“I didn’t realize how much pain I had from growing up in a church that did not permit women as pastors,” said Melanie Donohoe in an interview published March 22 in the Oakland Tribune.Donohoe was talking about growing up Catholic.
“I was not one of those girls who wanted to be a nun,” said Donohoe. “I always loved the spiritual, the mystical, and the sacramental, but I did not sit around dreaming of being a priest.”
But, today, Donohoe is a priest -- or what some would call a priest. She is an Episcopal minister and associate rector of Transfiguration Episcopal Church in San Mateo.
“I'm really happy being a priest,” she said, “and I love my parish.”
Twenty-five years ago, Donohoe joined the Episcopal Church because it has, since 1977, allowed women to be ordained. Even as an Episcopalian, she, a television producer, was not interested in ordination. But her “call” became more apparent.
“It was a call I could no longer refuse,” she told the Tribune.
She was ordained in November 2005.
“I asked God to drop the two-by-four, and she did. Being able to help people celebrate their most holy and sacred moments within the ritual of the church is very much what I felt called to do by God and by people.”
The number of female clergy in the U.S. is steadily growing.
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau counted 53,000 female clergy nationwide.
They make up 15 percent of the clergy in San Mateo County, according to the Tribune. Some have said a disproportionate number of Protestant female clergy are made up of former Catholics.
Do they leave because the Catholic Church forbids women’s ordination?
Examining this question, Paul Perl, writing in the Dec. 22, 2005 edition of the journal Sociology of Religion, said, based on the statistics (and the latest were from 1994), it is impossible to judge why, but a significantly larger percentage of female than male converts from the Catholic Church entered the Protestant ministry -- 5.1% as opposed to 2.5 percent.
But the percentages for the Episcopal Church are significantly higher.
From 1980 to 1994, 13.7% percent of female clergy were former Catholics as opposed to 9% of male clergy.
Over the years, the percentage of formerly Catholic Episcopal priestesses increased: 1980-84, it was 10%; 1985-1989, 13%; and 1990-94, 17%.
This, coupled with the fact that the percentage of formerly Catholic Episcopal female converts did not grow in like proportions, led Perl to conclude that “it is plausible that the all-male priesthood has caused some Catholic women to convert to the Episcopal Church to be ordained.”
Though Donohoe said of the Episcopal Church, “we’re a really cool church,” she admitted, “We’re not perfect.”
For instance, “there’s still a couple of dioceses that won’t ordain women,” one of those being her neighbor, the Diocese of San Joaquin.
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