July 21, 2005
Women’s holy struggle
With or without Church support, women answer call to the cloth
By MEGAN GILLIS, Ottawa Sun
WEARING FLOWING white robes, the nine will board a boat and set sail for the middle of the St. Lawrence.
On the water, as the late afternoon sun turns golden, two bishops will ask them if they are ready for the sacrament of ordination. They’ll answer and prostrate themselves on the boat’s deck as the Litany of the Saints is chanted.
The bishops will silently lay hands on them, anoint them with oil and place red stoles around their necks.
Then they’ll celebrate mass, going among hundreds of friends to deliver wine and fresh-baked bread.
But according to the Roman Catholic Church, these aren’t priests and deacons but renegades.
They’re women.
Like seven women "ordained" on the Danube in 2002, they may be excommunicated, along with the bishops who will preside at Monday’s ceremony off Gananoque.
Former nun Michele Birch-Conery, 65, the lone Canadian, said she can no longer wait quietly for the church to change.
"The road is made by walking," she said. "What will it do in people’s hearts? It will be the people who decide this, not the hierarchy."
About 450 people of all faiths — from Mexico to Japan — will gather at Carleton University this weekend for the second Women’s Ordination Worldwide Conference.
"We’re coming together to celebrate women’s call to priesthood and make it clear we have a right to an equal place in all churches," local organizer Virginia Lafond said.
"We’re fully human beings, we are fully baptized, we are fully able to receive all seven sacraments if we’re called to the priesthood."
Many Catholic women are afraid to speak out, she said. Nuns can be expelled from their orders and theologians at Catholic universities can be fired. Some have backed out of making presentations at the conference.
"We’re definitely on the margins speaking of women’s ordination," Lafond said. "We’re definitely breaking the rules."
But activists say there’s growing support for the idea. A National Post poll before Pope John Paul II’s 2002 visit to Toronto found 8-in-10 Canadian Catholics favour female priests. But the conference and ordination ceremony are being greeted with official silence from church leaders.
"Silence is the new weapon," Lafond said.
Ottawa’s archbishop has told his priests to keep silent. Marcel Gervais sent a letter to them earlier this month saying that the aims of the conference go against official teachings.
"I would count on all of you to refrain from offering any public statements, or public prayers – for or against — in connection with it, as this gathering is taking place completely outside the realm of our faith," Gervais wrote.
The archbishop counseled silence because there’s nothing to talk about, said Father Bob Bedard of St. Mary’s Parish, the founder of the Companions of the Cross.
"It’s not a question," he said. "Why would we want to waste time talking about something that can’t change?"
Priests are fathers to God’s people and women can’t be fathers as men can’t be mothers, Bedard said. Jesus broke society’s taboos but he didn’t choose female leaders.
There’s no need to condemn the illicit ordination, however.
"It would be invalid — women can’t be ordained," Bedard said. "You can go ahead and try to do it. Say you’re doing it. It doesn’t happen."
Dissenters are free to leave for faiths that ordain women, such as the Anglican and Lutheran churches, Bedard said.
"There’s always that option."
Former mayor Marion Dewar, a keynote speaker at the weekend conference, isn’t going anywhere.
Dewar said that like many Catholics, she was disappointed after Pope John XXIII’s promise to throw open the windows and let in fresh air with the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council in the early 1960s.
But she has stayed with her faith and used its teachings to work for peace, women’s equality and justice for the poorest.
"We have to keep the dialogue open, make sure it’s taking place," Dewar said. "I’m too old to be angry. We have to look at the scriptures seriously. Jesus himself didn’t marginalize women. Nor did he operate in a hierarchy."
She has attended the round church of St. Basil’s with her family for decades.
"What keeps me there is the richness of the liturgy, the beauty of the scriptures and the desire to come to understand and learn," Dewar said. "I feel very strongly that it’s our church. We’re all people of God."
Dr. Carolyn Sharp, a theologian at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, compares denying ordination to women to apartheid and argues its basis is no more logical.
As Anglicans began ordaining women — sparked by the "irregular" 1974 ordination of 11 American deaconesses by retired bishops — Rome had to respond, she said.
Pope Paul VI argued that women can’t be ordained because they don’t bear a natural resemblance to Christ.
Two decades later, Pope John Paul II said the church has no authority to ordain women and the question was closed.
Yet a 1976 Vatican commission found that nothing in the Bible forbids ordaining women, Sharpsaid.
"This makes as much sense as the Afrikaans Reformed Church that said apartheid was based in the Bible," she said.
The church is the poorer for it.
"As a Roman Catholic, I feel my hierarchy impoverishes my church," Sharp said. "It’s telling me I cannot have ministry at the hands of gifted women. I can teach guys who can barely get a C in theology and they can be ordained. The gifted young woman who would be a great preacher, a gifted counselor, an excellent leader, cannot."
But she believes the St. Lawrence ceremony is a desperate gesture that will mystify most Catholics.
"The conference in Ottawa is the important event," Sharp said. "The reason the Roman Catholic Church is going to ordain women — when it does ordain women — is because the Roman Catholic faithful say this is what we want.
"Sooner or later, they’re going to give in. That’s the trouble with having a 2,000-year-old history."
megan.gillis@ott.sunpub.com