NCR: Women’s ordination movement has always been about ‘more than ordination’
It’s time to completely rethink what ordination could look like in the Catholic Church, said one keynote speaker at the 50th anniversary celebration of the Women’s Ordination Conference.
More than 200 attendees at the May 22-24 Women’s Ordination Conference’s mourned the members who have died since the first gathering in 1975, examined the first flourishing of the movement in its early years, shook their heads — and sometimes their fists — at the backlash against their efforts that followed, and dared to celebrate the Catholic Church’s more recent commitment to synodality and the bit of hope it brings them that women could someday be ordained priests.
Keynote speaker Natalia Imperatori-Lee, an associate professor of systematic theology at Fordham University, said that while the efforts of Pope St. Paul VI, Pope Benedict XVI and especially Pope St. John Paul II to crush the movement are over, the church has been infected by a “masculine Christianity” that casts feminism as “incompatible with the Catholic faith” and embraces “the ‘new feminism’ promoted by right-wing Catholics, or what we call old-school sexism.”