On Saturday (Feb. 12), Nobel Peace Prize nominee and beloved Catholic
Maryknoll priest Father Roy Bourgeois will visit New York City.
He will
appear in Jules Hart's award-winning documentary about the women's
ordination movement in the Roman Catholic Church, Pink Smoke Over the Vatican, to be shown at Barnard College's inaugural Athena Film Festival.
Afterwards, Father Roy will participate on a panel, joined by Hart --
a once highly successful fashion model turned fearless filmmaker -- and
ordained Catholic woman priest Rev. Jean Marie Marchant.
Marchant is a
former administrator with the Archdiocese of Boston, where she served
-- before, during and for a year after her ordination -- as director of
Health Care Ministry in charge of the Archdiocese's chaplaincy program,
which provides pastoral care to people in more than 400 hospitals and
nursing homes.
I'm one of the talking heads in the film, having crossed
paths with Hart on two boats -- one in Canadian waters, site of
Marchant's ordination, and the other at the mouth of the three rivers in
Pittsburgh at more ordinations -- while writing Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church.
I'll also be moderating the panel.
A Purple Heart recipient, Father Roy makes his home in Georgia, where he founded the School of the Americas Watch.
That organization has long advocated closing the U.S. Army's Western
Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly, School of the
Americas aka "School of Assassins").
There, the U.S. military has been
training Latin American soldiers, some of whom have chosen to apply
their new skills against their own people.
Since Father Roy will be in Archbishop Timothy Dolan's own backyard,
and since Fr. Roy could even have been considered a guest of the
Archdiocese under other circumstances (say, if a priest participating in
a dear female friend's ordination to the Roman Catholic priesthood did
not bring down the wrath of the Vatican), I thought a comment was in
order.
In an e-mail, I identified myself as a Huffington Post blogger
preparing a piece in which Father Roy, who was coming to New York to
participate in a panel following the screening of a film about women's
ordination, would figure prominently.
I asked to know what the
Archbishop thought of the fact that this priest, devoted for decades to
the church, justice and peace, had taken this unequivocal stand for
women's ordination, with all its dire consequences.
I also asked if
perhaps the Archbishop might be willing to further explain the Church's
reasoning embodied in the new canonical guidelines
that a priest who attempts the sacred ordination of a woman is
committing as grave a crime as if he were raping a child, for which
excommunication and a fast track to defrocking are the immediate
remedies.
New York Archdiocesan spokesman Joseph Zwilling, responding in an
e-mail, took a pass.
"Because Father Bourgeios is a member of the
Maryknoll Fathers, any statement about him should come from his order,"
he wrote back. "We will not be making a comment concerning him."
I followed up, asking Zwilling if, in his capacity as head of the
U.S. Bishop's conference, Archbishop Dolan would at least comment on
those new canonical guidelines, under which such a highly regarded
priest, Fr. Roy Bourgeois, has been, and can even be more severely,
sanctioned. Not even a comment offering "no comment" came to that
request.
To their credit, the Maryknolls have not banished Father Roy from
their order. "He has been excommunicated by Rome," spokesperson Mike
Virgintino told me, "but he remains part of the Maryknoll Society,"
specifically, the Maryknoll Priests and Brothers.
The Maryknolls did
chicken out for a while there, pulling their support for School of the
Americas Watch because it would look like they were supporting Fr. Roy's
pro-women's ordination position.
But cooler heads have prevailed and
the Maryknolls are supporting the organization again.
Unfortunately, Bourgeois continues to stand pretty much alone among
the entire U.S. Catholic priesthood in his public, passionate and
unequivocal support for, and participation in, the women's ordination
movement.
In Pink Smoke, he denounces the church's ban as
nothing more than sexism and a sin.
In reference to the material
things he could lose as a result of his excommunication and the
laicization that could come next, like his pension, he says he'd "rather
go to a soup kitchen" than sell out his own conscience.
I'm not surprised the Archbishop has nothing to say.
Really, if you
were the Archbishop, and you had to defend an indefensible ban -- one
that flies in the face of church history, archaeological evidence and
even a Pontifical Biblical Commission that found insufficient Scriptural
grounds to exclude the possibility of women's ordination -- as well as
those new canonical guidelines effectively equating ordaining a woman
with molesting a child, would you have a comment?