Washington Post: Ruth Fitzpatrick, who fought to ordain female priests, dies at 90
“We will not accept men telling women they can’t be priests because that’s the way God wants it,” Ms. Fitzpatrick once said. “She does not!”
Ruth M. Fitzpatrick, a prominent and fierce advocate for the ordination of women as priests who called the Catholic Church “the last of the sexist institutions,” died June 15 at a long-term-care center near her home in Fairfax County, Va. She was 90.
The cause was cerebral arteriosclerosis, said her son John Fitzpatrick.
As the longtime national coordinator of the Women’s Ordination Conference, a Washington-based group she initially helped run from her dining room table, Ms. Fitzpatrick was an often combative champion for Catholic women who had, like her, felt the priestly calling of God.