Sudbury's Marie Evans Bouclin is among a group of Canadian women calling upon Pope Benedict XVI to lift the decree of automatic excommunication issued last year against Roman Catholic Womenpriests. The call from the Catholic Network for Women's Equality (CNWE), of which Bouclin is a member, came this week after the Congregation of Bishops, with instructions from the Pope, rescinded the excommunications of four dissenting bishops.
Bouclin was ordained May 27, 2007, by Bishop Patricia Fresen, a South African nun who lost her church, her university teaching job and her homeland after she became involved in Roman Catholic Womenpriests.
Womenpriests is an international initiative within the Roman Catholic Church whose aim is to ordain and support women and men from all states of life, who are committed to an inclusive model of church and who are called by the Holy Spirit and their communities to minister within the Roman Catholic Church.
Bouclin and the network are asking the Pope to stop discriminating against women and end the injustice in the church that says women cannot be priests because it is Christ's will.
They -- and many others -- say it is not Christ who bars women from sacred ministry, but rather canon law, which governs the church and its members.
The Pope's pronouncement last week has renewed the debate over the ordination of women, particularly after it came to light that one of the bishops whose excommunication was rescinded is a Holocaust denier.
Bouclin's fight for equality in the church goes back more than 15 years ago when she was fired from her job as assistant to Bishop Jean-Louis
Plouffe for expressing her views that women should be ordained.
Three years ago, she was among a group of women who were ordained deacons in the church, a stage toward becoming a priest, in a boat in the middle of the St. Lawrence because of fear of reprisals.
After Bouclin and two U. S. women were ordained Roman Catholic Womenpriests in 2007, Bouclin said she expected there might be repercussions.
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(Source: SSC)