Today, excommunicated and defrocked Roman Catholic Maryknoll priest and peace activist Roy Bourgeois, published an open letter to Pope Francis I. In this letter, Father Bourgeois asks the pontiff him to look more closely into listen more fully to the hearts of LGBT Catholics and Roman Catholic women called to ordination. Bourgeois writes: "Any movement rooted in love, justice, and equality is of the Divine and cannot be stopped."
I worship in a conventional Roman Catholic parish mostly, and in a community led by a female Roman Catholic priest when I am able, as well. So I have found it difficult to hear friends -- non-Catholics and atheists alike -- lavish praise upon a pope (Francis I) while so strenuously affirms, and reaffirms that the "door is closed to discussion of women's ordination."
I have held out hope that the pontiff everyone loves to love might prove that he truly is cut from some other cloth than that from which his two predecessors were cut by adopting a more Christlike point of view on the ordination of women. So far Pope Francis has yet to do this.
I have followed Father Roy Bourgeois's journey closely over the past few years, and having done so, have found it hard to push away the knowledge that Francis has done nothing at all to remove the excommunication of Bourgeois, whose offense was supporting the ordination of women. To add context, I note that hundreds of priests accused of raping children or serving as accessories in these crimes kept their frocks as Father Bourgeois -- a Vietnam veteran and Nobel Peace Prize nominee -- was being stripped of his.
In his letter to Pope Francis, Bourgeois cites the pain he has experienced as a consequence of being "kicked out of the church." This estrangement, he suggests, has deepened his feeling for fellow Roman Catholics who have been scorned and marginalized within their own church.
"My pain at having been kicked out of the priesthood has allowed me to glimpse the exclusion and discrimination that people of color, women, and gay people in our Church have experienced for centuries."
Judaism, from which the first church of Christ came, began as a tribe of fervent, loving, fearful, brave, orthodoxy-challenging believers who yearned for and found a sacred locus for their worship. The Roman Catholic Church began as a cult, in small rooms, as fervent, loving, fearful, brave, orthodoxy-challenging believers yearned for and found a sacred locus for their worship. The ordination of Roman Catholic women, which is currently under way and is too big to fail, began thus in small rooms wherein the voices of women called to the priesthood were heard.
The ordination of Roman Catholic women, which is currently under way and is too big to fail, began when Roman Catholic (male) bishops stepped forward from their spots in the Apostolic Succession in Christ's name to ordain women in secrecy in order that God's will, as they understood it, might be done. Thanks to them, the Roman Catholic Women's Ordination genie is out of the bottle.
Conservative Catholics (including women who view their subjugated status as a somehow blessed condition) find the Roman Catholic ordination of women so distasteful they call Catholics who support and take part in masses celebrated by women nasty names: "apostates," "heretics," "devils," and (Cover sensitive ears.) "Protestants!" I puzzle over and find ironic that any Christian should, under any circumstances, think "Protestant" an insult, but these anti-woman's ordination crusaders are skittish and desperate and that may account for the puerile tone of their rhetoric. I notice they fixate, in particular, on the "dress-up" aspects of Roman Catholic women priests -- as if the daring to "vest" itself -- to don the big dress, brocade and bling -- were the most diabolical feature of the so-called apostasy!
I am neither a Canon lawyer nor a theologian, but I am a smart and wise student of Roman Catholicism who has been studying doctrine and dogma informally and following Catholic news for a decade now. The more I read, the more I come to know that there is no authentic theological basis whatsoever for denying women ordination.
If the dogma and doctrine had been dictated to scribes by Jesus himself, those who hold both up as as clear evidence of God's desire that only people with male genitals are qualified to serve as priests might have a case. But Jesus did not write the Canon Code and they have no case. Men with political stakes in keeping women subjugated enshrined this prohibition; men driven by financial interests, men who were products of their time. Not Jesus. Not God.
There is no substantive theological barrier to the ordination of women. There is only white smoke and mirrors.
If this wiser, kinder gentler, more Christian Catholic pope is for real, he will respond to Father Bourgeois's letter. I pray the pontiff will be guided by Bourgeois's tender prose, and that Francis will be moved to lift the penalty of excommunication and to reinstate Bourgeois to the priesthood. If this wiser, kinder gentler, more Christian Catholic pope is for real, he will reach, with Christ in mind and heart, for the knob on that door he has called "closed."
If Pope Francis does reach for the knob, the gesture will be symbolic in the extreme -- because that door (to Woman's Ordination) has never really been closed.