EUNUCHS FOR THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church. By Uta Ranke-Heinemann. Translated by Peter Heinegg. 360 pp. New York: Doubleday. $21.95.

Early on in this remarkable book, Uta Ranke-Heinemann writes: "The whole of church history adds up to one long arbitrary, narrow-minded masculine despotism over the female sex." This critique by Ms. Ranke-Heinemann in "Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church" is a timely one. It comes at a moment when American bishops are struggling to define a new role for women in the church while opinion polls show most Roman Catholics resistant to Rome's pronouncements on issues ranging from birth control to artificial insemination.

No other book on the Catholic moral heritage unearths as many spiteful statements about women -- from early church fathers, saints and medieval moralists to recent popes. On this level, "Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven" is sure to become a treasure chest for feminists. Few theologians have targeted church sexual teaching from so many angles or as trenchantly as Ms. Ranke-Heinemann, currently a professor of the history of religion at the University of Essen, Germany. Because she was discharged from a professorship of Catholic theology there (for questioning the virgin birth of Christ) this book will probably be ignored by most bishops, or attacked, as it was by John Cardinal O'Connor in a recent column in Catholic New York, the newspaper of the archdiocese. That would be unfortunate; her message deserves to be heard.

Peter Heinegg has provided a smooth, easily readable translation from the German of this book, which is more a polemic than a work of history. Ms. Ranke-Heinemann's focus is on the ways in which the cultural domination of women has been perpetuated by the celibate governing elite of the Catholic Church, which long considered the clerical state purer and superior to that of marriage. Few bishops -- the visible members of that elite -- espouse that idea today. Indeed, the church's clerical culture is fraught with a variety of psychosexual conflicts. In this country, at least 200 priests or brothers have been reported for sexually abusing children. In civil litigation, the families of victims have received an estimated $300 million from the church and its insurers. Homosexuality is so pronounced that many religious orders and diocesan seminaries require men to pass an HIV test to prove that they do not have the AIDS virus. Yet historically, moral teachings remain the province of celibate males.