As a five-year-old girl growing up in Brooklyn, Gabriella Velardi Ward dreamed of being a Catholic priest.
Other girls doodled rainbows and unicorns in their notebooks; she
drew chalices and vestments.
Her family told her girls weren’t allowed
to be Catholic priests, which was true in 1953 and remains true today.
But last Sunday, Ward presided over what she describes as a Catholic
mass in a tiny living room in Sunnyside, Queens.
Now 63 years old, Ward
belongs to a group who call themselves Roman Catholic Woman Priests.
Her
community of 85 worshipers has named themselves after St. Praxedis, a
female leader in the early church.
She counts herself as the only female Catholic priest in New York City.
“I felt there was a void inside of me that could not be filled by
anything else, and I went to a support group for women who felt called
to be priests in the Roman Catholic Church,” Ward says. “Through them I
found out about RCWP.”
That movement has been ordaining women as priests since 2002, and
they believe there is no scriptural reason women can’t hold the post.
Since the seventies there have been several movements pushing women’s ordination,
but Catholic doctrine remains very clear in forbidding women from
taking on the role of a priest.
Ordained women and Catholic priests who
sanction their activities can be excommunicated.
“The Catholic Church has consistently taught that ordination to the
priesthood is reserved for men alone, because Christ did not authorize
the Church to do otherwise,” said Kate Monaghan, a spokeswoman for the
Archdiocese of New York. “Whatever else this group might be, it is not
part of the Roman Catholic Church.”
Ward, a mother of two, grandmother of six and an architect by trade,
was ordained in Boston in 2008 and founded the St. Praxedis Catholic
Community of New York soon after, drawing congregants through word of
mouth, prayer groups and the Internet.
Members of her congregation include adults who experienced childhood
abuse and are opposed to the church’s response to cases of abuse by
priests, gays and lesbians who feel excluded from the church, and
Catholics who believe that women should be priests.
During a visit to the service on Sunday, some worshipers said they
found Ward by searching Google for terms like “Catholic” and
“priestess.”
The mass was an intimate gathering.
The service drew eight
parishioners who crowded onto couches, stools and an old piano bench
draped in a flannel blanket inside the home in Queens.
Ward perched in a
wicker-backed chair in front of a coffee table draped in a white table
cloth.
The group previously rented church space in Brooklyn, but Ward said
the cost became too big of an expense.
The congregation likes to think
of its cozy ministry as something that creates a connection to the early
Christian church, which was also practiced in people’s homes.
And the room was very cozy indeed.
Members could reach across the
space to offer one another the sign of peace and to hug Ward at her
makeshift pulpit.
The doorbell rang in the middle of mass.
Psalms needed
to be printed at the last minute, and a dry ink cartridge left the
small group sharing two photocopied sheets.
The homily also gets something of a homey makeover at Ward’s mass.
Some Sundays she delivers one, at other times the congregation shares
the responsibility.
This past Sunday the topic at the Lenten mass was
the meaning of sin and evil in Genesis 2.
“Why does the woman always get all the blame?” retired teacher
Phyllis Petito, 63, asked the group. They didn’t come up with an easy
answer.
Praxedis member Susan Draper, 61, said she had been the Eucharistic
minister at the Catholic Church she attended in Brooklyn’s Park Slope
neighborhood, as well as an occasional participant in Ward’s
congregation.
In January, Draper told the pastor in her traditional
congregation that she supported women’s ordination and had been
attending mass with a woman priest.
She said that he asked her to step
down from her post.
“That was a big ouch for me, but I was very naive when I was honest
with my pastor,” Draper said.
“He said if I hadn’t told him, he wouldn’t
have done anything. It was like ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’.”
On Sunday, Draper served as the Eucharistic minister for St.
Praxedis.
She walked around the room administering the Eucharist, wine,
juice, and gluten-free unleavened bread—transported from home in a
lunchbox-sized cooler—to each church-member at their seat.
Ward sees alienation from the church as a thread that unites
her parishioners.
“A lot of the members…have been disillusioned and hurt
by the Roman Catholic Church,” she said.
“For me, the priesthood is
about celebrating the sacraments and giving service.”
“I once had a woman come up to me and say, ‘I have waited my entire
life to go to a woman for confession,” Ward said. “That’s what this
movement is about.”