The woman in the eye of a storm of controversy about ordaining female priests in the Roman Catholic Church doesn't see herself as a fighter.Marie Evans Bouclin has been bucking the church for years, speaking out against what she calls unjust treatment of women in her religion.
Last Sunday, she went against the teachings of that church and was ordained a priest in the Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement.
Bouclin and two other women were called to what they consider the legitimate priesthood at West Hill United Church in Scarborough, in the first public ceremony of its kind in the world.
Roman Catholic Womenpriests has held other ordinations worldwide, most on boats in international waters to avoid clashes with church officials.
The official position of the Roman Catholic Church is that Roman Catholic Womenpriests has no connection "whatsoever" to the church, nor do its ceremonies have any relationship with the church's sacraments. Bouclin and a growing number of women and men reject that view.
Rather than leave the church they love, they choose to remain and fight for change.
Bouclin doesn't accept the label "fighter" in her case. When asked how she see herself, she pauses: "Mrs. Fix-it." First and foremost, says Bouclin, she is a housewife and mother. "If there's a mess, you clean it up. If a kid hurts himself, you pick him up and you kiss the bobo; you put a Band-aid on it," says the mother of three grown children. "You teach your children right from wrong. You care for people. I feel the same way about the church."
Bouclin looks every inch the housewife in an interview in the kitchen of her New Sudbury home this week. She has just finished having lunch with her husband, Sudbury dentist Albert Bouclin, and returned from running errands. She offers a guest a cool drink and sits down at the kitchen table, smoothing a wrinkle out of the tablecloth.
Bouclin explains she has to leave by 3:30 p.m. to visit a friend who is sick in hospital.
Asked after her ordination how she expected her life to change, Bouclin said she wasn't sure. "What I sense is the enthusiasm of the people who were there and the applause. I think they were saying, 'It is time. It's time to move ahead with this. It is time.' "
While the results are hardly official, a Sudbury Star poll shows about 60 per cent of Sudburians agree the Roman Catholic Church should ordain women priests.
Bouclin isn't counting on that happening any time soon, but she and the female bishop who ordained her believe change is coming.
Seven Roman Catholic Womenpriests ordained in 2002 on a cruise ship on the Danube River were quickly excommunicated by the Vatican.
Sunday's ordination of three women priests and three deacons, one a married man, barely raised a whisper from church hierarchy. The Archdiocese of Toronto issued the statement about Sunday's ordinations not being valid or connected with the Roman Catholic Church.
But women like Bouclin, Bishop Patricia Fresen and thousands of others don't buy it. "I am Roman Catholic to my toes," said Bouclin, 66. Growing up in Smooth Rock Falls, she was a devout girl who attended mass daily and joined the Sisters of Charity in Ottawa at age 18. After seven years in the convent, she left the order, just before she was to take her final vows.
Bouclin always had the "niggling notion I wasn't going to be spending the rest of my life there."
Two months later, she met Albert Bouclin at a Catholic social club at the University of Toronto.
Two years later, they were married.
The couple had three children, and Marie worked as a high school teacher and translator, eventually earning a master's degree in theology. Along the way, Bouclin met "wonderful, wonderful priests, monks, bishops with the goodness and kindness you would expect." One of them was Sudbury's Bishop Jean-Louis Plouffe, whom Bouclin calls a "very pastoral man" - with a gift for listening to and helping people one on one.
Despite good people in the hierarchy, "things are really askew" with the Roman Catholic Church, said Bouclin. "But I'm not going to fight with anyone. I'm just going to do."
The first time Bouclin locked horns with the church establishment was 15 years ago when she was demoted from her job as personal secretary and translator to Plouffe and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sault Ste. Marie.
In a letter, Plouffe told Bouclin that newspaper reports of her involvement in a workshop on women in the church had embarrassed "the image of the church" and raised questions about her suitability as his assistant.
Exiled to a back-office job of filing, Bouclin's demotion struck a chord and she began to hear from women who had been badly treated by the church.
Stressed by her demotion, Bouclin went on sick leave and soon resigned. She would later write that her demotion gave her back her life. Women continued to contact her with stories of abuse by clergy and being punished for speaking out. So did men, such as the seminary professor fired for advocating the ordination of women.
The galvanizing moment came in 1996 when a friend called in tears saying she had just ended a three-year affair with her priest because he was sexually involved with another woman.
Shocked, Bouclin set off on a search to find ways to help women. It led her to write, Seeking Wholeness: Women Dealing with Abuse of Power in the Catholic Church, published in 2006.
It caused her to conclude that only another woman could properly minister to women hurt by the church. But they couldn't do it as "second-class citizens."
Bouclin scoffs when church officials say women are holier than men, and are suited for other positions in the church besides priesthood. "It's not about being holier. It's about having the same dignity and being respected."
Andre Gagne believes it's time the Roman Catholic Church talked to women and married men who feel called to the ministry. "It has to ... for the church to survive," said Gagne, a Biblical scholar and religious studies professor at the University of Sudbury.
A Roman Catholic, Gagne teaches students to take a critically interpretative look at Scripture and draw their own conclusions. "In reading the (Scriptures) and looking at tradition, I don't think there are reasons, sufficient reasons not to open ourselves up to this," Gagne said.
Evidence abounds in the Gospel of St. Luke and other gospels about the important role Jesus gave to women in the early days of the church.
Church officials often point to the fact all 12 of Jesus's disciples were men to bolster their position that only men can be priests. Gagne said that's a misinterpretation.
Jesus set out to create the new Israel, based in the Old Testament on Jacob and his 12 sons leading the 12 tribes of Israel. Choosing 12 male disciples was a symbolic gesture to reflect that, and shouldn't be used to exclude women.
One of the most important people in establishing Christianity, next to Christ, was Paul the Apostle, whose letters contain many references to female deaconesses. In a letter to the Romans, Paul also writes about female disciples.
Until the fifth century, women were involved in various ministries of the church, Gagne said. When the church began to institutionalize, church fathers took a harder tone toward women. In the church's early days, people met in homes because there were no church buildings.
Because the home "is the place of woman, it was absolutely normal that women had leadership roles." When Christians began moving out of homes into buildings, that changed. Not everyone approved of the ordination of females, even in the church's early history.
Second- and third-century church fathers often opposed women who felt called to the ministry.
"These were patriarchal societies where men ruled," Gagne said. Still, the Apostle Paul recognized men and women as equal because they were both Christians and "Jesus also gave a preponderant place to women."
Gagne says there are probably many other examples of women as priests and deaconesses in the early church, but information about them was likely suppressed. "Who writes history? The victors."
Biblical scholars today are discovering more marginalized gospels by disciples such as Thomas, Judas and even Mary, the mother of God. "These have women in the forefront, playing an important role in the narrative of these works." There is another point to consider, Gagne said. "People need to understand the church is not the hierarchy. The church is the people. It's the church that determines whom they recognize as leaders."
That's radical thinking, considering Pope John Paul II issued a letter to women in 1995, calling for more equality, but categorically ruling them out as priests.
During the Reformation, Roman Catholic priest Martin Luther believed the church should be returned to the people, but his struggle resulted in his expulsion from the church and his formation of the Lutheran Church.
The difference between Luther and women like Bouclin and Fresen is these women have no intention of leaving the church, said Gagne. They are "profoundly Catholic and they want to stay Catholic. They don't want to join the Anglican or the United Church."
Therein lies the challenge.
"Are people strong enough to take the situation into their own hands?" Gagne asked. The Roman Catholic Church is in dire straits, Gagne points out. Witness the recent, historic visit by Pope Benedict XVI to Brazil, a traditional Catholic stronghold that has lost 20 per cent of its members to evangelical churches who are open to the ministry of women and "more with the times."
The suppression of women in patriarchal societies was conceivable in the early centuries of the church, but isn't in 2007.
"We're not there any more." Brigitte Angster-Beckett is a Sudbury woman who will not leave her church. Angster-Beckett attended Bouclin's ordination and found it a moving and deeply spiritual experience. "I could just feel it, the energy and the real faith the people had there ... and how joyful it was. I kept thinking to myself, 'This is what our service should be like.' We shouldn't all just be sitting there, waiting for it to be over. "Everybody there was so charged up ... it was really an act of worship," says Angster-Beckett.
"I thought it was just wonderful." She decided to fight for reform in her church when the Anglican Church of England moved to ordain women, causing an exodus of male priests to Roman Catholicism. "That just hit my hypocrisy bone," says Angster-Beckett.
She was angry Anglican priests didn't think that differences in how the faiths regarded the Eucharist, a central part of their religions, reason to leave, but did so over admitting women to the Anglican priesthood. "I will not go," said Angster-Beckett this week in Sudbury. "This is my church and I am staying."
That is the thinking of Bishop Patricia Fresen, the South African nun who lost her church, her university teaching job and even her homeland after she became involved in Roman Catholic Womenpriests.
Fresen, 66, now lives in Germany after being offered refuge there after she left South Africa. Fresen was ordained by three male bishops, "in good standing with Rome." She and two other female bishops and their followers consider those ordinations valid in the tradition of apostolic succession.
Bouclin speaks in hushed tones of the three presiding bishops who ordained Fresen, knowing they would lose their positions should their names become known. There has been little talk of excommunicating women since the first seven.
Fresen speculates that may be because excommunication draws too much attention to Roman Catholic Womenpriests. "Nothing can put us out of the church," said Fresen after Sunday's ceremony. "Once we are baptized, we are in Christ Jesus. We are members of the church and nothing can put us out."
Calls by The Star to Bishop Jean-Louis Plouffe went unanswered this week, but one Sudbury priest gingerly weighed in on the issue. Father Anthony Man-Son-Hing, a former assistant to Plouffe, is pastor at Christ the King Church.
"As far as the church is concerned, nothing has changed" in terms of regarding recent ordinands as valid priests, he said. Still, "there has been no (excommunication), as far as I know, in this case."
Man-Son-Hing acknowledges Pope John Paul II closed the door on female ordination in his 1995 letter.
But he said discussions on the subject may be occurring among church hierarchy "sort of behind closed doors."
Because the discussions are occurring, though, doesn't mean the church is ready to reconsider its position. When the Roman Catholic Church takes a stand, it has to apply around the world.
While female ordination may be a hot topic in North America, that might not be true in other parts of the world. Man-Son-Hing says there is often "wiggle room" that allows for discussion on church policy.
"That's where this issue and many others fall. It feels like they're falling through the cracks. I'm not sure they are, because I'm sure those who are in higher-up positions are aware of this kind of stuff."
It's a complex issue that isn't going to be resolved overnight.
"In making it a legitimate part of the sacramentality of the church, it's a long way off. In some cases, people are hoping ... this is the way it's going to be. I'm not sure that's going to happen tomorrow."
It's Man-Son-Hing's belief that, if there is enough interest in the issue, "let's do a formal discussion about this, somehow." He points out he's not suggesting opening Christ the King Hall and inviting people to debate the issue. "But certainly people I've talked with have asked the question. "Each of us will come to a point where we'll say, 'Either I'm comfortable with this; I'm willing to enter the fray,' or 'No, no, no, no, no, no, just leave me out of this, thank you, with my rosary."
Rev. Ed Cachia of Cobourg, near Peterborough, was fired from his job as parish priest for writing a newspaper column expressing his opinion women should be ordained priests. Cachia set up his own dissident church, but has left it and begun a process of reconciliation with the Roman Catholic Church.
Many people in Sudbury are still reluctant to speak publicly about female ordination or to appear to endorse the idea. Marie-Paul Paquette, a friend of Bouclin's, spoke on behalf of several women from Sudbury who attended the Toronto ordination Sunday.
Paquette said many more people would have attended, but they were afraid it might affect their standing in their traditional churches.
One professional woman from Sudbury who attended the Womenpriests' ordination asked her name not be published in The Star. Eyes still red after the ceremony, the woman said she had cried from start to finish, the service was so moving.
It will take Bouclin and other ordinands time to figure out their role in a church that does not recognize them, but which they love too much to walk away from. Bouclin suspects her work will continue as it started the other day - with a visit to a sick friend in hospital, saying mass in the home of people who invite her, ministering to people who feel marginalized.
Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement continues to grow.
More than 40 women have been ordained priests among 150 or so people preparing for the priesthood (eight of them male).
The organization's priests and deacons will meet this summer to discuss a number of pressing issues, including the need to ordain at least one North American bishop.
This is where the movement is most active and where dozens more ordinations are anticipated. Bouclin understands the call women around the world are feeling because it's one she has felt much of her life.
When asked if she would considering training to be a bishop, Bouclin says quickly: "Oh heavens, don't go there. Please, my blood pressure's bad enough."
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