Longtime Scottsdale school nurse Cindy Worrell is not quitting her day job - yet.She answers to “Nurse” at Zuni Elementary School, but she is also known as Sister Mary Brigid, a Catholic sister in the Reconciliation Catholic Church, a part of the “Old Catholic Church.”
On Jan. 19, Worrell took the vows for her investiture in the small order of churches that hold Masses in Tempe, Paradise Valley and Phoenix.
She has been appointed director of religious education.
She calls it “an incredible opportunity” and a “wonderful challenge” that were a long time coming in a lifetime of spiritual wandering.
“Priests are teasing me that the work is just beginning, and that doesn’t scare me in the least,” said Worrell, who turns 60 next week. “I am used to hard work.”
Though the Old Catholic Church officially dates to 1870 and exists apart from the Roman Catholic Church, its orders and sacraments were recognized by Rome through a declaration signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) in 2000.
It’s one of 33 “branches of the Catholic Church with a capital ‘C,’ ” said the Most Rev. Michael Hillis, who is presiding archbishop for the synod.
Since its founding in Germany, the Old Catholic Church has been defined by its adherence to ancient Catholic faith and a repudiation of the dogma of infallibility. It has championed inclusiveness, making the Eucharist available with minimal restriction to all, strong participation of laity and adherence to the doctrines of seven early ecumenical councils held between 325 A.D. in Nicea to 787 A.D. when the Second Council of Nicea convened.
Old Catholicism calls for emulating the practices of community life of the early Christian church before a series of schisms followed. The Catholic Encyclopedia reports there are some 40,000 Old Catholics across Europe.
Cindy Worrell found the Old Catholic Church compatible after a lifetime of religious searching.
She had a challenging Roman Catholic upbringing in Southern California. Her Catholic father talked bitterly that during the Great Depression, “all the church did was ask for money” when he was dirt poor.
After his marriage to a Protestant woman, who took Catholic formation classes, they started their family — first Cindy, then three brothers.
Her mother “sent my brothers and me to catechism and off to Mass, but she and Dad rarely went,” Worrell said. “The nuns knocked at the door one day and said that unless the parents start attending, ‘you couldn’t get the kids all the way through catechism.’ ”
Her father’s reaction, she said, was, “Groan, here we go again.”
“We kept going even though Mom and Dad were kind of against it, but we managed to get through catechism somehow,” explained Worrell, who said she attended eight or nine schools before high school. Her father, a medical technologist, moved the family around as he set up hospital labs. “I got used to a gypsy lifestyle,” she said.
“Listening to Dad grumble led me to do my own research” and, at one point, she talked to her parents about becoming a nun. “My father was horribly, horribly opposed,” she said. “He wanted me to be teacher or doctor.” Instead, Worrell met and married a Methodist man from Arizona in 1968. They moved to Phoenix and immediately began a family. Meanwhile, she earned a nursing degree from Arizona State University. After 19 years of marriage and with their two children largely raised, her husband left her.
“I realized I needed to stand on my own two feet, but now I had choices,” she said. Worrell set off on a religious odyssey — through Pentecostal, Lutheran, Presbyterian and charismatic churches.
Then almost four years ago, her brother came to live with her. Because he was Roman Catholic, they began attending a parish church in Cave Creek. Then one day while she was praying before Mass, she said, “I got this message. It wasn’t even quiet. It was a kick in the backside” to go deeper into her faith. For the next three years, she explored Catholic vocations in which a divorced woman would be accepted. She looked at “third orders” in which laity are devoted to religious life but do not necessarily live in community, but can wear a habit, for example. She filled three-ring binders with information on orders, but most of them were recruiting people “between 18 and 36 years old and in good health. And then, they all said ‘cloistered,’ ” or “living in monastic life.”
Though she was a school nurse, engaged in “treating and healing, I needed to get closer to Jesus,” Worrell said. She learned about the Old Catholic Church on the Internet.
“I started doing what they called ‘nun runs,’ talking to people to see how I would fit, where I would fit best” into a community.
“I ended up with Archbishop Mike and his beautiful little flock in Tempe,” she said. “He is so filled with the Holy Spirit.”
She underwent six months of orientation and a year as a novitiate and then received the white veil at her investiture. She has embarked on another year of study and discernment, or what she calls “becoming as clean as I can.” Then she may profess new vows and promises, then take a black veil.
Though her parents are deceased, Worrell said her mother “would be thrilled out of her mind, and I think my dad would be in horror, but my dad didn’t want me to be a nurse either.”
“This is a true blessing” for the Reconciliation Catholic Church community, said Hillis. “I had been hoping that we would get some women who would be called to the sisterhood.” While there were laymen brothers, Worrell is the first sister. “I hope we will continue to grow with this,” he said.
Hillis said many call his church “independent” Catholic, but that is a misnomer because the Vatican, through publication of Dominus Lesus, a declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, recognizes the validity of its orders and sacraments.
“Even though it sounds like the Old Catholic Church is old and ancient, we are a very modern church,” Hillis said. “Our clergy can marry. We have women clergy. We are a totally inclusive church. We are a church where our theme is ‘Love Without Judgment.’ We let God do the judging. We are not here to judge one another.”
In August, Worrell and her brother will move to North Carolina to be near her daughter and to develop a ministry, possibly a retreat house in their home in the tradition of the Franciscans. She will continue a hobby of making rosaries and painting religious icons. “I will miss the children (at her school) terribly, and I have asked the Lord if he can please put me in contact with children again,” she said.
“I just can’t get close enough to Jesus,” Worrell said. “I want to know everything there is to know about him.”
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Clerical Whispers’ for any or all of the articles placed here.
The placing of an article hereupon does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
Sotto Voce