The Ordination of Women in the Catholic Church: a survey of attitudes in Spain in Journal of Gender Studies

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ina3CTdhm2rHSvZAfJGP/full 

This paper examines the correlation between socio-economic factors and attitudes to the ordination of women in the Catholic Church against a background of the existing literature on the perception of the Pastoral Ministry of Christian women. The struggle to find theories of economics that assist in formulating expectations in such research is identified and a part-solution offered through the Sraffian account for innovation.

A survey was carried out on 110 postgraduate students at the University of Granada (Spain) in 2006. The results demonstrate that the perception of the Catholic Church as sexist is positively related to the gender, political ideology and family size of those surveyed with discrimination perceived to be more prevalent in non-Christian religions. Respondents with a male image of God had less enlightened attitudes to gender equality and believers took a more conservative approach to gender equality than non-believers. Surprisingly, a conservative attitude to gender equality was correlated with a favourable attitude to the ordination of women.