Posted on 09/10/2007 11:40:04 AM PDT by NYer
The ordination took place July 14 in New York City, where Carpeneto, a Catonsville resident, joined three other women who were ordained by Bishop Patricia Fresen - despite the fact the church officially forbids female ordination.
The women belong to a growing movement that no longer simply argues for women's rights but is creating an alternative Catholic church, whether the official church likes it or not.
"Women, thank God, are coming to value themselves as full human beings, fully in the image of God like men," said Andrea Johnson of Annapolis, one of the four to be ordained. "You can't put that back in the bottle."
The women bishops performing the ordinations were themselves ordained by an Argentinean Catholic priest who has broken ranks with the Vatican, and by European priests whose names are not public, Johnson said.
It is the custom and long tradition of the Catholic church that it takes three bishops to ordain a new bishop, Johnson said.
But according to Helen Osman, spokeswoman for the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, only the pope can appoint a bishop.
The women ordained accept that their ordinations are illicit under canon law 1024, which forbids female ordination.
However, they argue that, while illicit, the ordinations are valid because they can be traced back to the apostles of Jesus and because it has only been in recent years that only the pope could appoint bishops.
But to Monsignor Art Valenzano of St. John Catholic Church in Westminster, the official Roman Catholic Church cannot accept the ordinations as either valid or licit.
The pope has determined that some church dogma can't change, Valenzano said, and this includes a male-only priesthood.
Lack of ordination doesn't automatically bar women from authority in the church, he said.
For example, Mother Teresa had tremendous authority, Valenzano said.
But according to the newly ordained women, females are a disenfranchised caste within the church.
Mother Teresa had moral authority in the church, Johnson said, but no legal authority.
Not a whim
For Johnson, 60, the decision to become ordained evolved after decades of service to the church.
"It didn't just pop into my head," she said.
She worked for years as a Catholic parish coordinator at an army intelligence base in Warrenton, Va., where she was the go-to person when people needed a minister.
She bonded with the 150-person congregation, but then had to step aside when a priest came in for a couple of hours a week to perform the sacraments, which are central to the Roman Catholic faith.
The split in functions didn't seem holistic to her. It seemed to make more sense that she be able to offer the sacraments to her flock.
In the 1980s, she became active in the women's ordination conference, a group of 20 to 25 women who discerned a call to ministry and did spiritual formation work together over the years.
For a time, the women received some support from the male establishment, Johnson said.
And over the years, women have amassed a body of evidence to build a case for women being ordained as deacons and serving in leadership roles in the early church.
If the church needed a rationale to plant ordained women firmly in church history and tradition, the women provided it. To no avail.
In 1995, the Vatican shut the discussion down when the pope said he had no power to allow female ordination, said Mary Bendyna, executive director of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostalate, a social science center that researches the Roman Catholic Church.
So some women shifted gears and found several priests who agreed to perform female ordinations in secret.
The Vatican excommunicated the first group of seven women priests, after giving them six months to recant and reconcile with the church. But then the church changed course and stopped excommunicating women priests, opting instead to say that the women, such as Fresen, had made a choice to leave the church.
"They wanted to put the onus on the women," Johnson said. "They don't want to be the badgerers."
The women insist they have remained in the church. A standoff exists - and a struggle over what exactly the Catholic Church is.
What is the Catholic Church?
The Roman Catholic Church can be defined in two ways, Carpeneto said.
There's the Catholic Church of the pope and the officials in the Vatican who set policy and act as the public voice of the faith.
Then there's the larger body of people who identify as Roman Catholic, whether they agree with official church policies or not. Some of these Catholics are so disaffected that they don't attend Mass regularly, Carpeneto said.
This is the group on which the women base their claim.
"If the people accept [female priests] it bubbles up from the bottom," Johnson said. "It's very messy. It's very slow."
But the church eventually will conform to the culture, she said.
Indicators point to lay acceptance of female priests, said Bendyna.
When CARA asked Catholics, if the church approved, would they support women's ordination, the majority of respondents said yes, supporting the women priests' point that it's the clergy on top, not the broader church, blocking their path.
And while the current dogma states that the pope has no authority to allow women to be ordained, there's no saying what future popes might decide, Bendyna said.
The Catholic hierarchy simply doesn't want the laity to know what's going on, Johnson said, because they are afraid the rank and file would accept female priests.
Osman, however, dismissed the suggestion that the church wants to hide the female ordinations.
"There are groups like this around the world who have their own agenda," she said. "That's their way of looking at what's going on."
The church's failure to excommunicate the women is not because it fears making them martyrs but because excommunication is an extremely rare occurrence, Osman said.
Reform or Reformation?
Johnson and Carpeneto both identify themselves as Roman Catholics. Both see themselves more as Francis of Assisi, who worked to correct the church from within, than as Martin Luther, who challenged corruption and ended up forming the Lutheran denomination and beginning the Protestant Reformation.
"We're not setting up a new church," Carpeneto said. "We're not a schismatic movement."
However, the changes the women propose - and are implementing - go beyond female ordination to challenge the basic structure of institutional Roman Catholicism.
For example, during the ordination ceremony in Manhattan, Fresen stood to one side of those being ordained, as symbol of equality, an implicit challenge to the hierarchical structure of the official church, which is militaristic and top down, Johnson said.
The women priests don't want to replicate a system that has excluded so many from power and hidden problems, such as clergy sexual abuse.
"We're not about getting ourselves on the inside of such a structure and behaving the same way," Johnson said. "We're anxious to have a new model of church ... one that is open and respectful of people."
Carpeneto talked about church community as a circle of equals, not a hierarchy.
"Just the fact that we're still using the word 'father' [to describe clergy] is beyond a joke," she said. "We want to raise a generation of people who aren't infantilized."
But Osman is bemused that the women could decenter hierarchy, ignore canon law, have themselves ordained and still consider themselves Roman Catholics.
"This would not be in ... the Roman Catholic Church headed by Pope Benedict," Osman said.
While some might interpret the women's break with church policy as a symptom of the self-centered individualism rampant in American society, Carpeneto said this is not the case.
She pointed to primacy of conscience, a Catholic teaching that allows individuals, after they have heard the teaching and authority of the church, to make up their minds on the basis on the promptings of their consciences.
She spoke, too, of prophetic obedience, challenging the religious institution from within in the way of the Old Testament prophets or Jesus.
Johnson said her ordination is not about herself.
"It may have been 25 years ago when I was shocked out of my mind at how misogynist the Catholic Church was ... then maybe you could have made a case for this to be about me."
But not anymore.
"I don't need it," Johnson said. "The call is from God. ... I'm at an age when it would be so nice to go out on my boat every day."
Two realities
Carpeneto acknowledged the existence of the two Roman Catholic realities.
"Voices say, 'You are playing at being ordained,'" she said.
But now the alternate reality is not as readily dismissed as it was a few years ago, she said.
While institutions such as the Bon Secours retreat center in Marriotsville have severed ties with her since her ordination, 250 people who witnessed her Manhattan ordination accept her as a deacon, she said.
She plans to become a priest next year.
Though marginalized by the official church, the women priests don't need its support, Johnson said.
The women support themselves through their jobs.
Johnson said she plans to minister to people who have been hurt by the church, such as gays or divorced people without annulments.
"They are languishing," she said. "They are looking for a Catholic ministry ... that is listening to them."
And while it might appear as if it would take a miracle for the official church to accept their ordination, stranger things have happened and people once despised are accepted into the fold, Carpeneto said.
"The hierarchical church does a lot of posturing and huffing, but we can hold a lot of people in," she said. "Don't discount the work of the Holy Spirit in this."
Female Priests
Starting with the ordination of seven female priests in 2002, Roman Catholic Women Priests has been ordaining women.
Reminds me of Luther. Luther was obessed with his inability to achieve perfection. Because the Catholic way did not work for him, he devised a new faith, one that relieved him of any responsibility for the guilt he felt. This is the way that heresy begins: with the felt needs of the heretric. This poor soul craves validation.
And, I feel compelled to fly like a bird despite not having wings.
I suggest they go for the gusto and name one of themselves Pope. Then their church will be complete.
Like so many loony libs, she’s all about FEEEEEELLINNGGGS, and not about truth.
Truthiness?
Sort of in the same zip code as Truth, but not too near. . . .
He, apparently, was in good company:
Romans 7:24 O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?
Oh my word. No one is safe anymore from these nutty subversive feminists!
Tell them to join a convent!
Well, one can accept Luther’s self-identification with Paul or not. I choose not, because Luther never met Paul. Luther even abandoned Augustine’s Interpretation of Paul. I’m almost with the psychologists where Luther is concerned: a single son and a demanding father, whose sole rebellion was to become a monk, and though he became a star, he could never been good enough to satisfy the Father. Then he cut the Gordian knot. Why worry: just let Jesus carry the load.
We have been dealing with the lesbian liberation theologist feminist Marxist nuns since Vatican II.
Our German Shepherd (BXVI) is taking out the garbage. If there is no other indication that there is a God, I would still believe it due to his election.
Our servant of the servants of God is the man of our times.
Feel free, they seem to have stuff figured out?:
1 Tim 6:20 O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called:
21 Which some professing have erred concerning the faith. Grace be with thee. Amen.
I've never met Jesus (in the flesh...in the common vernacular) , but I still identify with Him via Gal 2:20:
I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.
Paul identified with Jesus....or not?
I've never read that book. Is it good? Is it worth reading?
Sorry, but unless one accepts Luther’s premises, this is mere rhetoric. And Luther’s whole argument is essentially negative, a rejection of the efficiacy of the Augustinian rule, or at least its efficiacy. Luther obviously thought he had received a divine revelation. His interpretation of Paul ws based on an insight that he thought inspired. Sort of like Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum.”
Luther was an Austin friar, and his order aimed to go back to the master, largely abandoned the scholasticism of the day. Augustine’s theory of grace was appropriated by Luther and Calvin.
I have MS. I like to play golf, and I’m pretty darn good at it. I want to play on the PGA tour and they jolly well better let me ride a cart.
(p.s. the above as made up.)
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I think they've spent too much time discerning their own will of late.
Incorrect. A latae sententiae excommunication is indeed official.
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