More than 150 Roman Catholic priests in the United States have signed a
statement in support of a fellow cleric who faces dismissal for
participating in a ceremony that purported to ordain a woman as a
priest, in defiance of church teaching.
The American priests’ action follows closely on the heels of a “Call to Disobedience” issued in Austria
last month by more than 300 priests and deacons.
They stunned their
bishops with a seven-point pledge that includes actively promoting
priesthood for women and married men, and reciting a public prayer for
“church reform” in every Mass.
And in Australia,
the National Council of Priests recently released a ringing defense of
the bishop of Toowoomba, who had issued a pastoral letter saying that,
facing a severe priest shortage, he would ordain women and married men
“if Rome would allow it.”
After an investigation, the Vatican forced him to resign.
While these disparate acts hardly amount to a clerical uprising and are
unlikely to result in change, church scholars note that for the first
time in years, groups of priests in several countries are standing with
those who are challenging the church to rethink the all-male celibate
priesthood.
The Vatican has declared that the issue of women’s ordination is not
open for discussion. But priests are on the front line of the clergy
shortage — stretched thin and serving multiple parishes — and in part,
this is what is driving some of them to speak.
“They are saying, ‘We don’t have enough priests, we’re closing down
parishes,’ ” said David J. O’Brien, who holds an endowed chair in faith
and culture at the University of Dayton, a Marianist Catholic college.
“It’s a sign that the pastoral needs are sufficiently grave now that
priests are speaking up and saying, ‘Wait a minute, you can’t just
ignore the pastoral consequences of the things you do and say at the
top.’ ”
Church experts said it was surprising that 157 priests would sign a
statement in support of the American priest, the Rev. Roy Bourgeois,
because he did much more than speak out: he gave the homily and blessed a
woman in an illicit ordination ceremony conducted by the group, Roman Catholic Womenpriests.
That group claims to have ordained 120 female priests and five bishops
worldwide. The Vatican does not recognize the ordinations and has
declared the women automatically excommunicated.
Father Bourgeois, a member of the Maryknoll religious order, received a letter from the Vatican
in 2008 warning that he would be excommunicated if he did not recant.
He sent the Vatican a long letter saying that he was only following his
conscience. The Vatican never wrote back, he said.
The Maryknolls, however, did not dismiss him, and he continued
presenting himself as a priest. He is a rather well-known one, at that.
Father Bourgeois, now 72, was an American missionary in El Salvador
during the death squad era and has made it his ministry ever since to
lead antiwar protests outside the United States Army School of the
Americas in Georgia.
But now, under pressure from the Vatican, the Maryknolls have sent the
first of two required “canonical warnings” that they will dismiss him if
he does not recant.
Father Bourgeois responded that if he recanted to
save his priesthood or his pension, he would be lying.
“I see this very
clearly as an issue of sexism, and like racism, it’s a sin,” he said in
an interview this week from his home in Georgia. “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.”
In a 1994 declaration seen as intended to end the debate, Pope John Paul
II issued an apostolic letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, saying that the
church “has no authority whatsoever” to ordain women. Among the reasons
the church gives is that the apostles of Jesus Christ were all men, and
that that has been the church’s practice all along.
Christopher Ruddy,
associate professor of systematic theology at the Catholic University
of America, said of the recent statements from the priests, “I don’t
think anything will come of it.
“Some say the church’s teaching on the nonordination of women is an
infallible teaching, some say it’s not defined as such. But it’s clear
that an extraordinarily high level of teaching authority has been
invoked on that,” said Professor Ruddy, the author of “Tested in Every
Way: The Catholic Priesthood in Today’s Church” (Herder & Herder,
2006).
The statement from the 157 American priests says only that they support
Father Bourgeois’s “right to speak his conscience” — cautious wording
that probably enabled more to sign.
The effort was organized by Call to Action,
a Chicago-based group that has long advocated change in the church. It
is intended to put pressure on the Maryknolls not to go through with
dismissing Father Bourgeois.
“Maryknoll is caught in the middle,” said Michael Virgintino, director
of communications for the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, based in New
York. “It is Maryknoll that is trying to keep Father Roy engaged, and
very much wishes that there could be some conciliation between Roy and
the church.”
Austria is home to many Catholic priests and laypeople seeking changes
in the church. And yet the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph
Schönborn, said of the recent priests’ statement there, “The open call
to disobedience shocked me.”
Besides calling for ordination for women and married men, the Austrian
priests called for having women preach at Mass, and giving Communion to
divorced Catholics who have remarried without an annulment.
Cardinal Schönborn responded that if the priests had such extreme
conflicts with the church, they should not continue to serve. His
spokesman said the cardinal would meet with the group’s leaders in
August or September.
In Australia, the church was shaken in May when Pope Benedict XVI
removed Bishop William Morris from the Diocese of Toowoomba, where he
had served since 1992. The pope wrote the bishop that the teaching
barring women’s ordination was “infallible.”
The Vatican had sent Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver (named this week to be the new archbishop for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia) to investigate Bishop Morris.
The National Council of Priests of Australia, which says it represents
40 percent of priests there, denounced the dismissal, saying that those
who influenced the decision “have limited pastoral experience.”
The Rev. Ian McGinnity, chairman of the priests council in Australia,
said in an e-mail, “Bishop Morris was endeavouring to face honestly
significant problems in his rural diocese, particularly with the
shortage of priests, which meant that some communities were deprived of
the Eucharist on a regular basis.”