By Marian Ronan

Marian Ronan gave the following keynote speech at the Southeast Pennsylvania Women’s Ordination Conference (SEPA WOC), event on March 12, 2005, which kicked off WOC's 30th Anniversary celebration.

When, in 1974, 1,900 Roman Catholic women, myself included, gathered in Detroit for the first Women’s Ordination Conference, we could hardly imagine the impact that that meeting, and the movement that grew out of it, would have. Thirty years later, we gather here in Philadelphia to celebrate the most significant of those achievements, and to thank those who have labored for them over the years.

• We begin by celebrating the hundreds of women, known and unknown, who because of their devotion to God and God’s people, have accepted ordination as Catholic priests and bishops. (After each cause for celebration, I invite you to respond “Amen.”).

• We likewise celebrate the thousands of Catholic women who, although they have not yet found a way to be ordained, have remained faithful to the call they believe is theirs.

• We celebrate the more than 53,000 women who are lay pastoral ministers in the American church.

• We celebrate the uncounted number of women Eucharistic ministers and lectors, and the 58% of all altar servers who are women and girls. Life in Catholic parishes is more just and healing because of them.

• We celebrate the 387 women administrators of parishes in the United States.

• We celebrate as well the women who hold nearly half the administrative positions in Roman Catholic dioceses, including the thirty who are diocesan chancellors.

• We celebrate the 85% of Catholic chaplains nationwide who are women, and thank them for bringing God’s mercy to students, the sick, the imprisoned, and those in the armed services.

• We celebrate the many Catholic women preparing for ministry in Catholic and Protestant theological schools across the country, and the 22,332 women—63% of all students—studying in lay ministry programs.

• We celebrate the many American Catholic women teaching and writing about the Christian faith in its myriad manifestations.

• We celebrate American women religious whose leadership has been crucial in the movement for women’s ordination and who today comprise some of the most thoroughgoing feminist communities on earth.

• We celebrate the 70% of American Catholics who favor the ordination of women.

• We celebrate the WOC staff and board members who have labored long and hard for the ordination of women over the years.

• And finally, we celebrate ourselves, and our sisters and brothers in the movement for Catholic women’s ordination, that we have remained faithful, as best we are able, to the Spirit’s call.

II

It is apparent, then, that we have much to celebrate. But we must acknowledge that if we have much to celebrate, we also have much to mourn. For many of the hopes that were born in us that first weekend in Detroit have not come to fruition.

Some of these losses stem from the fact that, after the electrifying breakthroughs of Vatican II, many aspects of Roman Catholicism in this country and around the world have become increasingly conservative in the worst senses of that word.

Of course, I am thinking here, in part at least, of the institutional church. That church, under the brilliant leadership of Pope John Paul II., has moved steadily to the right. This move to the right is not limited to Catholic teaching on sexuality and gender. It also involves the suppression of liberation theology more broadly, an area in which the church once provided international leadership. It further entails direct institutional interventions into socio-political questions that have grave implications for large populations. I am thinking here, in particular, of Vatican and hierarchical alliances with conservative Christians and Muslims to block all levels of reproductive freedom and particularly the use of condoms in the battle against HIV/AIDS. These interventions also include efforts by members of the American hierarchy to influence the 2004 US presidential election.

For us in the women’s ordination movement, this move to the right has meant the institution’s total refusal to enter into public dialogue with us. At the same time, Vatican statements on women and women’s ordination have become ever more repressive. and after years of condemnation, the Vatican now attempts to appropriate feminist theology, repackaged as “the new feminism,” for its own purposes.

Decisions by Catholic communities like Spiritus Christi in Rochester, the Community of the Christian Spirit here in Philadelphia, and our sisters in Europe, to ordain Catholic women, are, in part responses to this steady move to the right by the institutional church. However much we celebrate the ordinations of our sisters, then, we must also acknowledge that there is much here for us to grieve—losses and divisions we deeply regret.

But we cannot blame all the losses of recent years on the institutional church. For it is often the case that groups struggling against more powerful bodies take on some of the characteristics of those bodies, even becoming, in some respects, a mirror image of their adversaries. This is happening in our movement, and it’s something we need to change.

To better understand the mechanism that has inclined us to replicate the values we oppose, I turn briefly to the work of the sociologist Gene Burns. In The Frontiers of Catholicism, Burns suggests that Vatican II, like most significant events, had unintended as well as intended consequences. In order to become part of the modern world, the Church at Vatican II gave up some of its claims to absolute truth that served previously as the foundation of its authority. One of these was its assertion of authority over the state. Another was the teaching that only Roman Catholics could be saved. The renunciation of both of these teachings was essential if the church was to enter the modern world.

But powerful institutions resist abandoning their claims to authority. And so the church turned to sexuality and gender for its foundational teaching after Vatican II. It did so because traditional church teaching maintains that gender and sexuality, unlike the dominance of church over state, is based not in revelation, but in natural law. And all people, not just Catholics, are required to obey natural law. Thus the institutional church is entitled—in fact, obligated—to force its sex/gender teachings on all of society.

This shift in emphasis from revelation to natural law has resulted in a new authoritative hierarchy of Catholic teaching. Sex and gender ideology occupies the highest place within this new hierarchy. Sine Vatican II, opposition to abortion, homosexual practice, and the ordination of women has become the most serious obligation facing Catholics. Doctrine, strangely enough, now occupies only the middle level. Because Vatican II acknowledged the right to religious freedom, practically speaking, Catholic doctrine is now obligatory for Catholics only. The Vatican would look ridiculous if it went to the UN to demand belief in Jesus Christ as it regularly demands curtailment of the use of condoms. The third and lowest level of the post-Vatican II hierarchy of Catholic teaching is social teaching. Because the church has renounced its control over the state, Catholic teaching on justice and peace is entirely optional, even for Catholics.

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick demonstrated the way the top and intermediate levels of this new hierarchy work—that is, the subordination of Catholic doctrine to Catholic teaching on sexuality and gender—in a recent interview on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. In this interview the cardinal mentioned Life (which, we all know, has a capital L) and the Gospel of Life multiple times but never mentioned the name of Jesus Christ. Similarly, the pastor of a liberal parish in Berkeley illustrated the optional nature of Catholic social teaching when he announced publicly that although the war in Iraq was unjust, those who support it continue to be valued members of the parish.

The implications of this new hierarchy of church teaching for the ordination of women is obvious: the ordination of women violates the highest level of Catholic teaching. Women’s ordination may also, of course, be a matter of social justice, but social justice falls to the bottom of the Catholic hierarchy. Despite their support for women’s ordination, most American Catholics, even liberal Catholic, conform to this new post-Vatican II hierarchy of Catholic teaching. Roughly 70% of American Catholics favor the ordination of women, but in the recent election, 52% of the Catholic electorate voted for an administration adamantly opposed to major aspects of Catholic social teaching. In fact, some women’s ordination activists will think it inappropriate that I am bringing up these quote-unquote political issues at all in a talk on women’s ordination. For many of us, ordination is quite separate from other issues of social justice.

The response of many reform Catholics to the clergy sex abuse crisis is another instance of conformity to the new ideological hierarchy. The sexual abuse of children and young people is, of course, reprehensible. And there can be no doubt that the handling of sex abuse allegations by some Catholic bishops was scandalous. But American Catholic bishops also behaved badly between 1990 and 2004 when they closed 794 inner city Catholic schools, most of them Black and Hispanic, while building new schools and churches in the mostly white suburbs. I note, however, that national groups of outraged white Catholics did not spring up to protest these closings. For most Catholics and other Americans, sexual violation is a far more serious matter than the violation of poor minority communities.

There is no evidence to suggest that Roman Catholic priests are more guilty of sex abuse than public school teachers, and they are far less guilty of it than the members of the families of a large number sex abuse victims. Some of us justify our outrage at priestly sexual abuse by asserting that the church is called to a higher standard than families or teachers. But it seems to me just as likely that the sex abuse crisis provides an opportunity for us to avenge ourselves on an institution that has dashed our dearest hopes since Vatican II. The bishops’ program of sex and gender discrimination has long been based on the innocence of the fetus; now we can fight back with the innocence of child sex abuse victims.

I repeat: The bishops’ program of sex and gender discrimination has long been based on the innocence of the fetus; now we can fight back with the innocence of child sex abuse victims.

We must recognize, however, that single issue advocacy is rarely ethical. The bishops have betrayed the American Catholic community on a number of questions, but they are still progressive on some important justice issues, and have, in the past, exerted national influence. Unbridled liberal attacks on the bishops regarding sex abuse have weakened that influence. In 2002, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia referred implicitly to Catholic clergy sex abuse in his dismissal of the bishops’ opposition to the execution of the mentally retarded; the bishops’ attitudes regarding crime and punishment, Scalia said, are far from representative even of the views of Catholics. Similarly, SNAP, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, attacked the election last fall of William Skylstad as president of the US Conference of Catholic bishops because the diocese of Spokane, under his leadership, declared bankruptcy in the face of massive sex abuse claims. But Bishop Skylstad also urged members of his diocese to consider a wide range of social justice issues when they went to the polls in November. I seriously doubt that SNAP would have protested the election of several other candidates whose dioceses did not declare bankruptcy but who also did not remind the faithful of their obligation to consider all justice issues, mot only abortion, when voting. How easy it is to argue that unlimited restitution to sex abuse victims is the only value the church should acknowledge. But as the editor of America, Thomas Reese, warns, such settlements create a new class of victims –those who no longer receive the essential social services that have been ended or curtailed by the size of these settlements.

Those of use who allow clergy sex abuse to trump all other issues show ourselves to be at one with the values of the institutional church: sex and gender are the most important issues of all. The gospel is secondary, and social justice draws up the rear.

III  

We see then, that with the best intentions in the world, those of us in the women’s ordination movement, and reform Catholics more broadly, have some problems that we need to address.

With the ordination of Mary Ramerman at Spiritus Christi in 2001 and of Ida Raming and her companions on the Danube in 2002, the movement for Catholic women’s ordination entered a new era. Actions undertaken previously by a few small faith communities have now become public. Excommunicated or not, these ordained women and their successors remind those within and on the margins of the institution that women can be Catholic priests.

This new era also offers us in the women’s ordination movement an opportunity to contest the institution’s minimization of the gospel and social justice since Vatican II. We can do this by living out our own Catholic feminist hierarchy of values. That is, we must explicitly integrate the struggle for women’s ordination and gender equality in the church with other struggles for social justice.

How do we do this? I have two recommendations.

First of all, Catholic faith communities that now ordain women should go out of their way to ordain women—and men—who do not have academic theological training, that is to say, who do not have seminary degrees or even college educations. In saying this, I am echoing the recommendation made by the African American Catholic scholar, Sheila Briggs, at the WOC conference in Milwaukee in the year 2000. By limiting ordination to those with advanced theological education, we exclude large numbers of God’s people who lack the cultural and financial capital to avail themselves of such training. Some of these excluded Catholics will be people of color.

In saying this I am not recommending that we stop ordaining people with seminary educations. But it is essential that the Eucharist sometimes be celebrated in Catholic communities by those whom Jesus came to call: the poor and the marginalized. Baptist churches practice what they call “local ordination.” They ordain members of a local congregation who are leaders by virtue of their long-term commitment and moral example. Clergy with local ordination cannot carry their ordination to another church, but they do play liturgical roles in their home churches. National WOC has taken a step in this direction by offering scholarships to women in ministry certificate programs as well as in graduate seminary programs. We need to move farther in this direction.

My second recommendation is that we expand our concept of ordination to explicitly include women with prophetic as well as ritual and pastoral gifts. The Jewish and Christian scriptures offer multiple examples of prophets who stood up for the poor and the oppressed. We must take prophetic traditions as much into account as priestly ones when we choose leaders for our Catholic communities.

When I say that we must begin to anoint the women prophets among us, I am not thinking primarily of those involved in charitable endeavors—that is to say, the works of mercy. We must do the works of mercy, of course, but that is not enough. I mean, rather, that we should recognize and ordain women who, as followers of Jesus Christ, critique, teach and organize against the social and economic forces that oppress women and men around the world.

To make this second recommendation more concrete, I now offer three examples of the kind of Catholic women prophets we ought to be ordaining if we really want to break from the values hierarchy of the post-Vatican II institutional church. Two of these women have not been primarily involved with the movement for women’s ordination, but we ought to be involved with them, because of their extraordinary commitment to the well-being of God’s people around the world. .

• The first of these is Maria Riley, an Adrian Dominican Sister who is the coordinator of the Global Women's Project at the Center of Concern in Washington, DC. Maria has been active in global women's issues since 1975, helping to found and lead several coalitions working to bring women's experience and women's perspective to world economic issues. Her extensive writing and speaking about the impact of global economic integration on women and girls inspires many.

• My second example is Nancy Small. Between 1995 and 2001, Nancy was executive director of the nation’s largest Catholic peace organization, Pax Christi USA. While at Pax Christi USA Nancy led that 97% white organization in confronting its own racism. In 2001, she also spearheaded the group’s decision to cancel its annual assembly rather than un-invite its keynote speaker when ordered to do so by the Catholic university where the meeting was to occur. Though on record as opposing abortion as part of its consistent ethic of life, the group had invited as its keynoter a major figure in the civil rights and non-violence movements without realizing that he was also publicly pro-choice. In declining to drop the speaker, Nancy noted that it was the practice of Pax Christi USA not to make judgments about the moral fitness of individuals based on any single issue.

• The third example I wish to bring to your attention is M. Carmen Lane. Carmen is a black Catholic lesbian feminist, artist, and activist working as an educator in the anti-sexual assault movement in Cleveland, Ohio. Carmen is a member of WOC’s Young Feminist Network and currently serves on the YFN Leadership Committee. In addition to her work against sexual assault, Carmen calls us to increase the membership of women of color in our own movement. She tells us: “If we do not do our work to include the women who live on the margins, women will never be ordained. (Anti-oppression) work is not separate from our women's ordination work. It is the work of ordination.”

Of course we know that other members of the movement for women’s ordination are also justice and peace activists—opposing the war, for example, demonstrating against the School of the Americas, lobbying Congress. We must do a better job, however, of making these overlapping commitments an explicit part of WOC’s public identity. We must increase the women of color in our membership. We must insert links on our web pages to Maria Riley’s global women’s project, to anti-CAFTA organizing at the Quixote Center, to lobbying efforts at Network. We must invite Catholic women prophets as well as feminist theologians and spiritual leaders to speak at our conferences and write in our publications, and more of these speakers must be women of color. We must march together in justice and peace protests, carrying signs that say who we are.

Since the invasion of Iraq and last November’s presidential election it has become evident that the United States and the global community face life and death challenges. In response to these challenges, we in the movement for women’s ordination must commit ourselves to bringing together prophecy and priesthood in our work for women’s equality in the church. The Gospel of Jesus Christ requires nothing less of us.

Thank you.

Marian Ronan

March 12, 2005

© Marian Ronan 2005