesus in choosing only men as apostles, many ordinary Catholics focus on the social rationality of Christ's life as a whole. For them, narrative accounts of Christ's life lead to an alternative theological interpretation which illuminates a pluralistic and inclusive, rather than discriminatory, Jesus.

Interviewees typically argued: "To me, being Catholic means to participate in the church established by Jesus. Jesus always seemed to espouse the dignity of humankind. To realise that dignity, all people need to be afforded the opportunity to follow their calling, to utilise their individual gifts and talents given to them by their creator. To deny that dignity to half of humankind does not fulfill the example set by Jesus to be Catholic."

Many Catholics who continue to participate in the church do so because they have a strong belief in the symbolism of Christ and the possibilities it offers for the church as a more pluralistic and egalitarian community. As we embark on this new millennium, however, it is not clear whether or how soon we might expect to see women ordained as Catholic priests.

One response to the acute shortage of priests would be to remove the ban on celibacy and allow male priests to marry. This is a relatively straightforward option for the Vatican since it is simply a church law and thus devoid of the theological complications in which women's ordination is embroiled.

It is also the case that people might find it easier to get used to married male priests than to women priests. On the other hand there is evidence, again from the US, that in parishes where women work as pastoral associates - doing the same work as a male priest, except consecrating the Eucharist - they are well accepted, even by those parishioners who tend towards doctrinal conservatism.

But even if practical considerations favour married male priests, instead of women priests, this will still leave women's status in the church ambiguous. It may also signal that the Vatican sees the reclaiming of its interpretive authority as having greater importance than nurturing a communally vibrant church.

Professor Michele Dillon is associate professor and Book Review Editor of Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion at the Department of Sociology, Yale University, P.O. Box 208265, New Haven CT 06520-8265 USA. Her e-mail address is michele.dillon@yale.edu