Roy Bourgeois is a former missionary, a Nobel Prize nominee, a
Vietnam vet with a Purple Heart and a Maryknoll priest, who founded and
now presides over SOA Watch, a grassroots organization that is seeking to close down the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).
WHINSEC (formerly "School of the Americas") is an academy for torture
whose alumni include Manuel Noriega; many of Augusto Pinochet's
generals; the leaders of the 2009 military coup in Honduras; and Roberto
d'Aubuisson, the commander of El Salvador's notorious death squads --
the same death squads that executed tens of thousands of Salvadoran
civilians, including three nuns and the church worker they raped before
murdering.
(Two of the nuns were friends of Father Bourgeois.)
That same
year, SOA-trained assassins murdered Archbishop Romero. The name of the
school has changed but the work of father Bourgeois and others
continues to be consecrated to putting WHINSEC/SOA, which continues to
train assassins, out of business.
Roy Bourgeois made the front page of this past Saturday's New York Times,
and I was glad for the good news at hand: 157 priests signed a
statement in support of Father Roy Bourgeois, whom the Vatican has begun
to defrock. The 157 have not necessarily signed on in favor of women's
ordination -- but rather to protest the punishment of a priest for
speaking out on a
matter of conscience.
The Vatican began its crusade to defrock Father Bourgeois in November of 2008 with the threat of excommunication. (Read Bourgeois's response.)
In April of this year, Father Bourgeois received his first "canonical warning,"
which was signed by Rev. Edward M. Dougherty, the Superior General of
the Maryknoll order.
The Maryknoll have a tradition of taking the
Christ-like part of the priest's vocation seriously; therefore, we can
assume that Vatican made Father Dougherty an offer he couldn't refuse.
Usually (and especially in recent years), when we hear about the
defrocking of a Roman Catholic priest, an accusation of sexual
misconduct is involved. Not so in this case.
Had Father Bourgeois raped
an altar boy, he would not now be hanging on to his frock by a thread.
Father Bourgeois has been ordered by the Vatican to recant -- to
formally, publicly, withdraw -- his support for women's ordination.
If
he refuses to cave, Bourgeois will be laicized by Ratzinger & Co.
Father Bourgeois's transgression, as the Vatican sees it, is not merely
that he is a proponent of women's ordination, but that he has been
present at the ordination rites and liturgies.
According to the New York Times, Father Bourgeois explained why he cannot recant in an interview this past week:
"I see this very clearly as an issue of sexism, and like racism, it's a sin. ... It cannot be justified, no matter how hard we priests and church leaders, beginning with the pope, might try to justify the exclusion of women as equals. It is not the way of God. It is the way of men."
I have been following (and writing about) the persecution of Father Bourgeois
for a while, and it seems to me that the Vatican's determination to
crack down on priests who support the ordination of women, when seen
alongside its (relative) indifference to the plight of adults who were
raped as children by Catholic clerics, is self-serving and twisted.
Even
the Knights of Columbus set are beginning to be troubled by this
bizarre juxtaposition, and that more and more Catholics are beginning to
see the pontiff and his team as a gang of mean, power-drunk perverts
who aren't all that interested in God.
Sure, there are ultra-conservative, lockstep Roman Catholics who take
a strict construction approach to embracing dogma and doctrine.
They'd
follow the Borgia pope to the letter, too.
But most Catholics are not
that, and even the most conservative of us -- because we tend to agree
that the current Vatican teaching which upholds the obligation of
Catholics to discern is correct -- are, to some degree, pick-and-choose
Catholics.
Even Catholics who oppose the ordination of women are beginning to
notice that there's something not quite right about defrocking a
missionary veteran with a Purple Heart as hundreds of bishops who pimped
out children continue to minister amok, frocks intact.
The July 23 Times piece quotes Christopher Ruddy, an
associate professor of theology at the Catholic University of America,
as saying the following:
"I don't think anything will come of it..."
Ruddy goes on to explain that church teaching on the "nonordination of women" may come under the heading of "infallible teaching."
Maybe Professor Ruddy is right about the infallible teaching aspect.
But I think a lot has already "come of it."
More than 150 signatures is
something. These priests have publicly confirmed what people in
parishes all over the world know: that there is widespread support among
practicing Catholics for the ordination of women.
I sat beside a friend who is a Catholic priest this past weekend at a
dinner party. We were talking about women's ordination. One of his
remarks should shed a particular light: "[The Vatican] won't even talk about it."
We have all experienced some version of this kind of refusal to talk
in our personal lives. An argument transpires. Logic falters,
stubbornness sets it, fear of losing the argument takes over and the one
losing the debate walks away.
That the Vatican won't ordain women might possibly be a matter of
infallible doctrine. The refusal to engage, however, is not. The refusal
to even engage is a sign of weakness. The refusal to engage is evidence
of bigotry and fear.
The argument against women's ordination is a lousy one. Arbitrary and
flimsy, it's a variation on "because we said so." The prohibition is a
man-made "law" grounded in medieval, temporal politics. It's man-made
policy based on broad interpretations and misinterpretations of select,
ancient, translated, retranslated and mistranslated texts. The argument
against women's ordination is fueled by greed and a juvenile fear of the
power, strength and sexuality of women.
In street terms: the pontiff and his boys -- they got nothin'.
The pontiff can take his shot at Bourgeois, but he won't land a punch.
According to the Vatican's own doctrine, it is God who turns men into
priests.
"Defrocking" Father Roy Bourgeois will not render Father
Bourgeois any less a priest.
The dress does not make the man a priest.
So Ratzinger and his boys in lace will just have to be satisfied with
robbing a 72-year-old Nobel Peace Prize nominee of his medical
insurance and modest retirement plan.