Ninety-five year old Roy Bourgeois Sr. says that God will look after his Maryknoll priest son who is threatened with excommunication over his stance on women's ordination.In his own words, Maryknoll Fr. Roy Bourgeois has "poked at a lot of hornets nests" along the way from soldier in Vietnam to committed pacifist and persistent critic of U.S. military policy, The National Catholic Reporter says.
He's poked at the presumptions of major institutions and systems, including, most recently, standing in opposition to the Catholic church's ban on ordaining women.
But Fr. Bourgeois wanted to hear what 95-year-old Roy Sr., devout Catholic and daily Mass attendee, would say about this latest in a long history of controversies involving his son.
"My siblings were afraid this would break his heart. My sister Ann was the first to ask him, 'Daddy, how do you feel about this?' " Bourgeois said in a Nov. 17 phone interview.
"My dad cried. He's a soft-hearted guy. But then he got his composure and said: 'God brought Roy back from the war in Vietnam. God took care of Roy in his mission work in Bolivia and El Salvador, and God is going to take care of Roy now.' Then he said, 'Roy is doing the right thing by following his conscience, and I support him.' "
They all wept, said Bourgeois. It was curious, he said, because all of them had worried that the news would be terribly upsetting to his father. "But then this person of great inner strength looked at us and said, 'God will look after the family, too.' "
Bourgeois, who faces almost certain excommunication, was the founder of an annual protest outside the gates of Fort Benning and what once was called the School of the Americas. This year's protest will be held Nov. 21-23. The school's name was changed in recent years to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.
As the School of the Americas, the facility trained scores of Latin American military who can be traced to committing or overseeing some of the most horrendous human rights abuses in modern Latin American history.
Bourgeois is known primarily for his campaign against the School of the Americas and opposition to the war in Iraq as well as his advocacy of the story of Franz Jagerstatter, the Austrian farmer who was executed for refusing induction into the German military during World War II.
Increasingly in recent years, however, he has become a vocal critic of the church's ban on women's ordination. He said he kept meeting women who said they had a call from God for ordination. "Who are we, as men, to say their call is illegitimate," he regularly asked.
For Bourgeois, the issue was a matter of justice, and he reached a point this past summer when he could no longer remain on the sidelines. Janice Sevre-Duszynska, a regular protester at the School of the Americas, asked Bourgeois to attend her ordination Aug. 9 in Lexington, Ky. She became the sixth woman to be ordained in the United States this year as part of the Catholic Womenpriests movement.
The Vatican response arrived Oct. 21, threatening excommunication unless Bourgeois recanted his statements saying the church is wrong and unjust in maintaining the ban.
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(Source: CTHUS)