She (E.E.) did the right thing. She left the Church. I’ve been suggesting this for years.
She is not a priest, priestess, minister, or even Catholic in good standing in the Roman Catholic Church (due to her public actions). That’s fine. She and her followers can create an entity out of whole cloth. It has nothing to do with the RCC. Nothing.
I don’t think her biggest issue is authority. (And I believe, as do many conservative priests, that lay women should have more legitimate authority in the church, as in voices taken seriously, but not as in ‘playing priest’ by performing sanctuary and liturgical roles.) I think her big issue, and those of the rest of her like-minded associates, is gender. That’s her hang-up. Gender.
Yes, I’m a woman, and a heterosexual woman, but that is not nearly as central to my spiritual identity as being a child of God. That is what I have in common with every other child of God – gay or straight, male or female (um, read St. Paul on these similar words, Elizabeth English), clergy or lay. And as a member of the Church Militant my identity as a Catholic Christian way supercedes my identity as a straight woman.
All of these self-created “womanpriests” have a gender hang-up, major. I know dozens of them. They isolate themselves with other women in some kind of seige mentality against men, which I find very sad – not to mention very '70s.
Straight men and gay men are my brothers, not my enemies. That’s what Christ commanded of me. Some of these women act as if they read a different Gospel. But it is a very good thing that she has left, and hopefully many others will join her, instead of festering from within the RCC. There are no valid sacraments which they dispense.
The saddest thing to me is that they equate power with sanctity – with closeness to God. (Another way they have failed to read the gospels closely.)
