"Role of Prophet" by Sister Joan Chittister, Roman Catholic Women Priests Movement: Prophets of Gospel Equality

 Bridget Mary's Response: 

Roman Catholic Women Priests and all who practice Gospel inclusiveness are contemporary prophets.

We live as a discipleship of equals in grassroots, inclusive communities, changing the church one community at a time. 

We are walking in the footsteps of Saints Catherine of Siena, Joan of Arc, Dorothy Day and many more!

Bridget Mary Meehan, ARCWP, www.arcwp.org

Bridget Mary Meehan, MA, D Min, is a Bishop with the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests, and a Sister for Christian Community. She is a founding member of the Mary Mother of Jesus Inclusive Catholic Community in Sarasota, Florida. As a woman priest and bishop, Bridget Mary ordains, presides at liturgies, officiates at weddings and offers sacramental ministry. Bridget Mary is the author of twenty books and is currently the Dean of the Doctor of Ministry Program for Global Ministries University. Her work in communications media includes programs about women priests on Google and YouTube. Bridget Mary was ordained a priest in the first USA ordination in Pittsburgh on July 31, 2006 and was ordained a bishop in Santa Barbara, California on April 19, 2009. Email: sofiabmm@aol.com Blog http://bridgetmarys.blogspot.com/

St. Catherine of Siena

"Role of the prophet"

There is a major difference between a critic and a prophet. Critics stand outside a system and mock it. Prophets remain clear-eyed and conscientious, inside a sinful system, and love it anyway. It is easy to condemn the country, for instance. It is possible to criticize the church. But it is prophetic to love both church and country enough to want them to be everything they claim to be—just, honest, free, equal—and then to stay with them in their faltering attempts to do so, even if it is you yourself against whom both church and state turn in their attempts to evade the prophetic truth of the time.

The French papacy of Avignon did not want to hear the call of Catherine of Siena but, in the end, she prevailed and they returned the Holy See to Rome. The powers that be did not want to hear Joan of Arc and killed her to silence her, but in the end, her prophetic word outlasted them all. Neither church nor state wanted to hear Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton in their pleas for the poor and their prophetic cries for peace, but in the need it is their messages that expose the secularization of the church, that haunt it at the turn of every gospel page, that challenge it to this day and that have marked its best presence in these times.

The function of the prophet is not to destroy. The function of the prophet is to expose whatever cancers fester beneath the surface so that what is loved can be saved while there is yet time.

To claim, then, that to criticize the government is treason, to insist that to criticize the church is disunity, may be the greatest perfidy and the deepest infidelity of them all. It is a prophet’s lot to risk the two so that what is worth loving can be lovable again.

       —from The Cry of the Prophet by Joan Chittister