Claudia C. Kalis: Ordination Has Lost Its Meaning [ECUSA, women in the priesthood]

I entered seminary in 1977 with no expectation of ever being ordained to the priesthood. I went to seminary to grow in my knowledge and love of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I longed for my life to be more fully molded and shaped into my Lord’s image and to grow in my willingness and ability to surrender and submit all that I am and all that I have to his call upon my life.

My bishop at the time was supportive of ordination of women. I was not. For me, ordination was not, and never was, meant to be about the ordinand as much as it was and continues to be about Jesus. What was true about one’s gender was very secondary, if not totally subservient, to the truth that had been implanted into the hearts, minds and souls of those who would be set apart to proclaim, protect, guard and witness to the gospel.

During the early years when women were being ordained to the priesthood, I had grave problems with what I saw emerging. I felt, and continue to believe, the Church’s historic and traditional understanding of the ordained ministry as being a response to the call of Jesus upon one’s life was suddenly being invaded and distorted by radical feminism and gender politics. Our understanding and appreciation of ordination as the claim of Jesus upon one’s life, accompanied by a sacred responsibility to guard the faith, was being redefined as a civil entitlement accompanied by human privilege. The very primacy of Jesus and his gospel, which lies at the heart of ordination, was trumped. What was once “a sacred call” was now a civil right. What was once understood to be a sacred responsibility was now being set forth as human privilege.

The call to serve our Lord and Savior in total and complete abandon and submission to him in humbled awe and adoration was gone. Sacrificial living, submission and obedience to the Word of God were among the first things to be sacrificed in our understandings of ordination. Ordination was becoming a “right,” an “entitlement” to be claimed by human endeavor rather than a response to the powerful and sanctified movement of the Spirit of God upon one’s life. The will and purposes of our Lord were being upended by some who were resolute in promoting the will and purposes of their gender politics beyond all else.

Although I was ordained to the priesthood in 1984, I continue to struggle with the injurious effects of many ordained women (although most certainly not all) upon our Church’s understanding of ministry and ordination. Radical feminism and gender politics opened the way to gross distortions in the Church’s understanding of the ordained ministry. Once ordination was cast as a human right, it was inevitable that anyone under any circumstances could be, and in fact should be, ordained. It should come as no surprise that as we altered our understanding of sacred responsibility and obedience into human privilege and licensure, the doors of revisionism, hedonistic narcissism, and human eroticism would be opened wide. Our Lord Jesus Christ was now to be adored as the One who would guard and protect our civil liberties and narcissistic pleasures, not the one who died because of them.

I recoil at any and all gender references, for ordination ultimately is not about what is true about my or anyone’s gender (male or female), but about what is true about that which lies within the hearts and souls and minds of those whose lives our Lord has claimed. He has called us to lay down our lives — our personal socio-political agendas, our hedonistic pleasures, our narcissistic desires and conduct, our intellectual pomposity — and to take up his cross in total abandon, surrender, and obedience to him and to the truth he reveals. This is what ordination is all about, or should be.

While many women helped to nullify this understanding of ordination, their mournful success has now so infiltrated our Church that we are past a discussion of whether women should be ordained. Rather, we are being confronted anew with the need to totally re-examine the entire meaning of ordination, irrespective of gender.

As both men and women in the ordained ministry have betrayed Jesus and his truth through their lives and in their witness, it is my hope and prayer that we, as a Church, can reach beyond gender and resolve the question of who should or should not be ordained upon the truth of the One who is to be proclaimed and the preparedness of Christ’s servants to proclaim, guard and live into that truth.

What may have begun and/or rapidly flourished with the onset of ordination of women is no longer just about women. It is about multitudes, men and women, who are betraying Christ as a result of their grossly distorted understandings and practice of the ordained ministry.

–The Rev. Claudia C. Kalis is the vicar of St. Bartholomew’s Church, High Springs, Fla.; this first appeared on page 13 of the October 31, 2004 issue of THE LIVING CHURCH magazine. The Reader’s Viewpoint article does not necessarily represent the editorial opinion of THE LIVING CHURCH or it board of directors.

The Rev. Kalis was the subject of the following recent report (emphasis added). --sionnsar

FLORIDA BISHOP JOHN HOWARD FIRES EVANGELICAL WOMAN PRIEST

By David W. Virtue

HIGH SPRINGS, FL (11/30/2004)--The Bishop of Florida, Samuel Johnson Howard has fired the Rev. Claudia B. Kalis, evangelical vicar of St. Bartholomew's Church, citing theological differences, her insubordination, and accusing her of proclaiming that he was the administrator of the "devil's cup" when publicly making known that she could not be in Eucharistic fellowship with the bishop while he remained in Eucharistic fellowship with Frank Griswold and Gene Robinson. She also refused to take Holy Communion from the bishop.

Kalis, who is vicar of the 108-member growing congregation, which gained and lost several families over the actions of General Convention last summer, got a letter on November 28, from Bishop Howard saying: "I am electing to terminate your employment as vicar of St. Bartholomew's, High Springs, effective immediately."

A copy of the termination letter given to the Rev. Kalis was obtained by VirtueOnline from an anonymous source. In the letter, four areas of concern were cited that lead to the irreparable break between her and the bishop.

In responding to the Windsor Report (the response was printed on the church's website) Kalis indicated that as long as Bishop Howard continued to be in sacramental fellowship with Frank Griswold and Vicki Gene Robinson she could not be in sacramental fellowship with Howard. The letter said that Kalis honored those who held sentiments similar to her own as well as those who did not. Because it had become a divisive issue in the parish, Kalis clarified her own position while respecting that not all would agree with her. Kalis indicated that she could not be in sacramental fellowship with Bishop Howard but that she continued to honor his position as her bishop.

[...this is an excerpt...]

conjectures of a guilty seminarian weighs in on this:

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

A Thread on Women's Ordination You Should Track

Over on titusonenine, there is a great thread which has started concerning an article written by Claudia Kalis on the Ordination of Women. She is a priestess, and she claims that gender has nothing to do with current battles in the Church, therefore neither does the Ordination of Women. But, she claims that ordination has lost its meaning. On this, I can agree with her. However, we are at radically different starting points.

For her, priesthood is about an individual calling from God. The Church need not affirm that calling. While recognizing the invasion of radical feminism, she has the starting point all wrong. It is the Church's job to enable individuals to seek the result of their emotive wills, not to call them. What she ends up with is saying that in this controversy over homosexuality, we are seeing men and women clergy abandon the faith - well, she says they're abandoning their calling. This is so typical I cannot even tell you. Women seeking orders whom I know are so arrogant and presumptive about their "calls" that it sucks the very meaning out of what we mean when we say "call." God cannot call in a fashion contrary to His revealed will. He cannot call in a manner contrary to the sacraments. But, Ms. Kalis believes in a God without order.

So she writes this, an alternative understanding of ordination suitable to her taste:

“I recoil at any and all gender references, for ordination ultimately is not about what is true about my or anyone’s gender (male or female), but about what is true about that which lies within the hearts and souls and minds of those whose lives our Lord has claimed”

So, she is saying that ordination is about what is in the individual heart and soul and mind of the Christian seeking that ordination. This is most certainly a novel understanding of ordination, having no basis in the Scriptures or in Tradition. What she is talking about is an individualistic, self-determined priesthood, rather than a Christ-centered priesthood. But, her made-up position is necessitated by her own “ordination” as WO is contrary to the priesthood which Jesus gives to the Church.

Gender is an extremely important part of what it means to be human. It is an integral way in which we relate to God and He to us in the Incarnation, in which Jesus takes male flesh. This is not incidental nor accidental. The Lord who sits at the right hand of the Father is male. It is He who gives us the priesthood, in fact, it is He who is the priesthood, a priesthood which we have no right to change.

Ms. Kalis, in her own mind, has already justified this change. But, she had done so far before she put on a collar or changed her stance on the ordination of women. Her very understanding of vocation - that of an individual, subjective notion of what oneself is to be - is faulty.

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