Maryland women feel compelled to join priesthood, despite opposition from RC officials

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.

What did the Episcopalians ever do to you? LOL!

This discussion reminds me of that folk song, "Oh daddy be gay", in which the devil carries off the old harridan of a wife, down to Hell, but:

One poor little devil looked over the wall
O daddy be gay
One poor little devil peeked over the wall
He said take her home daddy she’ll murder us all
Daddy be gay if you can be
O the devil he hoisted her up on his back
O daddy be gay
The devil he hoisted her up on his back
And home again with her in a pack
Daddy be gay if you can be
The old woman went a whistlin’ over the hill
O daddy be gay
The old woman went a whistlin’ over the hill
The devil won’t have me I wonder who will
Daddy be gay if you can be

“A latae sententiae excommunication is indeed official.”

Absolutely...but a latae sententiae excommunication is almost worthless a far as the teaching aspect goes. I mean what percentage of Catholics in the US have ever even heard the term “latae sententiae excommunication” much less had it explained to them?

Freegards

This is sad, but really a fringe business. No Catholic, not even a liberal Catholic, could be unaware that these are not properly ordained priests.

Actually the one point in the article that really troubles me is this:

“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.”

I can’t think of anything more dangerous than a Gaia-worshipping woman like this “bonding” with a congregation of 150 military intelligence people. Where was the military bishop while all this was going on? Yes, her position was “coordinator,” and a priest came in to say Mass every Sunday and presumably hear confessions, but this really wasn’t a good idea. We have enough problems with confused leftists in our intelligence agencies already.

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