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> Catholic Women: Rocking the Boat
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> Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
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> Catholic Women: Rocking the Boat
>
> Sojourners - March
2007http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&
issue=soj0703&a...
>
> Rocking the Boat
>
> A new wave of Catholic women answers the call to ordination priesthood -
> an act of ecclesial disobedience
>
> by Rose Marie Berger
>
> It was late afternoon at the end of July 2006. The sunlight slanted in
> and ricocheted unpredictably off the water of Pittsburgh's three
> rivers-the Ohio, Monongahela, and Allegheny. Boarding the riverboat
> Majestic, 400 people attended the first ordination in the United States
> of Roman Catholic women to the priesthood and diaconate. In doing so,
> the Catholics present aided in breaking canon law 1024, which states,
> "Only a baptized man validly receives sacred ordination." This act of
> ecclesial disobedience was punishable by excommunication.
>
> As the boat motored into deeper waters, a few protesters appeared on the
> wharf. Their signs read: "Women obey priests" and
"Jesus was a man."
> Aboard ship, in the open central gallery, bright banners hung from the
> balcony proclaimed, "Nothing new! Women reclaiming priesthood." Iconic
> images of ancient female Christian leaders adorned the altar-Mary of
> Magdala, apostle to the apostles; Phoebe, the deacon in Cenchreae
> (Romans 16:1-2); and Junia, who Paul calls an "outstanding apostle"
> (Romans 16:7).
>
> The ceremony was held by the international organization Roman Catholic
> Womenpriests, which has held five ordination ceremonies since 2002 in
> Europe and Canada and claims five female bishops and 40 priests and
> deacons. In the pipeline are 120 students, 80 of whom are from North
> America. Aboard the Majestic, three female bishops from Europe prepared
> to ordain eight U.S. women to the Catholic priesthood and four to the
> diaconate.
>
> Gisela Forster, a Roman Catholic Womenpriests bishop from Munich, was
> dressed simply and elegantly in a white alb with a bright yellow silk
> chasuble that floated lightly as she moved. "The church should not only
> be a church for men or with a male hierarchy," she said, "because men
> cannot do everything. It's very important that the women who are feeling
> called should be welcomed into this church."
>
> "We speak of priestly service, not priestly office," Christine
> Mayr-Lumetzberger, a founder of Roman Catholic Womenpriests, said at a
> previous ordination. "We advocate a servant priesthood and exercising
> power with people, not power over them."
>
> A buoyant spirit swept the congregation as 12 women stepped forward at
> the bishops' call, answering "Here I am. I am ready." Mary Ellen
> Robertson, a spiritual director and hospice chaplain, asked her
> brother-a diocesan priest-to be her witness to the diaconate. "She
> attended my ordination 45 years ago," he said. "It only
seemed fair that
> I should attend hers."
>
> Recent polls have found that the majority of U.S. Catholics support
> ordaining women. Seventy percent of U.S. Catholics were in favor of
> ordaining women in some sacramental ministry, according to a survey
> conducted in 2000 by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate
> (CARA).
>
> The pressure to ordain women to the Catholic priesthood and permanent
> diaconate is growing. Between 1993 and 2004, reports CARA, the number of
> Catholic parishes in the U.S. led by someone other than a priest has
> doubled. Because of the priest shortage, many U.S. Catholic parishes are
> experiencing the "reverse mission" phenomenon. Priests from the global
> South-primarily Africa and Asia-are tending to the needs of underserved
> parishes in the United States.
>
> "The goal of Roman Catholic Womenpriests," states its founding
> documents, "is to bring about the full equality of women in the Roman
> Catholic Church. ... We desire neither a schism nor a break from the
> Roman Catholic Church, but instead are rooted in a response to Jesus who
> called women and men to be disciples and equals in living the gospel."
>
> The group grew out of a 1998 gathering of European Catholics to discuss
> the issue of women's ordination. Within a year, 14 women were preparing
> for ordination. "Those who needed more theology," recalls Patricia
> Fresen, a bishop in Roman Catholic Womenpriests, "enrolled at various
> universities for further study. A program of preparation for ordination
> was created, and the women met regularly to plan for their ordination
> and future priestly ministry."
>
> But according to the tradition of apostolic succession (an unbroken
> chain of the laying on of hands since the time of the apostles), priests
> can only be ordained by a bishop-and there weren't many Catholic bishops
> lining up to defy Rome by ordaining women. However, Romulo Braschi, a
> renegade Argentinean bishop, agreed to celebrate the ordinations. He was
> joined by Bishop Ferdinand Regelsberger, two Roman Catholic priests, and
> women pastors from the Old Catholic, Lutheran, and Dutch Reformed
> churches. Seven women were made priests in 2002.
>
> After the widely reported ceremony, the Vatican gave the women a period
> of time to retract their vows. When they did not, then-Cardinal Joseph
> Ratzinger, the Vatican's chief guardian of theological orthodoxy and now
> the pope, issued a statement. "Because the women ... gave no indication of
> amendment or repentance for the most serious offence they had
> committed," he said, "they have incurred excommunication."
>
> "That the Vatican took this very seriously," said Patricia
Fresen, "is
> shown by the subsequent excommunication of the seven women. ... If it
> had been of no consequence, the Vatican would have simply ignored it."
>
> Two of the seven ordained women, Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger and Gisela
> Forster, were later secretly ordained as bishops-by Roman Catholic
> bishops in good standing-so that they could perpetuate the apostolic
> lineage of women priests. Forster explained, "We were ordained by
> several male bishops, whose names can not be revealed [to avoid Vatican
> reprisals]. We had a notary there to witness it and put the names in a
> safety deposit box, but we cannot say their names openly."
>
> These ordination ceremonies weren't the first for Catholic women. Even
> in modern times, extreme situations have motivated Catholic bishops to
> ordain women to the priesthood. The most noted example is Czech Catholic
> leader Ludmila Javorova, one of five women ordained by Bishop Felix
> Davídek in 1970 to serve the Catholic Church under the Soviet occupation
> of Eastern Europe. In 1996, the Vatican formally prohibited her from
> exercising her priestly office. In a 1999 interview, Javarova said that
> Bishop Davídek acted out of necessity. In the absence of guidance from
> Rome, she said, "He acted according to his conscience."
>
> In November 2001, Mary Ramerman was "irregularly" ordained a
priest in a
> Catholic parish in Rochester, New York, after the bishop-under pressure
> from the Vatican-removed a popular male parish priest. Ramerman
> continues to serve the thriving Spiritus Christi Church, which is no
> longer recognized as a Roman Catholic parish by the diocese.
>
> The worldwide Anglican Communion and the U.S. Episcopal Church provide
> historical insight into the struggle for ordaining women. In 1944,
> Florence Li Tim-Oi was ordained by the Anglican bishop of Hong Kong to
> serve Anglican Christians in China who were endangered by the Japanese
> invasion. She was the first woman priest in the Anglican Communion. This
> single incident was soon lost to history. Thirty years later, in July
> 1974, 11 Episcopal women were "irregularly" ordained at the Church of
> the Advocate in Philadelphia by three retired Episcopal bishops. The
> Episcopal Church declared the ordinations invalid and prevented the
> women from serving as priests.
>
> In 1976, after intense struggle, the Episcopal Church voted to
> officially open the priesthood and episcopate to women. The first woman
> (and the first black woman) to serve as bishop anywhere in the Anglican
> Communion, Barbara C. Harris, was consecrated in 1989. In 2006, the
> Episcopal Church elevated Katharine Jefferts Schori to its highest
> office of presiding bishop.
>
> The Roman Catholic movement to ordain women clearly hopes for similar
> success. But because the Catholic Church has a very centralized
> governance structure and no established mechanism for representing the
> desires of the laity, it may take longer.
>
> "We would like to see the Church become much more a 'people's
church,'"
> Patricia Fresen said. "As people become much better educated, even
> theologically educated, they need to have much more say in church
> structures and in the choice of leaders.
>
> "The 'sensus fidelium' [sense of the faithful] was much respected in the
> early centuries of the church. This needs to be returned to," continued
> Fresen.
>
> Many Roman Catholic organizations are pushing for change within the
> church: Call to Action, Women's Ordination Conference, and FutureChurch
> in the U.S.; a vibrant European We Are Church movement and Germany's
> Purple Stole organization; Japan's Phoebe Association. Such
> organizations advocate for more local ecclesial autonomy, for bishops to
> be advised and assisted by laity as well as priests, for removing the
> celibacy vow from diocesan priests, and for reinstating women to the
> permanent diaconate.
>
> Even the monolith of the Vatican-controlled church shows signs of
> shifting, especially in the global South. "We must admit that there
> cannot be a participatory church with gender justice," Catholic Brother
> Verghese Theckanath said in an address last year to the National
> Conference of Religious Superiors in India, "as long as the church
> retains the assumption that female humanity is ontologically different
> and secondary to male humanity."
>
> "We very definitely do not want to simply 'add women and stir,'" said
> Fresen. "We do not want to move into the present hierarchical
> power-structures. We have a new model of priesthood which we are trying
> to shape and to live."
>
> This new model was powerfully demonstrated at the Three Rivers ceremony.
> Roman Catholic Womenpriests has chosen to hold its ordinations on
> boats-a very early symbol of the church. Bishop Gisela Forster, an
> artist, carved the bishops' crosiers in a design that includes the
> profiles of male and female figures. The crosiers are wide at the bottom
> to signify a ship's paddle. "We want it to be simple,"
Forster said. "No
> gold or silver. It doesn't need to stand out."
>
> The ordinands prostrated themselves before the cross-not before the
> bishops. "This gesture," Fresen told the gathered community,
"is the
> prayer; no other words are spoken. This is the model of community we
> seek-a discipleship of equals, who are servants to one another."
>
> In anointing the women's hands for sacramental duty, a prayer was
> offered: "May the Holy Spirit anoint you and form you into a priest of
> Jesus Christ." The emphasis is on the Holy Spirit acting through the
> community of faithful.
>
> "As more and more women are ordained in full apostolic
succession," said
> Fresen, "they are finding increasing acceptance by an ever-greater
> number of Catholics. Eventually the sheer weight of opinion, the sensus
> fidelium, will break down the barriers of injustice."
>
> For Fresen, the movement to restore to the Catholic Church the full
> dignity of women is similar to the struggle for freedom in her native
> South Africa. "In South Africa, during the apartheid years, there was a
> groundswell of resistance that eventually broke down the system of
> racial injustice," she said. "I believe the same will happen
with regard
> to sexism in the church. There is already a great outcry to make the
> church more a people's church, if it is not to become irrelevant."
>
> The struggle against irrelevancy isn't solved simply by ordaining women.
> Even in Protestant denominations with a longer history of ordaining
> women, the road has not been easy. Sociologist Adair Lummis commented on
> the United Methodists and Presbyterians marking, in 2006, 50 years of
> women's ordination, saying, "Just because you have more women and you're
> having these milestone celebrations, please remember that in some
> denominations ... there were more women ordained 50 years ago than there
> are now."
>
> Aimee Semple McPherson's pentecostal International Church of the
> Foursquare Gospel was founded in Los Angeles in the 1920s with an
> emphasis placed on anointing women. In the mid-1970s about half of the
> Foursquare clergy were women, but by 2000 that number had dropped to 36
> percent, according to church historian Ron Williams. The largest
> Protestant denomination in the U.S., the Southern Baptist Convention,
> began allowing women pastors in 1963. In 2000, the SBC revoked the
> decision, leaving about 1,600 Southern Baptist clergywomen in an
> ambiguous position.
>
> Current Department of Labor data estimates that 15.5 percent of clergy
> in the U.S. are women. But according to Lummis' research in Clergy
> Women: An Uphill Calling, "the numbers indicate that clergy women remain
> significantly underpaid and underemployed relative to men."
>
> Still, when Christian churches authentically carry out their mission to
> be Christ's witnesses to the poor and oppressed, new needs arise. In
> traditional theology, the Holy Spirit calls forth gifts in the community
> in order to meet pressing needs of the church. For Roman Catholics,
> there is a marked rise in women with vocations to the sacramental duties
> of the priesthood. The institutional church structure may continue to
> refute these vocations, call them illegitimate, and excommunicate those
> who act outside the protocols of tradition. But eventually the wisdom of
> the people of God, the sensus fidelium, will rise to claim what it needs
> to live the gospel fully and authentically. This includes, as Patricia
> Fresen puts it, that "women and men are created equal and can equally
> act 'in persona Christi.'" The women ordained aboard the Majestic in
> Pittsburgh are one small boat in a rising tide.
>
> [Rose Marie Berger, an associate editor of Sojourners, is a Catholic
> peace activist and poet.]
>
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These women are not Roman Catholic priests.

In disobeying the ecclesiastical authorities, they break one of the very
vows priests make when being ordained - the vow of obedience. These women
are neither recognized by the Catholic church as legitimate priests nor do
they obey the church authorities as priests vow to do.

These mock ordinations are about as ridiculous as a man marrying one woman
- and professing his undying love and fidelity to her - while
simultaneously having sex with another during the wedding ceremony.

It's ridiculous. I'm surprised anyone takes it seriously.

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