Jeannine Gramick, SL

When I attended the first Women’s Ordination Conference that gathered over Thanksgiving weekend in 1975 in Detroit, I was brimming with enthusiasm and anticipation. The year before I had attended the ordination of the Episcopal women in Philadelphia. Surely our Roman Church would ordain women within the next decade! But gradually T.S. Eliot’s words rang in my head: “A cold coming we had of it.” More than two score years of rejection, heartache, grief, and anger at the sluggishness of the institutional Church. Now I meditate on the words of Mother Theresa Gerhardinger, the foundress of the School Sisters of Notre Dame: “All the works of God proceed slowly and in pain, but their roots are the sturdier and their flowering the lovelier.” I look at WOC and know that the roots of ministerial priesthood will be sturdier and the flowers of service even lovelier. WOC gives me hope!