Women’s Ordination: Love Trumps Doubt
By Rosemary Ganley
The well-reported Roman Catholic women's ordination events of July 22-25, 2005, moved the progress of women worldwide ahead by several steps.
Taking leadership from former Dominican sister and seminary professor Patricia Fresen of South Africa - who is now in charge of the preparation program for women candidates for priesthood - the Women-Priests Movement, after a weekend conference where 500 people from 20 countries broke the papal ban on discussing women's ordination, conducted the "illicit but valid" ordination of nine North American women to the diaconate and priesthood. The three-hour ceremony took place on a gleaming white tour boat on the St. Lawrence River near Gananoque, Ontario.
For me and for many, it was the most significant and positive event in 40 years of Catholic feminist discourse and activity. It showed to the world the strength, courage, and confidence of Catholic women and many men today. It made use of modern communications to send instantly to Catholics around the world the message that equality is being claimed, and that resistance to oppression is growing.
Fifty-seven journalists were on board the ship to witness and record along with 250 elated supporters. Thank goodness. I opened my Peterborough Examiner on Tuesday, July 26, to find two huge colour pictures of the ordinations, and a long account written by the Canadian Press and the Osprey News Network.
Such joy! No more the lament, so long uttered among us: "How long, O Lord, how long?" If this is the work of the "secular" media, let them flourish. They help us break a debilitating long silence. Insiders who follow church politics say it will be 70 years until our authorities relent on women's ordination. But Jesus and St. Paul and Vatican II called for a discipleship of equals. Pastorally, the church, our birthright, is disintegrating before our very eyes. Most of the young have left. Thousands of parishes have no Eucharist. An execrable theology of women is promulgated by Rome. In turn, it justifies anti-human teachings, which are deadly - especially to "Third World" and poorly-educated women and their children.
The ceremony represented the second public ordination of women candidates by women bishops on international waterways in five years. It was organized by the European-based movement "Roman Catholic Womenpriests." The first ordination of seven women took place on the Danube in 2002. These women were quickly excommunicated. They appealed the decision and were subsequently denied. "The day I received my excommunication letter, all on embossed heavy paper, was the day a dagger plunged into my heart," said Bishop Gisela Forster of Germany. But as the movement grows, the fear of
such a punishment dims. Non-violent, reasoned, public challenges to unpersuasive canon laws now undermine hierarchical authority. What happened near Gananoque was the firm but gentle withdrawal of consent to this arrangement by the faithful. One journalist told me he recently stood outside a Catholic parish in Kingston, Ontario, and couldn't find one parishioner who disagreed with the idea of women priests.
"We learned in South Africa that one must finally break unjust laws," Patricia Fresen told her workshop on "Training for Priesthood" during the three-day Ottawa conference, which examined all aspects of ordination of Roman Catholic women. "After one has striven mightily by lobbying, demonstrating, sit-ins and writing, one is called in justice to act,"
Fresen explained further.
In 2002, Fresen decided to join the German and Austrian bishops, Christina Mayr
Lumetzberger and Gisela Forster, in their work to train and ordain women, thus defying repeated Vatican prohibitions, letters, silencing,and excommunications. Taking a room in Forster's home, Fresen has expanded the preparation program for Roman Catholic women called to ordination now. She has 65 candidates currently studying. During the Ottawa weekend, 30 more women approached her asking about the program. It seems there really is no shortage of priests for our community. Candidates usually have a master's degree in theology and take ten more units of study, reflection, and writing. They meet face-to-face four times. Priesthood is not linked to celibacy and no vow of obedience to a bishop is required. Sexual orientation is irrelevant. The priests are referred to by their first names. They will continue as "worker priests" in their various ministries: social work, chaplaincy, teaching, and the law.
Assisting Women-priests is the group "Corpus" representing married Catholic priests. They mentor the women in some of the practical aspects of their ministry. A political question raised during the weekend was whether, if the Vatican moved to admit married priests back to service, would the married men proceed without the women? This was just one of the challenging questions debated by the conference.
Major feminist thinker, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza of Harvard Divinity School, delivered an unvarnished critique of the present state of affairs in a press conference. "The kyriarchal church is more like the Roman Empire than the ecclesia of Jesus," she said. "It is morally bankrupt, with the sex abuse of children and its cover-up, the anti-condom campaign hurting the world, the harsh campaign against homosexuality... What we have is authoritarian anti-intellectualism." Still, Schüssler Fiorenza said she was concerned about ordination of women into this system. "Do we want clerical privilege" she asked, "a piece of the clerical pie, re-inscribing hierarchy?" Rather she called for a truly alternative model, one made up of free intellectual inquiry and integrity, guided by a decision-making assembly, and welcoming plurality. She called it an "alternative movement, not an anti-movement."
For many years, Schüssler Fiorenza has been calling for a true discipleship of equals, a "radical democratic church." She is convinced that progress would be achieved in other ways than the priesthood. Diverse feminist ministries will be central to this model - along with a strong political vision that attacks capitalistic globalization. I am at all times stimulated by the visionary leadership and rigorous scholarship of this great feminist theologian.
But then, in the final analysis, I came to agree with feminist theologian and activist Mary Hunt of Silver Spring, Maryland, who told a panel discussion that love often trumps even one's doubts and convictions. "I will be on that boat on Monday," she said to cheers.
I too, with my spouse and many friends, was on that boat.
Political action is not often clear, clean, and unmixed. It requires us to think through the issues as carefully as we can, and then take a position based on one's commitment to the common good. Joan Chittister has said that we internalize a symbol system early in life. For me, the images on the boat - women every w h e re, colourful stoles, husbands applauding wives as priests, Native women drumming, the lapping of water on the hull, unexpected sudden breezes through the windows, hosts held aloft by rapt women- all contributed to a new, inclusive and vibrant symbol system.
The women ordained priests were Michele Birch-Conery, Victoria Rue, Jean Marie St. Onge and Marie David. Women ordained to the diaconate were Regina Nicolosi, Dana Reynolds, Rebecca McGuyver, Kathleen Strack and Kathy Sullivan Vanderberg.
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Rosemary Ganley, originally from Kirkland Lake, has lived in Jamaica and Tanzania. She is the former assistant editor of the Catholic New Times in Toronto. A feminist of faith, she has a special interest in women of the global south. This first appeared in The Social Edge, an online social justice and faith magazine.