The Roman Catholic Church has quietly taken a step forward for women's equality, naming the first female theologians as Vatican consultants, and promptly denied the appointments had anything to do with their gender.
Pope John Paul, whose defence of the male-only clergy has rankled some liberal Catholic women, named the two theologians at the weekend to the International Theological Commission, an influential advisory board for the Vatican.
The Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano published without comment on Sunday the list of new members including Sister Sara Butler of Chicago's University of Saint Mary of the Lake and Barbara Hallensleben of Fribourg University in Switzerland.
"They were not chosen because they're women. They were chosen for their competence," Cardinal Georges Cottier, Papal Household theologian and former head of the commission, told Reuters on Monday. "It's very positive and I'm very happy.
"Women can bring their own sensitivity to certain problems where men might have a different point of view," he said.
A senior Vatican source remarked that "a barrier has fallen" but said the timing had no link to International Women's Day on Monday since gender was not an issue. That also explained the lack of publicity, he added.
The appointments placed Butler and Hallensleben among the highest-ranking women in the Church, which allows only celibate males to be priests. Men hold all top jobs in the Curia, the Vatican bureaucracy, although some women hold lower-level posts.
The main senior posts for women in the Church are as heads of orders of nuns. The Polish-born Pope has forcefully reaffirmed Catholic tradition on the role of women within the Church, rejecting the possibility of female priests and declaring in 1994 that the issue was definitively closed.
Hallensleben, a German who teaches dogmatic theology in Fribourg, said the appointments were a natural step since more women have studied theology after the 1962-1965 Second Vatican Council's reforms opened more job possibilities for them.
"My first reaction was not that I was one of the first women appointed but that I now had a new responsibility relating to the theological life of the Church," she told Reuters.
"This shows the Council, not immediately but over a few generations, still bears fruit and provides the impulses it was meant to give to the Church."
Butler, an American systematic theologian who once advocated women's ordination, is now a strong defender of the Church's 2,000-year-old tradition of the men-only priesthood.