Happy New Year!

Again, a simple greeting. You may be eager to see 2021 end. We will remember this year, or these two years, as historic. We pray that the number of deaths from COVID will never be repeated – yet we are fearful of global climate catastrophe. Despite our technological progress, can we keep people alive? At the same time, can we keep democracy alive, in the United States and around the globe? And in what shape will the Catholic Church survive?

These cheery thoughts are hard to follow, yet I find hope in our movement for the ordination of people of all genders. We have come to understand solidarity in a deeply profound way: one for all and all for one. We are not alone in our search for justice; like the Pope, we embrace the earth, the poor, the marginalized, at the same time we speak out for ourselves and for all those who are denied full participation in our faith.

It has not been a horrible year for the Women’s Ordination Conference, though there have been some horrible moments. Probably the worst was the codification in canon law of the “grave crime” of ordaining a woman (Canon 1379). As Kate McElwee says in her year-end letter, “This effort is theologically unsound, incompatible with our common understanding of the limitlessness of God’s call, and a form of spiritual violence. Our exclusion is one of the deepest wounds that the ‘field hospital’ of the church must heal before being able to move forward.”

We know that women priests existed in earlier eras because of the prohibitions issued by church authorities. In the same way, our actions are acknowledged by this canon and its punishment, self-excommunication. What is the result? How many masses led by women and non-binary people have you attended? On Zoom or in person? Locally or internationally? Many are replying to “the limitless call of God!”

WOC has offered scholarships to women studying for ordination, lifted up and gathered together Latina women, witnessed with allies at the UN and the USCCB, continued the ministry of irritation, and developed plans for strong participation in the Synod. I have taken this list from Kate’s year-end letter, but I want to focus on one item.

Usually I survey the Catholic press to know what’s going on about women in the church, but I do ask Google to alert me to secular sources on Roman Catholic women, priesthood, and ordination. They are important because more Catholics read them, I have no doubt, than read those Catholic sources I regularly follow. Kate notes one major such item this year, the New Yorker article by Margaret Talbot last June. Talbot presents portraits of RCWP priests from their own points of view, as well as the whole landscape surrounding ordination. But again, that’s a limited audience, though New Yorkers would not imagine that to be so.

Google kept bothering me in December this year with so many links that I finally decided to take a look, and I found three articles that are important because they were widely circulated. God bless the AP for moving the discussion into the secular press!

Do you know why I didn’t bother to read: “Barred from priesthood, some Catholic women find other roles”? Of course you do. Not again! This article by Claire Giangravé and David Crary is among the first of a series by Religion News Service, the Associated Press, and The Conversation about women in patriarchal religions. The authors begin with the glass ceiling, but quickly shift to prominent “nuns” in the Vatican and then in the US. They conclude with Carolyn Woo, former dean at Notre Dame and now retired as head of Catholic Relief Services, and Lucetta Scaraffia, who says she resigned because of Vatican restrictions as on her as editor of “Women Church World.” I note that the authors chose laywomen no longer in their “positions of power,” who are also the only ones quoted on women’s ordination. Woo says it “has taken up every ounce of oxygen.” (Good for us!) Scaraffia says: “women should have authority in Vatican and church departments as normal women, as lay women, who see things differently.”

This was published the same day as Deborah Whitehead’s introduction to the series, “Women-lead religious groups in many ways – besides the growing number who have been ordained.” She beings with Maureen Fiedler’s summary of at least eight ways women exercise leadership. Though she quotes Fiedler that “denominational leadership is hardest for women to achieve, because it involves real power,” Whitehead is affirming the narrative presented by Giangrave and Crary. She glances at women’s central roles in world religions, and then details the ordinations of Protestant and Jewish women in the US, especially beginning in the 1950s. Roman Catholics, Southern Baptists, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, and Muslims are then each  profiled as both failing to ordain women and generating resistance movements. Using statistics about top roles for women in American religions, Whitehead concludes that there’s still a stained glass ceiling.

Fourteen articles compose the series, and all are worth reading, but remember that I started this because I was thinking about the secular press. Google linked me most often to the first article on Roman Catholic women, published by outlets from the Washington Post and ABC News to the Durango Herald. I was linked to Whitehead’s piece three times, and once each to the Presbyterian Outlook on Black Churches and YahooNews about the Mormons. I am not going to pursue whether these various outlets published the whole series. My point is that Catholic women are news, more than other women in religion, and that more people have the opportunity to read about us.

To further make the point, I want to highlight an article by Nicole Winfield of the AP, “Catholic women urge Vatican to sign Europe rights convention.” She reports about a group of European women’s organizations who argue that the Vatican’s failure to sign on to the Council of Europe agreement to protect human rights reveals a different standard for itself than the Pope urges for others. Gender discrimination is only one of the features of the convention that the women highlight, but my point is that publications from US News to the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette picked this up. Catholic women again make the news, this time in the secular arena of human rights.

Other than wanting you to know about these important stories, I want to be optimistic about WOC’s prospects in 2022. While the Synod might not represent the fulfillment of our deepest hopes, we can use the opportunities it provides to continue to explain our cause in the public arena. We already represent the new way the Catholic Church will survive.

Happy New Year!