http://m2.toledoblade.com/Religion/2012/04/01/Toledo-woman-attempts-to-heed-call-to-be-priest.html
Beverly Bingle is on a mission impossible.
A "cradle Catholic" who retired from the Toledo Catholic Diocese after
serving as a pastoral associate at Blessed Sacrament Parish, Ms. Bingle feels
that God is calling her to be a priest — a Roman Catholic priest.
She knows the rules, of course, stated clearly and concisely in Canon Law
1024: "Only a baptized male validly receives sacred ordination."
And she knows church tradition.
http://m2.toledoblade.com/Religion/2012/04/01/Toledo-woman-attempts-to-heed-call-to-be-priest.html
"We were trained from an early age that it's not possible, that men are
superior," Ms. Bingle said in an interview. But the deeply spiritual Toledoan with a doctorate in ministry from
Ecumenical Theological Seminary in Detroit has been unable to shake the feeling
that God wants her to be a priest in the Roman Catholic Church, to which she has
belonged for all of her 68 years.
A no-frills type who shuns makeup, Ms. Bingle lives in a scruffy part of
North Toledo where she plants a huge garden in her backyard and gives the
harvest away to anyone in need...
‘Badges of honor'
Bishop Bridget Mary Meehan of Sarasota, Fla., said she has received several
letters of excommunication.
She said she considers them "badges of honor" because Pope Benedict XVI has
canonized two excommunicated nuns, Mother Theodore Guerin and Mary MacKillop.
"He is making excommunication the fast track to sainthood," Bishop Meehan said
in an interview...
Sydney Condray, 72, a Toledo author who has a doctorate in education
administration, is weighing whether to seek ordination as a priest.
A widow, Ms. Condray said she feels "a call to a leadership role, and the
priesthood is a call to leadership within a community."
...Father Bourgeois remains a Roman
Catholic priest in good standing.
Shortly after participating in Ms. Sevre-Duszynska's ordination, "I received
a very serious letter from the Vatican stating that I would be excommunicated
automatically if I did not recant my support of women's ordination as priests,"
Father Bourgeois said. "I responded by saying that I cannot recant. Sexism, like
racism, is a sin, and no matter how hard we may try to justify discrimination
against women it is not the way of God but of men in their quest for power."
He has not heard further from Rome, he said. His Maryknoll superiors,
meanwhile, sent him two warning letters last year demanding that he recant,
which he has refused to do. The order took a vote earlier this year to dismiss
him, Father Bourgeois said, but the motion did not have enough votes to
pass.
‘A grave injustice'
For Father Bourgeois, 73, a Roman Catholic priest for 40 years, the ban on
women's ordination is "a grave injustice."
"The question I had to ask myself and my fellow priests is an all-important
question that they refuse to answer, and it's who are we, as men, to say that
our call from God is authentic but your call as women is not. Who are we to
reject God's call of women to the priesthood?
"What I discovered after a lot of study and reflection is that the root of
our church's teaching is sexism. A grave injustice is being done against women
and against God, who I believe without any doubt calls both men and women to the
priesthood."
....Bishop Joan Houk of Pittsburgh, who heads the Great Waters Region of Roman
Catholic Womenpriests, which includes Ohio, was a Roman pastoral director and
pastoral associate in Kentucky, where for 5½ years she ran two Roman Catholic
parishes that had no pastors.
"I preached. I did funerals that did not have Eucharistic liturgies. I took
my turn doing hospital chaplaincy, but I was not able to use holy oils. I was
not able to hear confessions or preside at Eucharist. I did a couple of
baptisms, but I could not do weddings."
Bishop Houk, a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a master of
divinity degree, said the ministry restrictions placed on her because of her
gender became increasingly difficult to bear.
"It was extremely painful," Bishop Houk, 71, said. "I never realized that it
would be that painful. … I thought, ‘If I was ordained I could give them the
sacraments.'"
In March, 2005, she was inspired to pursue ordination after hearing Bishop
Patricia Fresen, a bishop and a native of South Africa, talk about
apartheid.
"I had believed that someday the Catholic Church would ordain women," Bishop
Houk said. "I had been waiting, and then I saw that things were getting more
rigid against any possibility of us getting ordained. And then I heard Patricia
say that when you try everything and it doesn't work, then sometimes what you
have to do is break the law. It became very clear to me right then that that was
something I needed to do. I needed to break the law."
Bishop Meehan, 64, of Sarasota, Fla., was one of the first eight women
ordained in the United States, in a July, 2006, ceremony on a boat at the
confluence of three rivers in Pittsburgh. She was ordained a bishop three years
later...."We don't have to wait for permission anymore, Bishop Meehan said. "We're not
putting up with second-class citizenship. We are refusing to sit in the back of
the bus. We are taking our rightful role. We are not leaving the church. No, we
are leading the church."
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