"I will disobey this unjust law"

On Monday, a dozen women will be ordained Catholic priests in a forbidden ceremony in Pittsburgh. But can the womenpriests movement ever succeed?

By Angela Bonavoglia

Read more: Religion, Feminism, Catholicism, Life

July 31, 2006 | On Monday, 12 women in bright white robes will board the Majestic, the flagship of the Gateway Clipper fleet, at the Station Square dock in Pittsburgh. The ship will become a floating church -- and the stage for what might be the most central controversy in Catholicism today. The robed women are in the vanguard of the growing womenpriests movement, the most flamboyant and incendiary challenge to the Roman Catholic Church's unrelenting discrimination against women. Declaring herself "present" (in Latin, ad sum), each of the 12 will be ordained priests or deacons by women bishops -- themselves secretly ordained to the episcopacy by active Roman Catholic male bishops whose names will remain locked in a vault until they die. This ceremony is totally verboten: Women's ordination or even advocating for it is forbidden by the Catholic Church, under pain of excommunication, which means no sacraments, ever, not even a Catholic burial.

By their visibility and accessibility, a small band of women are forcing a confrontation. They are asking, Is sexism a sin? How does the church reconcile its teaching that women and men are created in God's image, that once baptized, there is "no male or female" and "all are one in Christ Jesus," with its contention that women cannot represent the ultimate sacred or hold ultimate power through ordination because they are, literally, the wrong "substance"? The statement from the Diocese of Pittsburgh condemning the ordinations asserted this argument against women's ordination: that priests must resemble Jesus physically. That belief is based, in part, on the notion of the substance of a sacrament: in the case of the Eucharist, bread and wine; and of holy orders, a man. Comparing people to food, the press release said: "Just as a priest cannot consecrate the Eucharist if he uses something other than unleavened white bread and wine from grapes, so too a bishop cannot confer Holy Orders on anyone other than a baptized man."

The organizer of this event, who will become a priest Monday, is Joan Clark Houk, 66. With a wide smile and cropped salt-and-pepper hair, she is a cradle Catholic who remembers May crownings, daily rosaries and Catholic Daughters. Like many other Catholic women -- myself included -- her love for the faith, the Eucharist and the Mass, the rituals and traditions, is deep and indelible. "From my birth as a Catholic through this day, I have never doubted my Catholicism, never been away from the Church. I am Catholic, and will always be Catholic, " she wrote in her letter to Bishop Donald W. Wuerl, then head of the Pittsburgh Diocese, telling him about her upcoming ordination. She also took aim at Canon 1024, which restricts ordination to baptized men. "It is a sin for the Church to discriminate against women and blame God for it," she declared. "In obedience to the Gospel of Jesus, I will disobey this unjust law."

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The Roman Catholic womenpriests movement came into public view on June 29, 2002, when seven women were ordained priests on the river Danube between Austria and Germany, out of any bishops' clear jurisdiction. Presiding was the controversial Argentine Bishop Romulo Antonio Braschi. Though no longer in good standing with Rome, he had been ordained a bishop and could therefore provide the apostolic succession required for ordination. In church speak, the new women priests consider themselves ordained validly but illicitly (because of canon law). Within two months, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, excommunicated all seven women and publicly chastised them for having "wounded" the church.

That action did nothing to quell the movement, which advocates "a new model of priestly ministry," a servant rather than an imperial priesthood, and seeks no break from Rome. In the years since the first ordinations -- as Muslim women have boldly led prayer services and the first female bishop has risen to head the U.S. Episcopal Church -- another 32 women (including today's 12) have been ordained Catholic deacons or priests, and 120 more are in training. These events have taken place on the Saone River near Lyon, France; Lake Constance between Germany and Switzerland; the St. Lawrence, between the United States and Canada; and in Barcelona, Spain. Secret "catacomb" ordinations have been held, too.

Today's ordinands are both longtime activists and more sedate recruits. One of the most notorious in church circles is Janice Sevre- Duszynska, to be ordained a deacon today (the step before priestly ordination for these women). She once presented herself at the ordination of a male seminarian at the Cathedral in Lexington, Ky., asking Bishop Kendrick Williams to ordain her, too. Sevre-Duszynska crashed the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting in Washington in 2000, taking over the mike to read her "Statement for Justice for Women in the Church" until her power was cut off. An ardent peace activist, she has served time in the federal prison for civil disobedience. She thinks Catholic clerics should be out there doing the same. As she said to me, "Why aren't Catholic bishops out in front of the Senate Office Building or the Pentagon in sackcloth and ashes crying out for an end to the Iraq war?"

Houk's history in the church is lower key. Active in parish ministry for 30 years, she has prepared Catholics to receive the sacraments, conducted Christian education classes, and pastored two parishes without resident priests. Her call blossomed when she got her master of divinity degree at Notre Dame University in Indiana, sitting side by side with male seminarians, learning how to preside at Mass, celebrate Eucharist, hear confessions and anoint the dying.

Like many of the other women being ordained today, Houk is not celibate. She has been married for 30 years and has six children and five grandchildren. One of today's ordinands is divorced. Another describes herself as "lesbian by birth." Bridget Mary Meehan, a petite woman with a tight cap of blond hair, cheerily declares herself a "freelance nun" because her order is out of the pope's jurisdiction. She also heads Women-Church Convergence, a national association of women's worship communities, many of which have been quietly ordaining women priests for 30 years, since the founding of the U.S.-based Women's Ordination Conference.

In fact, the womenpriests movement did not spring out of whole cloth but has its roots in the worldwide movement for women's ordination in the Catholic Church. The women who launched the U.S. movement in the 1970s were energized -- as are women today -- by the legendary "Philadelphia 11," who in 1974 forced open the doors of the priesthood in the U.S. Episcopal Church. They were "irregularly" ordained by retired and resigned Episcopal bishops, an action that resulted in the denomination's approval of women's ordination the following year.

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As I've traveled around the country talking with women about the church, why they stay, what they love, what they're fighting to change, invariably a woman --sometimes young, most of the time older -- will rise and share her great dismay at the thought of women priests. Indeed, the Catholic Church is steeped in a rich sacramental tradition, and some cannot separate that tradition from the men who have claimed to exclusively represent it. But that has been changing. While in the 1970s, 29 percent of Catholics supported women's ordination, today some 60 percent do. In addition, as Peter Steinfels, author of "A People Adrift: The Crisis in the Roman Catholic Church in America," explains, "the burden of proof has shifted." It used to be that advocates had to explain why women should be priests; today, the hierarchy has to explain why not.

Frankly, in attempting to defend the church's ban on women's ordination, Catholic spokespeople sound a little like used-car salesmen. They have a lot full of old models. You don't like this argument? No problem. What about the one over there? The Last Supper used to anchor a central argument. There, the teaching holds, Jesus commissioned the 12 male apostles to be the only leaders of his church, from whom all other leaders, male too, had to proceed. The idea of ordination came much later. The problem is, no one knows who was at that Passover meal. And, as theologian Elizabeth Johnson once said in a lecture, do we really think that Jesus, who was so welcoming to women followers, decided that night to leave all the women, including his mother, out in the cold? To which I would add another question: If women were allowed at the meal (which they had probably prepared), then when Jesus said over the bread and wine, "Do this in remembrance of me," did he also say, "only you guys"?

Next page: When applied to women, "apostle" doesn't mean apostle and "ordained" doesn't mean ordained