California “womanpriest” Victoria Rue has gone to Indonesia to spread the word of women’s and homosexual liberation.She said she particularly wants to plant the seed of women’s ordination in that country.
Rue, a professor of comparative religion and women’s studies at San Jose State University, made something of a news splash in April 2006 with reports of her celebrating Mass on the university’s campus.
The reports led the San Jose diocese to issue the following statement: “Victoria Rue is not a validly ordained priest of the Roman Catholic Church. Members of the Roman Catholic Church should not participate in celebrations of the sacraments that are conducted by Victoria Rue, as those celebrations are not in union with the local or universal Church."
Rue’s response at the time of the statement was that the diocese had published it “without prior dialog or conversation.”
Though Rue had said she had (before the diocese issued the statement) told the bishop that she was “willing to engage in dialogue,” she received no response.
Rue hoped her trip to Indonesia would lead eventually to the ordination of a woman in that country, said the Aug. 4 Jakarta Post.
"Women have been thought of as evil, sinful and lustful, as representing only the body and not the spirit," Rue told a meeting of women’s rights and homosexual, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender activists in Jakarta.
A lesbian, Rue says her sexuality expresses God’s love, said the Post.
In San Jose, she holds regular Masses for LGBT people and is a member of Dignity, a group which promotes the morality of homosexual acts.
Rue was “ordained” in 2005 on the Saint Lawrence Seaway in Canada. She claims the woman bishops who performed the ordination ceremony had themselves been secretly ordained by male bishops in good standing with the Holy See.
“It was very `Da Vinci Code'!" Rue told the Post.
She said she was required to sign a document that said she could reveal the male bishops’ names only after their death.
Rue says she had wanted to be a Catholic priest since she was a child. She entered a convent in the 1960s but left after a year. She also left the Church. After spending some years in the theatre and the women’s rights movement, Rue came back to the Church because of her experience with liberation theology in Nicaragua.
Rue told the Post that the womanpriest movement is “probably” having an effect on the Vatican; but it is certainly having an “effect at the grass roots in the United States, where, she said, a recent poll revealed that 70% of Catholics are in favor of women’s ordination.
“My biggest belief is that the church will change because the spirit is within the people and outside the people, and larger than the people. The spirit will move and something will change,” Rue told the Post.
"I believe the community Jesus founded was a community in which there was a table, men and women, old and young, people on the margins of society -- all were welcome at the table."
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