Womanpriest

Tradition and Transgression in the Contemporary Roman Catholic Church

Jill Peterfeso

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780823288274
• eBook ISBN: 9780823288298
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia sociale

This book is openly available in digital formats thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. While some Catholics and even non-Catholics today are asking if priests are necessary, especially given the ongoing sex-abuse scandal, The Roman Catholic Womanpriests (RCWP) looks to reframe and reform Roman Catholic priesthood, starting with ordained women. Womanpriest is the first academic study of the RCWP movement. As an ethnography, Womanpriest analyzes the womenpriests' actions and lived theologies in order to explore ongoing tensions in Roman Catholicism around gender and sexuality, priestly authority, and religious change.In order to understand how womenpriests navigate tradition and transgression, this study situates RCWP within post–Vatican II Catholicism, apostolic succession, sacraments, ministerial action, and questions of embodiment. Womanpriest reveals RCWP to be a discrete religious movement in a distinct religious moment, with a small group of tenacious women defying the Catholic patriarchy, taking on the priestly role, and demanding reconsideration of Roman Catholic tradition. Doing so, the women inhabit and re-create the central tensions in Catholicism today.

Chapter 1

Called

WHEN SHE WAS A child, Victoria Rue played priest. Growing up as the oldest of eight in a “good Catholic family” in Downey, California, the young Rue distributed Necco Wafers to neighborhood children. She would place the chalky candy discs upon her playmates' tongues in imitation of the pre–Vatican II practice of the time. As an adult, Rue recalls this practice with much animation and vocal inflection—she is, after all, according to her partner Kathryn Poethig, a “theater person.” Rue believes this childhood game was an early sign of God calling her to priestly ministry.1

Other Roman Catholic Womenpriests (RCWP) women tell similar stories. When she was six years old, Juanita Cordero also reenacted the Communion ritual with Necco Wafers. When she was five years old, Gabriella Velardi Ward played Mass and told family members that she would be a priest when she grew up. Mary Grace Crowley-Koch led fellow preschoolers in Eucharistic celebrations at age four. Kathleen Kunster was not raised Catholic, but as a child she learned about Roman Catholicism during her school's required religious education lessons. She played Mass with the young boy next door, who wore his brother's cassock and informed Kathleen she could never be a priest. Her solution: she would play the Virgin Mary. In retrieving their girlhood memories, these women weave narratives of call and use their childhood behavior to help explain why they disobeyed canon law and became ordained through the RCWP movement.2

This book begins with call narratives, where so many womenpriests start their stories. In conducting interviews and reading womenpriests' autobiographies, I quickly found that women loved talking about their journeys to RCWP. I also found that, despite initial appearances, these stories are not simple feel-good reflections. Instead, they are deeply layered accounts that serve to argue for women's ordination.

With their passion for telling their call narratives, womenpriests show not only that they believe God has summoned them to contra legem ordination but also that they trust the rhetorical power these stories can have on an audience. As this chapter will show, call narratives do many things. Telling stories of God's call empowers the women to control their own stories, counters Rome's refusal to accept that women can be called to priesthood, minimizes womenpriests' reputation as lawbreakers, and casts them as obedient to God's voice and not to man-made rules.

Honoring the Call, Not the Church

Victoria Rue's journey from child priest distributing wafer candies to womanpriest celebrating Eucharist was not without detours. As a young woman, she entered the Sisters of the Holy Names, a teaching order of women religious, but departed after a year. Thereafter, the theater became her congregation and the women's movement became her church. These passions carried her to Nicaragua, where she experienced Catholic social teaching and liberation theology in action. She went on to study liberation and feminist theologies at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. After then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger issued the “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons” in October 1986, which called homosexuality a “moral disorder,” Rue got involved in liturgical protests with the lesbian and gay community. She pursued a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, where her work merged theology, theory, feminism, and her artistic endeavors. In the Bay Area, she cofounded A Critical Mass: Women Celebrating the Eucharist, a group that gathered monthly in a public park to feed the homeless and celebrate a feminist-inspired liturgy.

In summer 2002, Rue learned of the womanpriest developments in Europe, where seven women had been ordained by male bishops on the Danube River. Knowing this option was now available to her, Rue began a discernment process. She concluded that she was being called, and a contra legem ordination followed. She was ordained a deacon in summer 2004 and a priest in summer 2005.3 Why be ordained? Rue told me, “It was an opportunity to claim what I had already been living and [was] called forth to be.”4

Honoring the call came with challenges. As for all of RCWP's ordained, no Roman Catholic parish awaited Rue's sacramental ministry, so Rue had to be creative: she had to identify need, offer her services, and hope a community formed. In February 2006, she began a weekly Eucharist at the nondenominational chapel at San Jose State University, where she taught classes in gender and religion. She often celebrated these Masses with others, including Don Cordero (a married Catholic priest who was her ordination mentor), Juanita Cordero (Don's wife and a womanpriest), and Kathleen Kunster (another womanpriest). The liturgy attracted students from SJSU as well as nearby Santa Clara University, a Jesuit institution that would not have permitted Rue to celebrate on campus.

Despite (or maybe because of) Rue's energy and enthusiasm, problems began. Signs advertising Rue's weekly services were defaced or torn down. New signs appeared, condemning Rue's actions. The Diocese of San Jose instructed local parishes to publish warnings in weekly bulletins, informing parishioners that Rue's liturgies were invalid and must be avoided. When Rue sought an audience with the bishop, she was told there were “no grounds for dialogue” so long as she continued to call herself a Roman Catholic priest. Rue's excommunication from the institutional church became finalized in May 2008, when the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's general decree announced that RCWP's womenpriests had all excommunicated themselves by attempting to become priests.5

Young girls who play with these rituals show how readily Catholic ideas and images take hold. Adult women who perform sacraments, however, defy Catholic dogma. As the girls become women, play becomes protest—and the stakes get higher. Of all of her faith-centered actions, from studying feminist theology to working with gay and lesbian Catholics to starting a liturgical community in an Oakland park, it was Rue's priesthood ordination and sacramental ministry that riled the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Rue's story reveals how seriously the Vatican takes an adult woman's seeking illicit ordination and calling herself a priest.

This is because the Roman Catholic Church teaches not only that men alone can be priests but that men alone are called to priesthood. In 1976, Inter Insigniores addressed the issue of women feeling called to priesthood: “Women who express a desire for the ministerial priesthood are doubtless motivated by the desire to serve Christ and the Church.” Furthermore,

it is sometimes said and written in books and periodicals that some women feel they have a vocation to the priesthood. Such an attraction, however noble and understandable, still does not suffice for a genuine vocation. In fact a vocation cannot be reduced to a mere personal attraction, which can remain purely subjective.6

Honoring a vocational call to the priesthood is fundamental for womenpriests, who have felt pain from Rome rejecting their call's authenticity. The Catechism states that “Church authority alone has the responsibility and right to call someone to receive the sacrament of Holy Orders” (emphasis mine).

In telling their call stories, womenpriests claim that only God has the authority to determine their suitability for priesthood, subverting Roman authority in the process. These stories also construct an essentialist narrative by arguing that these women had, from childhood, an innate, God-directed pull toward the church, the sacraments, and ministerial priesthood. This counters the gender essentialism in Roman Catholic theology, which says only men have the intrinsic characteristics needed for the priestly role. In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1 Called
• CHAPTER 2 Rome's Mixed Messages
• CHAPTER 3 Conflict and Creativity
• CHAPTER 4 Ordination
• CHAPTER 5 Sacraments
• CHAPTER 6 Ministries on the Margins
• CHAPTER 7 Womenpriests' Bodies
• Conclusion
• APPENDIXES
• Acknowledgments
• Notes