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SJSU INSTRUCTOR JOINS `ORDINATION’
By Lisa Fernandez
Mercury News
On Monday, Victoria Rue of Watsonville (CA) will drape herself in a white robe and take a controversial step as part of her journey to become a better spiritual leader. She’ll also be performing a grave sin in the eyes of her church.
The San Jose State University instructor will join eight other women in a renegade ``ordination’’ as priests – an act she is fully aware is forbidden by the Roman Catholic Church and could bring her excommunication. She doesn’t care.
The act of open defiance, she says, is aimed at closing the gap between the church hierarchy and the people. She doesn’t want to join another denomination that accepts female priests. And unlike some of the others who plan to be ordained under fake names, Rue said she is proud to be openly flouting the church’s Canon Law – which for most of the past 2,000 years has forbidden the ordination of women, and married men for that matter.
Catholic women are not the first to reach for a top rung of official religious status. Similar movements have long existed among non-Orthodox Jews and several Protestant denominations, which have accepted women as rabbis or ministers, but only after long battles.
As usual, the dueling camps cite the Bible to bolster their cause.
Rue cites a passage in Galatians, where Jesus says there ``is no male, or female, no Greek or Jew, we are all one,’’ to argue her point. For the church, though, the model for priesthood is the life of Christ.
``There is an uninterrupted tradition in the church that ordination should be reserved for men. Jesus chose his 12 apostles, and they were all men,’’ said Kevin Drabinksi, communications director for the Diocese of Monterey, where Rue would worship if she attended church. She prefers to lead prayers in her living room.
Drabinksi said Bishop Sylvester Ryan probably wouldn’t initiate Rue’s excommunication, in which the Vatican would issue a ruling. But he acknowledged the diocese has called a Canon lawyer in San Francisco to investigate what the process would entail. The main question, he said, is whether the bishop would even have the power to get involved if the ceremony takes place away from his jurisdiction – on the St. Lawrence Seaway along the U.S.-Canada border. The ceremony is scheduled to follow a women’s ordination conference this weekend at Carleton University in Ottawa.
Ultimately, however, Drabinksi said that he respects Rue’s passion for her faith. She and the other women, including Dana Reynolds from Carmel, will stand aboard a private ship to participate in a non-sanctioned ceremony they believe will give them the authority to deliver the holy sacraments and lead ministries.
``I grant them that they have a very serious feeling about their calling, even though that’s not possible in the church today,’’ Drabinksi said.
The women are part of a tiny organization that began in Germany and Austria in 2002 called Roman Catholic Womenpriests. The first seven women to hold their homegrown ``ordination’’ ceremony on the Danube River were excommunicated by Joseph Ratzinger, the former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and who became Pope Benedict XVI this spring.
To the women’s knowledge, they are the only group performing public ordinations of women. There are about 70 members who are in the ordination-preparation program. By Monday, 25 women will have become illicit deacons, priests or bishops.
Within the accepted confines of the church, women have achieved ``tremendous progress’’ in terms of administrative jobs, said Mary Gautier, senior researcher of Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. Her department found that in 2003, one quarter of all U.S. church chancellors were women, a job that Canon Law decreed was open only to priests until 1983.
But for the 58-year-old Rue, a lesbian raised in a traditional Catholic family and the eldest of eight siblings, the roles the church has relegated to women aren’t that satisfying. She even tried being a nun for a while. But what she has always wanted is forbidden: participation in liturgical life.
To compensate for not being able to lead her own parish, Rue leads services in her home every month. She teaches women’s and comparative religious studies at San Jose State University. She also volunteers for the Hospice Care Project in Santa Cruz, and several years ago ran the Toxic Avengers Theater, a troupe of amateur, mostly immigrant performers who put on plays as a form of spiritual therapy.
She knows the church may condemn her for what she’s doing. But she’s ready to become a martyr for her cause. Being on the margins is often where you need to be…
mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/northern_california/12185452.htm
By Lisa Fernandez
Mercury News
On Monday, Victoria Rue of Watsonville (CA) will drape herself in a white robe and take a controversial step as part of her journey to become a better spiritual leader. She’ll also be performing a grave sin in the eyes of her church.
The San Jose State University instructor will join eight other women in a renegade ``ordination’’ as priests – an act she is fully aware is forbidden by the Roman Catholic Church and could bring her excommunication. She doesn’t care.
The act of open defiance, she says, is aimed at closing the gap between the church hierarchy and the people. She doesn’t want to join another denomination that accepts female priests. And unlike some of the others who plan to be ordained under fake names, Rue said she is proud to be openly flouting the church’s Canon Law – which for most of the past 2,000 years has forbidden the ordination of women, and married men for that matter.
I was raised a Catholic,'' she said. This is my church. I don’t want to go anywhere else.’’Catholic women are not the first to reach for a top rung of official religious status. Similar movements have long existed among non-Orthodox Jews and several Protestant denominations, which have accepted women as rabbis or ministers, but only after long battles.
As usual, the dueling camps cite the Bible to bolster their cause.
Rue cites a passage in Galatians, where Jesus says there ``is no male, or female, no Greek or Jew, we are all one,’’ to argue her point. For the church, though, the model for priesthood is the life of Christ.
``There is an uninterrupted tradition in the church that ordination should be reserved for men. Jesus chose his 12 apostles, and they were all men,’’ said Kevin Drabinksi, communications director for the Diocese of Monterey, where Rue would worship if she attended church. She prefers to lead prayers in her living room.
Drabinksi said Bishop Sylvester Ryan probably wouldn’t initiate Rue’s excommunication, in which the Vatican would issue a ruling. But he acknowledged the diocese has called a Canon lawyer in San Francisco to investigate what the process would entail. The main question, he said, is whether the bishop would even have the power to get involved if the ceremony takes place away from his jurisdiction – on the St. Lawrence Seaway along the U.S.-Canada border. The ceremony is scheduled to follow a women’s ordination conference this weekend at Carleton University in Ottawa.
Ultimately, however, Drabinksi said that he respects Rue’s passion for her faith. She and the other women, including Dana Reynolds from Carmel, will stand aboard a private ship to participate in a non-sanctioned ceremony they believe will give them the authority to deliver the holy sacraments and lead ministries.
``I grant them that they have a very serious feeling about their calling, even though that’s not possible in the church today,’’ Drabinksi said.
The women are part of a tiny organization that began in Germany and Austria in 2002 called Roman Catholic Womenpriests. The first seven women to hold their homegrown ``ordination’’ ceremony on the Danube River were excommunicated by Joseph Ratzinger, the former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and who became Pope Benedict XVI this spring.
To the women’s knowledge, they are the only group performing public ordinations of women. There are about 70 members who are in the ordination-preparation program. By Monday, 25 women will have become illicit deacons, priests or bishops.
Within the accepted confines of the church, women have achieved ``tremendous progress’’ in terms of administrative jobs, said Mary Gautier, senior researcher of Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. Her department found that in 2003, one quarter of all U.S. church chancellors were women, a job that Canon Law decreed was open only to priests until 1983.
But for the 58-year-old Rue, a lesbian raised in a traditional Catholic family and the eldest of eight siblings, the roles the church has relegated to women aren’t that satisfying. She even tried being a nun for a while. But what she has always wanted is forbidden: participation in liturgical life.
To compensate for not being able to lead her own parish, Rue leads services in her home every month. She teaches women’s and comparative religious studies at San Jose State University. She also volunteers for the Hospice Care Project in Santa Cruz, and several years ago ran the Toxic Avengers Theater, a troupe of amateur, mostly immigrant performers who put on plays as a form of spiritual therapy.
She knows the church may condemn her for what she’s doing. But she’s ready to become a martyr for her cause. Being on the margins is often where you need to be…
mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/northern_california/12185452.htm
