Historically, a number of brave women have established
themselves as a catalyst for change, dedicating their lives to a cause
that becomes so compelling that they’re willing to risk everything they
know to achieve their goal.
One such woman is Lexington resident and peace activist
Janice Sevre-Duszynska.
As a member of the Roman Catholic Women Priests,
she and others like her relentlessly challenge the church’s dogma
including their right to be ordained as priests.
Her story and those of
many other determined women have been featured in Pink Smoke Over the Vatican, a documentary that played at the Esquire Theatre earlier this month.
Although Sevre-Duszynska remains committed to her quest
for reform, the bigger question remains: Will members of a church
steeped in tradition and conservative values ever recognize women as
priests?
The calling to join the priesthood emerged around the time
of her first communion, Sevre-Duszynska says.
Growing up in a
predominantly Polish-Catholic neighborhood in Milwaukee, she says at age
10 she was ask to help tidy the sanctuary (the part of the church where
the alter is located).
While cleaning, she says she lived her dream by
pretending to celebrate mass as a priest.
Her ambitions almost drove her to step into the sanctuary
as an ‘alter girl’ during a mass, a rite reserved only for young boys,
but she stopped short fearing she would get her superior in trouble.
Reading the gospels at a young age, Sevre-Duszynska realized Jesus also
loved women and saw them as equals, not inferior members of the church.
She pays homage to her mother for passing on the sense of liberation
theology that caused her to question Catholic dogma and the role of
women.
After mass, Sevre-Duszynska's mother would question the homily
pointing out male priest’s disconnect to women lives as well as the real
world.
“My mother was dropping this little seed in me, saying not
only do they not have the lived experience of raising a family, they
don’t know what is a woman’s lived experience,” she says.
“My mother
taught me what’s really important is my relationship to God and my
relationship to others.”
Her desire lay
dormant for many years until a series of events reshaped her life.
In
the 1980s, she and her family moved from Milwaukee to Lexington, Ky. A
few years later, one of her two sons was killed in an automobile
accident, and subsequently her marriage of nearly 25 years ended in
divorce.
Experiencing such devastating loss motivated her in more
spiritual directions.
In 1998, Sevre-Duszynska made national news when
she interrupted an ordination ceremony at the Cathedral of Christ the
King in Lexington.
“I walked up there and said, 'I am called upon by the holy
spirit to present myself for ordination — my name is Janice, I ask this
for myself and all women,’ and I prostrated myself on the alter like a
male candidates for priest,” she says.
“So, I’m down on the ground and
Bishop Williams says, 'Get back to your seat you’re disrupting the
service.' Well, I always say it wasn’t disrupting it was interrupting.”
In 2000, Sevre-Duszynska garnered media attention yet
again during a U.S. bishop’s conference in Washington, D.C., where she
made a public announcement during the gathering calling for the
ordination of women priests.
After organizers silenced her microphone,
she refused to leave the meeting until police escorted her out of the
hotel.
Two years later, Sevre-Duszynska was arrested and charged
with trespass after she refused to leave a diaconate ordination in
Atlanta where she and several others protested sexism in the church.
In
2001, she hung a banner in Rome during a bishop meeting that called for
the ordination of women priests in eight languages.
“I was known as the sign lady and the banner lady and I headed up the ministry of irritation,” she says.
Her journey began to see fruition in 2006, when she was
ordained a deacon of the church by the order of Roman Catholic Women
Priests in Pittsburgh. She continued her preparation by studying
theology at Lexington Theological Seminary working toward her doctorate,
adding to her master's degree in theater from the University of
Kentucky.
In 2008, Sevre-Duszynska was ordained a “womanpriest” by
the order at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Lexington. With more
than 150 people in attendance, she celebrated the joyous event with
family, friends, fellow peace activists and supporters of the women’s
ordination movement including three male priests in good standing.
The Rev. Roy Bourgeois delivered the homily, an act that
would have lasting repercussions. After sending invitations to a number
of male priests, Bourgeois called to tell her he would be proud to
attend and deliver the homily.
“I said, 'I know you know what you’re doing — but do you know what you’re doing?' ” she says.
The two met as peace activists in their shared quest to
close the U.S. Army School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga. — an
organization accused of training paramilitary assassins for militant
groups in South America.
During a 2001 protest, Sevre-Duszynska crossed into the base, resulting in a sentence of three months in federal prison.
The School of the Americas, recently renamed the Western
Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) is believed to
be responsible for several deaths in El Salvador including those of
Catholic priest and activist Oscar Romero, six Jesuit priests and four
Catholic nuns, two of whom were members of the Maryknoll order.
As a
Catholic priest in the order of the Maryknolls, a division of the
Catholic Church that helps poor and repressed people overseas, Bourgeois
was friends with the two women.
“For the next
year, I was full-time building a movement calling for the closing of
School of the Americas and the training of all of these soldiers coming
from El Salvador and all of these other countries, all paid for by our
tax money,” Bourgeois says.
“I was zigzagging all over the country
talking about this injustice in El Salvador and the injustice in the
school of the Americas and then I discovered an injustice much closer to
home in my church.”
With a sincere ring in his voice, Bourgeois recalls how he
wrestled with his conscience over his own beliefs. While away on
missions, he met a number of women like Janice who received a calling
from God to be priests.
Until then, he never really questioned church
tradition, but tells how he was unable to reconcile one question that
continued to haunt him.
“As Catholics, we do profess that God created men and
women of equal dignity — and as Catholic priests, we always say the call
to be a priest comes from God,” he says.
“So I began to ask a very
important and basic question, 'Who are we as man to reject God’s call of
women? How can we as men say that our call from God is authentic but
God’s call of women is not?' ”
After returning home from Sevre-Duszynska’s ordination
ceremony, Bourgeois received a call from Maryknoll headquarters
requesting a meeting with the superior general and general council in
order to explain his actions.
Two months later, he received ‘the letter’
from the Vatican stating he had 30 days to recant his belief and public
statements for the ordination of women or be excommunicated from the
church.
During his visit to headquarters, Bourgeois says he posed
the question to the Maryknoll council and other priests in the church;
their response, he says, was silence.
After crafting a lengthy and
passionate letter to the Vatican, Bourgeois says he received no
response or even acknowledgment of its receipt.
By ultimately following his conscience, Bourgeois says he
refused and continues to refuse to remain silent about the issue and
gives talks around the country in support of ordaining women priests.
As
a result, two months ago — a little more than two years since he
attended Sevre-Duszynska's ordination — Bourgeois received another
summons to Maryknoll headquarters in New York.
Superiors ordered him to
recant his statement within 15 days or receive expulsion from the
Maryknolls, his family and community for more than 39 years.
Bourgeois says he visits the mailbox every day expecting
the final letter.
He likes to joke that his chances of winning the
Georgia State Lottery are better than his chances of being allowed to
remain in the order.
But a small glimmer of hope arrived recently in a copy of a
letter sent to the Vatican.
Bourgeois says it was signed by more than
100 priests in good standing supporting his position to honor his
conscience.
Bourgeois believes hope lies in sheer numbers, with more and
more people in the church coming forward in support.
Many of them have
supported female ordination for some time but are afraid to come forward
because of harsh repercussions.
He particularly questions the church’s
stand on excommunication for supporters of women priests in relation to
some other scandals that rocked the church.
“How many priests has the Vatican kicked out or
excommunicated for their crimes against children?” he says.
“There’s
none — not a single one. They have not excommunicated them or the
bishops who have covered up the crimes. That continues to be a big issue
in the Catholic Church.”
To date, the Roman Catholic Women Priests movement boasts
120 female priests with branches in in Eastern and Western Europe,
Eastern and Western Canada and the United States, says womanpriest
Bridget Mary Meehan.
In addition, Meehan says she recently ordained the
first woman in South America expanding the order to yet another
continent.
She explains the grassroots movement continues to play by
church rules, a measure necessary to gain credibility.
She says of the seven womenpriests originally ordained on
the Danube in 2002, two were later ordained secretly by a male bishop in
good standing.
As part of apostolic succession in the Catholic
religion, the church only recognizes priests ordained by chosen bishops
in good standing; an act that was completed under the veil of secrecy,
but carried out nonetheless, Meehan says.
“That means they recognize apostolic succession and a male
bishop would need to ordain us,” Meehan says.
“We got that, and that’s
the part that they hate. They take the movement seriously and they’ve
done everything they could to punish us because they see it as a direct
threat to the all-male, patriarchal dominant model. It’s a threat to the
male authority power structure of the church.”
The movement includes more reforms than simply ordaining
women, Meehan adds.
The grassroots movement looks to reinvent the church
into a more egalitarian, circular model where all members participate
and feel empowered.
The group believes the Catholic Church in its current
state bears little resemblance to the vision of Jesus.
She tells of how
in all four gospels, Jesus appears after his resurrection to Mary
Magdelene, who is still widely believed to be the apostle to the
apostles.
When traditionalists question her right to be a priest, she
counters with historic evidence of women priests in the church more than
1,200 years ago.
“Women priests are reclaiming our ancient tradition of
women in ordained ministry,” Meehan says.
“People who are guardians of
the tradition and traditionalist Catholics should celebrate that women
are taking their rightful place following the example of Jesus, who had
male and female disciples — all they have to do is read the gospels.”
Pink Smoke Over the Vatican, the award-winning
documentary directed by Jules Hart, follows the lives of several women,
including Sevre-Duszynska, and their quest for ordination.
With all the adversity these women face in the Catholic
Church, the question arises why don’t women like Meehan and
Sevre-Duszynska simply embrace another faith that ordains women as
church leaders — why fight the fight?
For Sevre-Duszynska, she simply professes Catholicism to
be her religion since birth and her religion of choice.
Other churches
have approached her, but she still feels connected to her roots.
She
says while reform needs to occur within the church, she can’t help but
love the institution based on the gospels and filled with patron saints
that has always been a part of her life.
“Why should I leave the richness and all of my experiences
in the church that I worked to and was called upon to speak out and
challenge it?” she asks.
“I feel like a daughter of the church, why
would I want to leave it?”
