Commonweal: A Call of the Heart
Carol Crowley was a twenty-one-year-old student at Michigan State University when a parish staff member invited her to a Thanksgiving-weekend conference in Detroit on women and Catholic priesthood. Crowley had already discerned, with the help of priests at the student parish, that she was called to ordination, so when women with a calling were asked to stand at the conference, she was one of three hundred who rose to their feet. It was the first time she realized she was not alone.
The mood at the 1975 conference was electric and hopeful as more than 1,200 participants gathered to hear from feminist theologians such as Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Margaret Farley, and Anne Carr, and to network and strategize about how to challenge the patriarchal structures that prevented women’s inclusion in all ministries in the Church. (Five hundred people were turned away at the door for lack of space.)