Catholic Women Priests Served Church Before, Can Do Now/ By John McNally

http://www.news-press.com/article/20120208/OPINION/302080006/1015/opinion/Guest-opinion-Catholic-women-priests-served-church-before-can-do-now?odyssey=nav%7Chead

Ordination Liturgy- Judy Beaumont in Ft. Myers, Florida

The argument for women priests in the Catholic Church is based in Scripture, where we find that Jesus Christ had many women associates in his ministry on Earth.
Besides his own mother and other women he had a close relationship with Mary of Magdala, who was the first of his disciples to learn that he had risen from the dead. And St. Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, who was the first to write any of the New Testament scriptures, writes of several women who were his very close associates and whom he refers to as deacons.
Scripture scholars now realize that Jesus did not ordain anyone, and that the first bishops and priests to serve the church were installed long after Jesus had left the Earth. They probably came to be as a result of the destruction of the Jewish temple in 76 A.D. and the consequent demise of the Jewish priesthood. At any rate, the Bible indicates that Jesus thought women and men were equals and should be treated as such.
Our Catholic bishops today like to characterize themselves as successors of the apostles. However, most of the apostles were dead and gone before we ever had any bishops in our church. And our leaders like to describe our church as a monarchy. But in reality our church started out as a democracy. The first religious services in our church were conducted by mothers and fathers and laymen and laywomen in private homes, in secret, because it was dangerous to be identified as Christian or Catholic in the Roman Empire at that time.
Leaders of these services were chosen by their peers. Thus the Catholic Church was originally a democracy and did not identify herself as a monarchy until the fourth century, when the Roman Emperor Constantine became her protector. The church then patterned herself after the Roman Empire. And don’t let anyone tell you that it is an unbroken tradition in the church that women can not be priests. Dorothy Irvin, a local scholar, has done a lot of research in Rome and early Christian sites and located engraved inscriptions which depict women as bishops and priests. And up until the ninth century, women were being ordained as deacons. It is worthwhile noting that a lady, Ludmila Javorova, was ordained a priest secretly on Dec. 28, 1970, behind the Iron Curtain when male priests were not allowed to function. She was able to give the sacraments to people without the authorities getting suspicious by virtue of the fact that she was female.
Today women are no longer asking church authorities to be ordained. They know that’s a dead end. They are taking back their God-given place in the church. They are demanding equal rights with men and want to be treated as Jesus treated them. They want to function again as women did in the early church.
They do not believe that it is as important to obey a man-made law as it is to serve God’s people. Their idea is that an unjust law (women can’t be priests) is no law at all.
They will not go away. Since women were first ordained in 2002 there are women priests in 23 states. Judy Lee and Judy Beaumont are women priests serving in Fort Myers.
Since church authorities bar them from serving as parish priests they have made serving the homeless in our area their ministry, finding housing, clothing, transportation, and government help for them, and providing meals for them. Yes, indeed, there is good reason why women should be priests as well as men.
John W. McNally is secretary of the Catholic Call to Action Conference of Southwest Florida. He lives in Estero.