The 2025 Awardees of the Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship
The Women’s Ordination Conference and the Durkin-Dierks Family are happy to announce the awardees of the 2025 Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship:
Catherine Cavanagh
Annie Girresch
Please join us in celebrating the courage and resilience of Catherine and Annie, who walk a prophetic path toward equality. We challenge our Church to open its doors to truly listen to their voices and learn from their experiences. God is calling them to lead!
Meet Our 2025 Awardees
Annie Girresch
Catherine Cavanagh
Catherine Cavanagh
Catherine Cavanagh has worked as an educator and Catholic chaplain for thirty-five years, both in Canada and in Africa. She is addicted to theology (and chocolate), and loves to write about God and justice. Her deep interest in unexplored areas of ministry involving women, youth and the Catholic church led her to complete a Doctorate in Ministry focused on ministry across diversity in Ontario’s publicly funded Catholic schools (University of Toronto, Regis College, 2018).
The author of Women Priests: Answering the Call as well as many articles, essays and short stories, she believes we are all God’s beloved and that we come closest to God when we reach out to others, especially those most marginalized.
Catherine is inspired by groups and individuals – like Women’s Ordination Conference, Catholic Network of Women’s Equality, Catholic workers, the SOA Watch, Sabeel, Community Peacemakers, and so many others – who follow their conscience in spite of heavy costs.
While still engaged part-time in ministry to high school students, Catherine is finally answering a profound and life-giving call to ordination within the United Church of
Canada. She no longer sees the edges of her Catholic identity as walls, but rather as blurred lines which allow her to live and work in other spaces which she can also call home.
Catherine is extremely grateful to the Lucile Murray Durkins scholarship for their assistance in helping her complete the necessary courses to pursue her path to ordination. It is a blessing and a gift to continue to feel the support of the many women and men with whom she has travelled for so many years in this quest for full equality and justice for all within the Catholic tradition.
Proud mother of Deborah and Luke, and hopelessly in love with Brian after 36 years of marriage, she would also like to thank all of her family and friends for their support.
Annie Girresch
Annie is an ordained deacon with Roman Catholic Womenpriests USA. She is passionate about end of life care and the intersection of spirituality, healing, and cultural change.
Annie’s call to priesthood has been shaped by her background as a union and community organizer, her training during her Masters in Divinity at Eden Theological Seminary, and her work in death care. Together, these experiences lead Annie to be of service to liberation.
She sees priesthood as a form of doula work, a way to be of service to the dying of this world and the birthing of what will resurrect from its ashes. She sees Catholic sacrament, queer feminist spirituality and church practices of communal care as critical tools that can hold us together through times of great change, aiding the process of transformation on the individual, communal
and cultural levels.
She currently serves as a hospice chaplain, end of life doula and spiritual director. This fall she will be studying the art of ecstatic grief ritual with the Sacred Groves Grief Tender Mentoring Program. Annie continues to discern and work towards priestly ordination with her community, the Midwest Region of Roman Catholic Women Priests.
She is also learning to center her artistic creation more in her life, especially through music and writing. When not doing all that serious stuff, she likes to play with her niblings, go dancing or kayaking, and play kickball.
About the Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship
Since 2017, the Women’s Ordination Conference has awarded nearly $40,000 to women and non-binary leaders discerning their ministry.
Meet our past scholarship recipientsWho was Lucile Murray Durkin? Support the scholarship fund