|
Cover
story Women finding ways
By JEANNETTE BATZ
Special to the National Catholic Reporter
Catholic tradition teaches young
women to be receptive, to be patient, to wait for the angels next
visit.
But in a world where women are no longer considered inferior,
hysterical vessels of procreation, that teaching is holding less sway.
After Vatican II, many Catholic women were convinced that change
would soon be blowing through that open window, the aggiornamento promised by
Pope John XXIII. Theyd be ordained alongside their brethren, and the
hierarchy would fade into an egalitarian, communitarian church of the
people.
Over three decades, that hope turned to anger. And now even the
anger has burned away. Nobody expects change anytime soon. If and when it does
come, activists worry that it wont be a change born of repentance, but
rather of expediency wrung from the shortage of celibate male priests.
Some women arent waiting.
Some are entering interfaith seminaries, investing years of study
without welcome or promise from their own church. Others are quietly assuming
leadership roles in understaffed churches, doing a priests work without
benefit of a priests authority. Once-staunch Catholics have abandoned
parish life altogether, gathering in homes to break bread, sip wine and bless
one anothers struggles. Those who feel called to the priesthood are
turning to the more congenial Lutheran and Episcopal churches that have
ordained women for nearly three decades, draining potentially strong leadership
from the church they left behind. (Neither the Episcopal church nor the
Evangelical Lutheran Church of America keeps statistics on former affiliations
of its women priests. Of 229 female priests responding to the Episcopal
clerical directorys latest survey, at least 15 were raised Catholic.)
Finally, those who refuse to leave their chosen faith are finding other ways:
receiving ecumenical certification, for instance, then being consecrated to
minister to independent Catholics.
Some cry a lot and shake in their sensible shoes. But they
dont regret taking action.
They say theyve had plenty of visits from angels.
No more nonsense
What makes a devout Catholic defy church authority by even
considering the forbidden topic of womens ordination? For Genevieve
OHara of St. Louis, who spent 17 years in a convent and now cant
even bring herself to go to Mass, the turning point was a glorious, sunny Palm
Sunday in Rome in 1985. She stood in St. Peters Square, pressed in a
crowd so huge it was almost frightening. She watched men in billowing vestments
move through the crowd distributing the Eucharist. Not a single woman was
allowed to help.
By Holy Thursday, when she watched Pope John Paul II bless the
holy oils amid all this wonderful pageantry, without a woman in
sight -- she was ready to start reading feminist theology. She read
Rosemary Radford Ruether, Marija Gimbutas, the Lithuanian anthropologist, on
goddess worship in ancient cutlures, among others. Soon she was furious,
helping stage alternative liturgies on the steps of the Basilica of St. Louis,
and refusing to go to confession until the church ordained women. Today, she
worships informally, in groups of dedicated and deeply spiritual women who take
turns planning, reading aloud and praying, before breaking bread together.
OHaras Catholicism is bred in the bone, as
unchangeable as being a blue-eyed Irishwoman. I was born to love
religion, she says softly. My mother always blessed the bread. She
blessed the seeds before they were sown. We got a blessing on our forehead
every night before we went to bed. Her whole life was a prayer. But, oh, the
institutional church, I just basically renounce it. She stops short.
Im afraid Im shocking you. You see, I believe I am the
church, too. But I take no part in a lot of the nonsense -- the hierarchical
structure, the concentration of power. I think thats really, really
wrong. So I am outside of it. I have said for many years, The bishops
dont have authority over me. Thats pretty radical. But
its also comforting.
For the Rev. Donna Reilly Williams, who is now sitting in the
living room of a Lutheran parsonage in De Kalb, Ill., surrounded by cardboard
boxes, the first turning point came when she and her husband returned from
missionary work in Swaziland and Malawi. Shed worked with the excluded,
from Africans with leprosy to women trying to find a dignified, meaningful
place for themselves in a polygamous society. Back in Canada, she looked for
her own place, enrolling in Newman Theological College/St. Josephs
Seminary to prepare for hospital chaplaincy. She was allowed to take the same
courses as the seminarians -- with one exception.
Williams still remembers standing outside the chapel door,
watching through the glass as her nervous classmates mastered the intricacies
of worship and liturgy. Slowly they learned to elevate the host with reverent
authority and to move about the chancel as though they belonged there. Williams
stood watching in the cold and drafty hall, held by a longing she couldnt
explain.
Graduating with distinction, she became a hospice chaplain in the
AIDS community in Los Angeles, earned a masters in pastoral theology, did
grief counseling, worked as a pastoral associate, became a marriage and family
therapist and consulted for Catholic parishes in Seattle where peoples
working relationships had snagged or frozen. Around 1995, three different
Protestant denominations asked if shed consider ordination. Shed
already begun having this unpleasant experience where I would be in Mass,
and Id hear this voice saying, What are you doing here in the pews,
and not in leadership? Shed weep quietly, diagnosing herself
with an ecclesial version of abused wife syndrome. Because
shed grown so used to seeing herself through the eyes of male prelates,
she couldnt imagine any denomination wanting her in another role.
When Lutherans and Catholics signed the joint declaration of
faith, Williams attended a big celebratory liturgy in Seattle. At the
reception, I introduced myself to the archbishop, she recalls. He
knew right away who I was. By then shed written six books and done
consulting work throughout the diocese. I told him I was becoming a
Lutheran pastor and looked forward to a lot more collaboration with him. Less
than a week later, a memo went out to all the Catholic agencies, saying they
were no longer to use my services.
Williams was ordained this December, and on Christmas Eve, she
arrived at Bethlehem -- Bethlehem Lutheran Church, which had called her to be
the congregations minister. Im not angry at the Catholic
church, she stresses. I wouldnt want to be a Roman Catholic
priest. In the Lutheran church, the powers structured from the bottom up,
and while that has its flaws, Id rather err in that direction.
Intense heat
The Rev. Elaine M. White avoids hierarchy just as strenuously,
preferring circles instead of ladders. This woman who now calls
herself a Catholic priest grew up working-class Catholic in Brooklyn, educated
by Dominican nuns she adored. Against the advice of a pastor (White
people should stay with white people) she married an African-American. At
23, she divorced and realized that, if she was going to raise her two baby
girls alone, she needed Gods help. Id survived violence in my
childhood, and again in my marriage, and I was at the point where I knew that
no human could heal me the way I needed to be healed, she confides.
It was very hard for me to reach out to a God who was male and warm and
loving. It did not resonate for me. God as policeman, God as watchman, the
Im gonna get you God overshadowed a loving God. But I wanted
more than anything to be whole.
One day she sat down with the New Testament a coworker had given
her. I started paging through, pouring out some of my own experiences to
God as I read. Eventually I noticed that one particular word kept coming up
over and over in the scripture passages, and that word was love. What I came to
understand was that this was God picking the topic of conversation. God wanted
to talk to me about love. I kept reading and sharing, and after a period of
time the crown of my head seemed to open and I experienced this intense heat.
It began to come down over my forehead, passing my eyes, going into my mind,
down my throat. This warmth, this peace, kept permeating my innermost being --
an innermost being that I did not even know I had.
I was crying, a lot, she continues, and
remembering things I had to remember, and the more I poured out my heart and
soul, the stronger the peace was. It just kept coming in waves. The next
morning it was almost like I had a fire in my eyes. My whole being was changed.
Now I knew I could trust this personal God, and over a period of time I fell in
love with God, and I wanted to tell God all the things I had done to harm, to
damage, to hurt. It seemed like everything was coming up, no stone left
unturned, and you know what? I never felt I was going to be shamed or put down
by God. What I received instead was more peace, more love, more power. And
because I was able to empty myself of all this negativity, I gave myself
completely to God. I said, I am yours now and forever. I will do whatever
you ask.
One day soon after, she was standing at the kitchen sink doing
dishes when she heard, in her heart and her mind, God saying to her, You
are going to be my minister. I said, Yes, I will, but
Im a woman and Im Catholic. How am I going to do that? and
God said, I will make a way for you. And because of everything else
God had done, I believed it.
The experience was so direct and so powerful, it short-circuited
any worries about defying church authority. I found out something
else, says White. I found out religion is not God.
Instead of looking wistfully up the hierarchical ladder, these
women are looking around, learning to see through the walls of organized
religion, making their own connections. When OHara, caught by the fresh
wholeness of creation spirituality, visited the Grace Cathedral in San
Francisco (the Episcopal congregation that welcomed Matthew Fox after he was
stripped of his Catholic priesthood), she saw a woman walk down the long aisle
in a gray suit and a priests collar. I fully recognized her as an
ordained priest, OHara recalls, and I did something I had not
done in years. I went to confession. And during that confession I cried, and it
was not in sorrow for my sins.
Deeply rooted in Catholic contemplative tradition, White presents
workshops in centering prayer and lectio divina with Trappist Fr. Thomas
Keatings Contemplative Outreach. She has studied other spiritual
traditions at The New Seminary in New York and is currently working on her
masters of divinity at the multicultural, multilingual, nondenominational
New York Theological Seminary. She was ordained Dec. 3 by a community of
consecrators for her Independent Catholic church -- a congregation founded by
Roman Catholics but with no formal ties to the church. The consecrators
included married priests, resigned priests, Roman Catholic laywomen, an
African-American Protestant minister and a Protestant layperson.
The same spirit that was in Jesus is present in all times
and all places, she says, firmly refusing to let denominational
party lines become an obstacle. I practice open Communion, welcoming to the
Lords Table anyone who approaches it reverently to receive the Eucharist.
We are one body in Christ. How interesting it would be if we all just worshiped
and praised God and let the Spirit just be who she is.
Nervous at first
Looking past doctrinal differences doesnt mean ignoring
sacrament. These women share a deep love for the sacraments, their sensuous
fusion of the physical with the spiritual and the way they touch human need
with grace. Women in eucharistic base communities were nervous at first, unsure
whether this was heresy or trivial mimicry, but they have since realized the
symbols are too universal to be restricted. Who is going to stop them from
baking bread? And even without formal consecration, the act holds deep meaning
for them.
White finds her lifes meaning in the experience of
reconciliation that first opened her to Gods love, and she works hard to
keep her priesthood humble. My job is to point to God, to be a clear
channel and to work through my own shortcomings, she says. Reverend
is not a title; its a relationship. I am not celebrating Mass for people;
I am celebrating Mass with people. Even a child can say, Holy Spirit,
please come, fall on this bread and wine. Nobody has a corner on the
market. Its a question of justice.
When Williams was finally allowed to study worship and liturgy, at
Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minn., she remembers weeping as she practiced.
I felt so humbled, she explains, to be allowed to come that
close to celebrating the sacraments. The other students were amazed how much it
meant to me. But it was such a privilege, and still is. When I say the words of
institution at Communion, it is so powerful. This is Christ coming into action
here in our lives, and we get to ingest Christ into every cell of our
bodies.
Often discussion about women priests tends to center around
rights -- including feelings, needs and desires -- of the women who
feel the call, points out a female pastoral associate who cant risk
being named. Less often spoken, though not completely neglected, is the
deep hunger for other voices. The hunger to hear the gospel preached by someone
who knows your life.
Its that hunger that pushed Janice Sevre-Duszynska to
interrupt. Three years ago, she disrupted an ordination ceremony in Lexington,
Ky., urging the bishop to make her a new priest along with the man he was about
to ordain. Last November, she grabbed the microphone during a meeting of the
National Conference of Catholic Bishops to plead for ordination on behalf of
all women.
In the early years, some of the women she spoke for -- especially
those closest to home, in the conservative Lexington, Ky., diocese --
didnt welcome Sevre-Duszynskas taking their part so vigorously.
They felt we should try to go through proper channels,
she recalls ruefully. But Ive done that.
Sevre-Duszynska grows bolder every year, but women arent
shushing her anymore, and nobody has urged obedience or patience for a long
time. Im 51 years old, she says. To think that in this
day and age we still cant go to church and find feminine images of God or
a feminine presence at Mass -- its sinful! As far as Im concerned,
sexism is the original sin, because from it springs so many other injustices.
If men are against women, they are against the feminine in themselves, in the
earth, in the environment.
White adds that the exclusion of womens experience has
robbed us of the balance that men and women need with each other. We need each
other in order to be whole, to have balance, to know God. Her colleague,
the Rev. Giles Spoonhour, a married Catholic priest affiliated with the
Federation of Christian Ministries, says of Whites ordination,
Everybody was flying. I had to take the next day off, I was so
emotionally and spiritually exhausted. Heres a woman whos not only
a mother but a grandmother, sitting there in her alb holding her grandchildren
on her lap. The difference that makes is hard to put into words. It is almost
ineffable.
Women have been linked since time began with family, nurture and
the body. By excluding them from priesthood, says Spoonhour, you exclude that
entire realm from the sacramental reaches of the church, and what youre
left with is machismo. Its very confrontational. There is no
pluralism, no open debate, no possibility of compromise; you must toe the party
line. Its like a military organization, theyve silenced so many
theologians.
White talks easily about The Ruah. The Shekinah. There are
many names for God in the feminine form. Why were they so easily lost?
The metaphors a people uses for God come very much from where they
are, she says slowly. History tells us that. A trusting people will
have a daddy God, the Abba Jesus spoke of with such affection, while a warring
people will have a warring image of God. We tend to project onto God our
images, our conditioning -- when in reality, God is love.
One way OHara loosened her own conditioning was learning
sacred circle dances. One of her groups favorite songs is called
Washerwoman God, and it moves with the lively rhythm of a woman
caught up in her work. We call you mighty God, Father Eternal, Leader of
Armies, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, begin Martha Ann Kirks
lyrics. But you are (hit the beat hard) WASHERWOMAN GOD, we know you in
the waters. Washerwoman God, splashing, laughing free. If you didnt clean
the mess, where would we be?
Where, indeed, asks OHara, who has found spiritual cleansing
and refreshment in images of God as Mother and Father. After a recent home
liturgy, she carefully saved one of the readings, a re-visioning that began,
On the first day, she gave birth to light and darkness. They danced
together. On the second day, she gave birth to land and water. They
touched (from A God Who Looks Like Me).
Why I was born
Ordain women or stop baptizing them, demands the
bumper sticker.
Not in a hundred, not in a thousand, not in a million
years, the archbishop of Philadelphia, Cardinal Antony J. Bevilacqua, has
warned.
The first time I stood in the pulpit and preached,
recalls Williams, I had the sense that this was like breathing, it was so
natural, and I knew: This is why I was born. A lot of people never have a
moment like that in their lives.
At least, not officially. Most of the priestly work in the
church is being done by women, points out one whos done her share
of it, and who cant speak openly without jeopardizing her position.
Ministry to the sick, teaching the faith, leading worship, counseling,
working behind the scenes -- almost all women. When I was younger and folks
asked me, Would you want to be a priest? my answer was, I
already am, in mind and ministry. But I am mortally tired of
working for priests.
The shortage only compounds the frustration: Were not
exactly attracting the cream of the crop, she says bluntly. If a
man is reasonably average and not prone to embezzling or boffing little boys
and sticks to the course, he will be ordained, and he will be a pastor --
charged with the care of souls, supported for life, period. There are not many
wisdom figures coming out of the seminary these days. Actually, theres
hardly anyone coming out of the seminary these days.
Unless you look beyond the seminaries operated by the church.
At age 6, Ruth McDonough Fitzpatrick knelt obediently while her
big brothers took turns distributing the Necco wafer communion. But by the time
shed finished a degree in religious studies at Georgetown University, she
was ready to challenge convention.
In 1975, she attended the first-ever Womens Ordination
Conference. Planners expected a few hundred people -- and drew three times that
many. At the end of the meeting, the organizers asked if the women who
felt called to be priests would please stand, and almost 70 women stood,
recalls Fitzpatrick. It knocked the socks off everybody.
Five more years, they thought, and it would happen. Efforts
redoubled, and in 1977, an optimistic Womens Ordination Conference
decided to incorporate and hired Fitzpatrick as director. She wound up starting
a month early because the Vatican declaration against the ordination of
women, Inter Insigniores, had just come out. The whole sacramental
economy is in fact based upon natural signs, the declaration reads
There would not be this natural resemblance, which must exist
between Christ and his minister, if the role of Christ were not taken by a
man.
The words fell with a thud, crushing bright hopes.
Fitzpatricks first project was to encourage liturgies of protest around
the country. But when she went to St. Matthew Cathedral, right there in
Washington, officials stalled for a month. Finally the monsignor told us
the liturgy couldnt be inside because the church had to be open at all
times for tourists. So we held it on the steps outside, and shared wine and
bread with the homeless people. She pauses. Those closed doors were
extremely symbolic. And they are still closed today.
At the second conference on womens ordination, in 1978, the
conference invited the bishops. Only one came, Bishop Charles Buswell, now
retired, of Pueblo, Colo. Five years later, when the bishops decided to do a
pastoral letter on women, conference members urged them to change the focus.
Women arent the problem, they said. You didnt do
a pastoral on black people, you did it on racism. You didnt do it on poor
people, you did it on the economy. Do this one on sexism.
In 1992, Fitzpatrick and three other Womens Ordination
Conference members traveled to Czechoslovakia to meet women who had been
ordained in the underground church. With communication risky between
Czechoslovakia and Rome, the Vatican had authorized Czech bishops to ordain
people as they needed to without getting permission in every case. At least one
bishop had ordained several women, mainly so they could minister to women in
segregated prisons. When the repression lifted, the priests had to be
reevaluated individually, and the women were conveniently forgotten.
We found a married male Czech priest in the U.S., and he
helped us arrange to meet one of them, Ludmilla Javorova, recalls
Fitzpatrick. But when the group arrived in Prague, Fitzpatrick said, the
priest there told us the women were all dead. The American women
werent fooled. They had already arranged to meet Ludmilla two days
later.
Fitzgerald pauses, and her tone turns wry. That priest is
now a bishop. He earned his little hat.
Too fundamental
It took a while for Javorova to trust the American women, but soon
she was telling them how, when the Czech bishops voted at a secret synod about
whether to ordain women, and the vote tied, she ran out into the snow with
tears in her eyes. Her bishop came after her. Please ordain me! she
cried, and he said, I will.
Fitzpatrick thought ruefully of all the well-intentioned American
bishops. WOC was actually dialoguing with seven bishops, and probably
between 35 and 50 more would have gone along with ordaining women, she
says, but we always said that all we needed was three who would ordain
women now, as happened in the Episcopal church. And as much as those bishops
wanted to, they wouldnt dare.
Hoping to bolster the mens courage, the Womens
Ordination Conference and other groups brought Giorgi Otranto, a scholar at the
University of Bari in Italy, to discuss recent discoveries about early
Christianity: the mosaic from the Church of St. Praxidus in Rome, which shows
four bishops, among them a woman, Theodora; a fresco in which a woman, arms
upraised, appears to be officiating at a religious ceremony; inscriptions on
gravestones attesting to female priests named Leta, Flavia, Maria and Marta; a
fresco of women blessing bread in the Priscilla catacomb in Rome.
Otranto started a flurry of excited discussion that lasted long
after he returned to southern Italy. Then, in 1994, Pope John Paul II
proclaimed once more that women could not be ordained, and the Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith pronounced his statement infallible. It was intended
to be the end of the discussion.
The following year, the pope wrote a letter to women urging them
to be involved in society and predicting that their involvement would
force systems to be redesigned in a way which favors the processes of
humanization, which mark the civilization of love.
Then, just minutes away from the meeting of the National
Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Womens Ordination Conference held its
own conference with the theme A Discipleship of Equals. That
95 conference revealed that many women had lost patience with the stance
espoused by the Womens Ordination Conference. Leaders urged abandoning
church structures in favor of a nonhierarchical discipleship of
equals. Others, though, grabbed microphones to say no, that ordination
must come for women within the Catholic church.
The conference left the Womens Ordination Conference broke
and fragmented, and leaders spent the next five years facing the harsh reality
of red ink and divided opinions. The cause held them together -- that, and
members so loyal one took out a second mortgage on her house to help pay off
the conference costs. Now the conference has a new director, Genevieve Chavez,
1,800 members, and a lively billboard campaign that started when a young mother
saw the Chicago dioceses recruitment billboard. Looking for a sign
from God? Become a priest.
A group of women, since dubbed the Chicago Seven, drank a lot of
coffee and produced a billboard that says, Looking for a sign from God?
This is it. Ordain women. The billboard has been displayed in prominent
locations in Chicago, Milwaukee and Lexington, Ky.
A second billboard was produced and is now on display at nine
sites in the dioceses of Winona, Minn., La Crosse, Wis., and Dubuque, Iowa .
The Womens Ordination Conference hopes the billboards will galvanize
action and education.
The pope said we cant even discuss womens
ordination, notes Chavez, so the Catholic hierarchy cant say
a word about it. She says she has seen women tire of trying and drop out
of the debate altogether. I can give you the name of a nun who
doesnt go to Mass anymore, she says. On the other hand,
theres this whole new generation of young women coming up through the
Catholic ranks who can understand and name discrimination but are wanting to
hold onto their Catholic roots. Theyre the hope. Because its too
fundamental an issue to say, Its OK the way it is.
Women wont be fully equal, she adds, until we say that women, too,
can represent the divine.
Chavezs consolation is the research, scholarship and
theology thats been done in failures wake -- work that, had
Catholic women been ordained years ago, might never have been done. This April,
for example, Janice Sevre-Duszynska will leave for Rome, Naples and Tunisia
with archaeologist and theologian Dorothy Irvin, to investigate sites of
women presbyteras, episcopas and deaconesses. From there Sevre-Duszynska
will travel to Dublin, Ireland, as will the Womens Ordination
Conferences board, for the Womens Ordination Worldwide conference
June 29 to July 1. So far, women from 14 countries have registered. And then
Sevre-Duszynska will go home to Lexington, resume her studies at Lexington
Theological Seminary and continue looking for a bishop brave enough to ordain
her.
Problem is, she has to look blindfolded, whisper and tiptoe.
Everyone who knows a bishop who might be friendly honors the secrecy of
that bishop, notes Chavez, because the axe could fall on him at any
time. We want him to stay in the system.
For many women, though, stayings getting harder all the
time.
Maybe its the churchs turn to sit patiently, scrubbed
clean by a Washerwoman God and dressed in her finest, waiting for the
angels visit.
Jeannette Batzs e-mail address is
jeannette.batz@rftstl.com
National Catholic Reporter, March 9,
2001
|
|