The fact that she faced an uphill battle to be ordained in the Roman Catholic Church, which rejects women as priests, only strengthened her resolve.“They can excommunicate us and they do say we’re excommunicated, but we don’t really buy into that,” said Patricia Sandall, a local resident who will be ordained as a priest this Saturday in Santa Barbara.
“We can’t be excommunicated from the church of our baptism. We understand we’re breaking a manmade law, but we’re doing that because it’s an unjust law and needs to be changed.”
While working in a local parish several years ago, Sandall came into the folds of the Roman Catholic Womenpriests, a somewhat rogue movement seeking to return women to a leadership role in the church.
Coupling her longtime involvement in the church with her interest in feminist studies, she made the decision to pursue the priesthood.
“This is a matter of justice, a matter of equality,” Sandall said.
When she joins the order of priesthood this Saturday at the First Congregational Church, Sandall will enter an exclusive group of women in the clerical system.
While the most recent movement to bring women back into the hierarchy of the church dates back to the late 90s, it wasn’t until a renegade bishop agreed to ordain seven women as priests in 2002 that the initiative began gaining speed.
Performed on the Danube River in Germany, the ceremony lent the newly minted priests their moniker of the Danube Seven.
Two of those women later rose to the rank of bishop in secret ceremonies performed by male bishops in good standing with the church.
Since then, the movement has spread and more than 100 women throughout the United States have been ordained or are pursuing the priesthood.
“The Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement is growing and there’s no turning back,’ said Suzanne Dunn, who was ordained nearly two years ago and serves as pastor of the local Church of Beatitudes.
“I have that strong feeling. Hopefully, it will provide a new model of church within the Roman Catholic tradition, a model that is inclusive.”
She said the movement has strived to avoid fostering any negativity toward the church hierarchy, and instead has focused its energies on a return to the early centuries of the church.
Citing recent studies, Sandall said women had been ordained in the church until the 11th or 12th centuries. Since then, references to women being ordained have been expunged from the record.
While she credited the opposition toward women as priests to centuries of patriarchy within the church, she echoed Dunn’s desire to avoid any sense of divisiveness.
“We have great hope for the church, and that’s why we’re doing this,” Sandall said.
Once she is ordained, she plans to remain on the pastoral staff at the local church with Dunn, in addition to looking into the possibility of becoming a spokeswoman for the Roman Catholic Womenpriests.
Since being ordained in September 2008, Dunn has built a moderate following at the Church of Beatitudes, which meets every Saturday evening at the First Congregational Church, 2101 State St.
While she performs a standard Catholic mass, Dunn said the church follows an all-embracing model that welcomes not only women as equals, but gays, lesbians, progressives and those who are divorced or remarried.
“We don’t exclude anyone and we use non-sexist language,” Dunn said. “It really makes a difference.”
When Sandall is ordained at the church, the event will mark the first public ordination for women in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. The ceremony takes place at 3:30 p.m. and is open to the public.
For Sandall, the event is a culmination of years of study to obtain a master’s of divinity, as well as work with a mentor in the Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement.
“It makes me just a little bit anxious,” she said of the upcoming ceremony, “but I’m also serene, peaceful.”
SIC: DSUSA