From Coolkerry to the Eucharistic Table
A Grace-Filled Journey to Priesthood
By Rev. Dr. Bridget Mary Meehan, ARCWP
When I look back over my life, I see a trail of grace stretching from a small cottage in County Laois, Ireland, to the Eucharistic table where I now preside as a Roman Catholic woman priest.
At the time, I could never have imagined where the Spirit was leading me. Yet every chapter—childhood faith, immigration, religious life, theological study, pastoral ministry, struggle, joy, resistance, and holy surprise—was preparing me for a call that the Church I loved told me was impossible.
My journey began in Coolkerry, County Laois, where I was born in 1948 to my parents, Bridie and Jack Meehan. Faith was woven into the fabric of everyday life. God was not an abstract idea. God was present in family, parish, prayer, neighbors, stories, and the sacred rhythms of Catholic Ireland.
Some of my earliest memories of faith are of praying the rosary at home with my brothers, Patrick and Sean. Every night before bed, my mother gathered us together and led the rosary. Those simple family prayers shaped my imagination and planted deep within me a trust in God’s presence and in Mary’s companionship. Faith was something we lived together, not only something we practiced on Sundays.
Looking back, I realize that those evenings of prayer were part of the beginning of my vocation. Long before I understood where my life would lead, I was learning to listen for God in the ordinary rhythms of family life.
My First Communion photograph captures something essential about those early years: joy, wonder, and belonging. I was a little girl dressed in white, standing in a tradition that had shaped generations before me. I loved the Eucharist long before I understood theology. I sensed that something holy was happening there.
I could never have known then that one day I would stand at the table myself and pray the Eucharistic Prayer as a priest.
“I Will Love You Forever”
One of the most important spiritual experiences of my childhood occurred at Ballyheigue in County Kerry. In prayer, I experienced a deep awareness of God’s presence and heard in my heart the words:
“I will love you forever.”
Those words became a spiritual compass for my life.
God’s love was not conditional. It was not limited by human rules, institutional boundaries, gender, or approval. It was a love that called me forward again and again, especially when the road ahead seemed impossible.
When my family emigrated to the United States in 1956, we carried our Irish Catholic faith with us. I grew up in Arlington, Virginia, but Ireland remained deep within me—the stories, the saints, the humor, the sense that the sacred could break into ordinary life at any moment.
I have always felt a special kinship with St. Brigid of Kildare, a woman remembered for hospitality, leadership, generosity, and spiritual authority. Her large and welcoming table has become an image for the kind of Church I believe Jesus calls us to be.
Pull up another chair.
Make room.
No one should be excluded from God’s table.
A Call to Give My Life to God
As a young woman, I felt called to religious life. In 1966, I entered the Immaculate Heart of Mary Sisters.
Those years deepened my prayer life, introduced me to theological study, and strengthened my desire to serve the People of God. Later, my path continued through the Sisters for Christian Community and through decades of pastoral ministry.
For fifteen years, I served as a pastoral associate at Fort Myer Chapel in Virginia. I accompanied people through baptisms, weddings, illness, grief, military deployments, family struggles, and moments of profound spiritual searching.
Over time, something became increasingly clear to me.
Women were already doing priestly ministry.
We were preaching, teaching, praying with the sick, accompanying the dying, leading communities, studying theology, and proclaiming the Gospel.
Yet sacramental leadership remained closed to us simply because we were women.
The contradiction became impossible for me to ignore.
Theology Opened New Doors
My academic journey gave me language for what my heart already knew.
I earned a master’s degree in religious studies from The Catholic University of America and later a Doctor of Ministry degree from Virginia Theological Seminary, where I became the first woman and the first Roman Catholic to graduate from the doctoral program.
My studies introduced me more deeply to feminist theology, liberation theology, historical scholarship, and the witness of women throughout Christian history.
I discovered that women were never merely silent spectators in the Christian story.
Women were apostles.
Women led house churches.
Women were deacons.
Women preached.
Women proclaimed resurrection.
Mary Magdalene was sent by the risen Christ to announce Easter to the apostles.
Phoebe was a deacon and trusted minister.
Junia was remembered among the apostles.
Prisca helped lead an early Christian community and instructed others in the faith.
The evidence of women’s leadership was there in Scripture and tradition. It had simply been obscured, minimized, or forgotten.
I began to understand my own calling within that much larger story.
The Impossible Call Becomes Possible
For many years, women’s ordination in the Roman Catholic Church was presented as something impossible.
But grace has an interesting relationship with impossibility.
Grace keeps opening doors.
Grace keeps raising questions.
Grace keeps calling people beyond boundaries that once seemed permanent.
On July 31, 2006, I was ordained a Roman Catholic priest aboard the riverboat Majestic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as part of the growing Roman Catholic Women Priests movement.
It was one of the most profound moments of my life.
The river itself became a symbol of what was happening. The Spirit was moving like living water beyond institutional barriers.
We were not leaving Catholicism.
We were claiming our baptismal equality within it.
We were standing in apostolic succession and affirming what countless Catholic women had already experienced in their hearts: God’s call cannot be limited by gender.
Three years later, on April 19, 2009, I was ordained a bishop in Santa Barbara, California, so that I could help ordain other women called to serve.
I never imagined such a path when I was that little girl making her First Communion in Ireland.
But grace often writes stories larger than our imagination.
A Holy and Joyful Shake-Up
My journey to priesthood has never been about seeking status or power.
It has been about following Jesus.
Jesus consistently welcomed those pushed to the edges.
He challenged religious systems when rules harmed people.
He treated women as disciples and theological conversation partners.
He trusted women with leadership.
The Roman Catholic Women Priests movement stands within this Gospel tradition of prophetic change.
We are not asking permission to live our baptismal equality.
We are living it.
In our inclusive Catholic communities, everyone is welcome at the Eucharistic table. Divorced and remarried Catholics are welcome. LGBTQ+ people are welcome. People who have been hurt by the institutional Church are welcome. Seekers and doubters are welcome.
There are no second-class Catholics.
At Mary Mother of Jesus Inclusive Catholic Community in Sarasota, Florida, where I have served as a founding priest and presider, we gather as a community of equals.
We often share dialogue homilies.
We pray together.
We listen to one another.
We celebrate Eucharist around an open table.
This is the Church I have dreamed about since childhood—a Church where God’s love is larger than every barrier we construct.
The Journey Comes Full Circle
In recent years, returning to Ireland has brought my journey full circle.
I have prayed again in places connected to my childhood faith. I have visited Kildare and remembered Brigid. I have celebrated Eucharist in the land where my spiritual life began.
There is something deeply moving about returning to Ireland as a woman priest.
The little girl from Coolkerry could never have imagined it.
Yet perhaps somewhere within that little girl was already the seed of this calling.
When I look at my First Communion photograph now, I want to whisper to her:
“Your story is not finished yet.”
There will be doors that close.
There will be people who tell you that God cannot possibly be calling you.
There will be rules that say you cannot stand at the altar.
But the Spirit will keep moving.
And one day, you will stand at that table and proclaim what you first learned as a child:
God loves us forever.
A Grace-Filled Revolution
Women’s ordination is part of a much larger transformation taking place in the Catholic Church.
Around the world, Catholics are asking deeper questions about equality, conscience, leadership, clericalism, and synodality.
Women are no longer willing to wait quietly outside doors that God has already opened.
Our movement is small, but the Gospel often begins with small communities.
Jesus began with a handful of disciples.
The early Church gathered around kitchen tables.
Mary Magdalene began Easter with one astonishing sentence:
“I have seen the Lord.”
Every great movement of faith begins when someone trusts what God has shown them.
My journey from Coolkerry to priesthood has convinced me that God’s imagination is always larger than ours.
What once seemed impossible has become my lived reality.
I am a daughter of Ireland.
I am a Catholic.
I am a woman priest.
And I remain deeply hopeful about the future of our Church.
From Coolkerry to the Eucharistic Table
When I look back now, I see the road from Coolkerry to the Eucharistic table as a grace-filled pilgrimage.
It began with a little girl in Ireland, dressed in white for First Communion, already drawn to the mystery of God’s love. It continued through immigration, religious life, theological study, pastoral ministry, struggle, friendship, and the persistent whisper of the Spirit.
This summer, the journey came full circle when I returned to Ireland and celebrated Eucharist with women gathered in a home church in Dublin. Sitting together in a living room, praying and sharing faith around a simple table, I felt the deep grace of homecoming.
The child who once received Communion in Ireland had returned as a woman priest, presiding at an inclusive Eucharistic table.
That moment gathered so much of my life into one sacred circle: the faith of my parents, the rosaries prayed with my mother and brothers, the women who inspired me, the communities that formed me, and the conviction that God’s call cannot be limited by gender or institution.
My journey has taught me that the Spirit keeps moving, the table keeps widening, and grace keeps surprising us.
My prayer for the Church I love is simple:
May every sacred calling be welcomed.
May every gift be honored.
May women and men stand together as equals in Christ.
May no one be turned away from the table of God’s abundant love.
Open the doors.
Pull up a few more chairs.
From Coolkerry to the Eucharistic table, grace has carried me all the way—and grace is still leading us forward.
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