Month: April 2023

Posted on

Philadelphia Archdiocese faces civil suit claiming then-priest preyed on adult woman at Nashville Catholic college

The gold cross and cupola of Philadelphia’s Cathedral Basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul are pictured in this 2011 file photo.

By

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia is facing a civil lawsuit over claims it covered up for one of its former priests who allegedly sexually abused a student at a Nashville, Tennessee, Catholic college run by Dominican women religious.

The complaint highlights problems in the sharing of information among dioceses and institutions, as well as unaddressed challenges in the Catholic Church’s handling of allegations of sexual abuse involving adult victims.

Attorneys for “Jane Doe,” an undergraduate at Aquinas College in Nashville from 2014-2018, filed a 31-page complaint April 18 with the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas Civil Trial Division, naming as defendants the archdiocese and Kevin Barry McGoldrick, a former priest of the Philadelphia archdiocese and currently a Nashville resident.

Doe, now a 28-year-old educator working in Virginia, claims McGoldrick groomed and then sexually assaulted her on at least two occasions in 2017 while she was a 22-year-old student at Aquinas College, during which time the priest — also a singer-songwriter who crowdfunded his own album — was her spiritual director.

Existing church protocols on abuse, such as the Dallas Charter, focus on the protection of minor children and those adults legally regarded as children due to a habitual incapacity of some kind.

But the vulnerability of adults generally to sexual exploitation by clergy or lay authority figures is only now receiving greater attention within the church. The 2018 McCarrick scandals and #ChurchToo movement exposed in the U.S. and globally how women and men in the church, particularly those in pastoral relationships, spiritual direction, employment, religious life or seminary, could be vulnerable to clergy abuse.

Underscoring the need to extend the church’s safe environment protection to adults, Pope Francis revised in March his 2019 legal reform “Vos Estis Lux Mundi” (“You are the light of the world”), with the term “vulnerable adults” specifically defined as “any person in a state of infirmity, physical or mental deficiency, or deprivation of personal liberty that in fact, even occasionally, limits his or her ability to understand or will or otherwise resist the offense.”

Ordained in May 2003, McGoldrick — according to the complaint — had been sent in 2013 with a letter of suitability from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia to serve as a chaplain at Aquinas College, located within the Diocese of Nashville and operated by the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia, known as the Nashville Dominicans.

According to the complaint, from about 2017 to 2020 McGoldrick also served as a chaplain at the Nashville Dominicans’ Overbrook Catholic School and St. Cecilia Academy, adjacent to the Aquinas campus, and together serving students from PreK to grade 12.

Doe, who is seeking more than $250,000 in total damages on five counts, alleges the archdiocese permitted McGoldrick’s relocation despite supposed prior reports of sexual abuse involving at least two other women in the Philadelphia area, which Doe said she discovered through online sources not specified in the complaint.

Requests placed by OSV News for comment from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Aquinas College and the Nashville Dominicans have been declined. OSV News has not yet received a response to requests for comment from the Overbrook Catholic School and St. Cecilia Academy.

Doe told OSV News in an April 19 call that she has suffered “two-fold” trauma as a result of the alleged abuse — the first from the sexual assaults, and the second from the “constant invalidation experienced from the church” as she has sought justice.

Learning of other alleged victims in the Philadelphia area was “another blow,” said Doe. “To know that everything I had experienced, the abuse at the hands of McGoldrick and the trauma the church had inflicted — all of that was avoidable if the Archdiocese of Philadelphia hadn’t sent a known sex predator to my college campus.”

Doe’s attorney, Stewart Ryan, advised OSV News by email that his client had been alerted to the alleged additional accusations against McGoldrick through the Facebook page of Catholics4Change, which describes itself as an “accountability blog” focusing on child protection issues in the Catholic Church.

The complaint details allegations of sexual abuse by McGoldrick against “M.W.” and “Victim #2” — neither of whom are parties to the lawsuit — said to have occurred prior to McGoldrick’s move to Nashville. Ryan told OSV News the information about M.W. and Victim #2 “was developed during (his) law firm’s investigation of the case.”

M.W. alleged in the complaint that McGoldrick had groomed her beginning in 2006, and abused her for several years, raping her at least once. Victim #2, a parish business manager, was also groomed and abused by McGoldrick beginning in 2012, according to the document, which asserts that both cases had been reported to and were under investigation by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

“McGoldrick made the women he abused, including Plaintiff, M.W., and Victim #2, believe that their sexual interactions were ‘special trials’ ordained by God,” the complaint states.

The complaint states Doe reported the alleged abuse she had experienced to both the Diocese of Nashville and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia in March 2019, and was repeatedly advised by the latter that no additional victims had been identified.

A timeline of Doe’s efforts to report her claims and obtain further information from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, the Diocese of Nashville and Aquinas College was published July 18, 2020, by the U.K.-based Catholic Herald.

According to the article, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia stated that McGoldrick’s petition for laicization was “in process” as of July 2020.

OSV News is awaiting confirmation from the archdiocese of the date when McGoldrick, who is not listed as a priest on the Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s website, was officially laicized.

Along with the timeline of Doe’s reporting, the Catholic Herald posted a July 18, 2020, first-person reflection by Doe, writing under the pseudonym “Susanna.”

In that account, she described feeling “overwhelming confusion and guilt” over the alleged attacks by McGoldrick, and “regularly contemplated taking (her) own life.”

Speaking to OSV News, Doe said her spiritual life has been profoundly damaged by the abuse she claims to have suffered.

“I was a convert to Catholicism, and … Catholicism was everything to me. It was my whole life,” she said. “Even after leaving (Aquinas), I was a full-time missionary Catholic.”

However, the “experience of trying to seek justice while inside the church has been so damaging that I can no longer exist within the church,” she said. “Because to be surrounded by those who are actively putting others in harm’s way is not something I can live with. And my heart breaks for those who continue to trust in an organization that I know all too well is not keeping them safe.”

Ryan told OSV News that his client’s case against the Archdiocese of Philadelphia revolves around “two core issues.”

“First, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia never should have transferred this man,” he said. “Based on our information, we allege that they knew (about McGoldrick’s alleged abuse) as of at least 2013.”

In addition, “once our client came forward to the Archdiocese of Philadelphia … (it) should have been more fully open and transparent with what they did know,” said Ryan. “There was absolutely no reason for the archdiocese to withhold information it knows about credible accusations of clergy members, just because they haven’t abused a child.”

He said, “I think this case stands as an example of a severe lack of communication (among dioceses).”

In an April 19 statement emailed to OSV News, the Diocese of Nashville said it had received a March 2019 “report from an adult woman of inappropriate activity involving Kevin McGoldrick” regarding “an incident that happened a year and a half earlier.”

The diocese said the incident at the time “appeared to be neither a civil nor canonical crime,” noting that “the report made to us was significantly different from the description of sexual assault subsequently reported to others and contained in published media reports.”

The statement said the diocese had “immediately referred” the report to the Nashville Dominicans, who as McGoldrick’s then-employer “had the authority and purview to investigate and respond to this matter,” since “as a pontifical order … not under the control of the Bishop or Diocese of Nashville” the sisters are “solely responsible for the operation of the school and its employees.”

The Nashville diocese said McGoldrick had been granted priestly faculties in Nashville after his hiring by the Dominicans, following McGoldrick passing a criminal background check and presenting a letter of good standing from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. The faculties “were withdrawn after the Dominican Sisters elected not to continue McGoldrick’s employment,” said the Nashville Diocese’s statement.

The diocese said it, along with the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, had received “a much more detailed and serious report of abuse” from “the person who made the initial report” in the summer of 2019.

The diocese also said that it had “entered into settlement discussions” with the person reporting, out of pastoral concern for her healing, with both parties acknowledging the agreement was “not to be construed as an admission of validity of the merits of any claim or allegation” made by the person reporting, and “any and all liability was specifically denied.”

Ryan confirmed by email to OSV News that his client’s settlement with the Nashville diocese — an amount reported by the Catholic Herald as totaling $65,000 — “has been fully resolved.”

OSV News has attempted to reach McGoldrick directly for comment. According to his LinkedIn page, McGoldrick — who lists his clerical experience but does not state he is currently a member of the clergy — states on the site he has been a chaplain at Avalon Hospice (now Gentiva Hospice) in Nashville. On calling the hospice April 20, OSV News was advised McCormick is no longer employed at the facility. A message sent to McGoldrick’s Facebook account has not yet received a response.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Vatican commission for the protection of minors is all about spin

— ‘Rome’s serial “mishaps” in this area are neither stupid nor insane. They are about protecting itself’

Pope Francis salutes prelates at the end of the audience of the Curia at the Vatican in Rome.

By Patsy McGarry

At times it is difficult to believe anything other than that Rome is being willfully stupid when it comes to its dealings with clerical child-sex abuse. This repeated failure, inevitably, prompts recall of Einstein’s much-quoted definition of stupidity, even insanity — doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

That’s how it may look, but Rome’s serial “mishaps” in this area are neither stupid nor insane. They are about protecting itself above all while obscuring that reality through spin.

That said, it is only fair to record that the Irish Catholic Church now has some of the most stringent child-protection measures in place, and enforced, anywhere in the Catholic world.

The commission must not be merely engaged in ‘PR’ but become a refuge for those abused by clergy and silenced by the church

Fr Hans Zollner is a German Jesuit and one of the few figures at the Vatican with credibility where the abuse issue is concerned. A member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors since it was set up in 2014, few doubt his commitment to protecting children and supporting the abused.

He resigned from the commission last month and gave his reasons last week at a press conference in Rome. The commission, he said, had yet to take seriously the principles of “transparency, compliance and responsibility” and that there were people in the church, who “for personal or emotional reasons, create obstacles” in the fight against abuse.

The commission must not be merely engaged in “PR” but become a refuge for those abused by clergy and silenced by the church. It was “a continuous impression on the part of victims that they are not listened to”, he said, and that “many victims no longer expect anything” from the church.

He claimed commission president Cardinal Seán O’Malley had “put roses and flowers” (spin) on his (Fr Zollner’s) resignation statement last month, yet did not address problems repeatedly raised with him.

In 2017, two abuse survivors resigned from the commission for similar reasons. They included Dubliner Marie Collins, who felt “the attitude of a small number in the Vatican’s Curia is resistant to the work of the commission and has not been co-operative”. She too had to deal with a “roses and flowers” spin on her reasons, provided by senior Vatican figures. UK survivor Peter Saunders resigned because the commission was failing to do what he said it was supposed to do.

A founding member of the commission in 2014 was former president of the UK’s Royal College of Psychiatrists Sheila Hollins. During her time, its work “seemed to be blocked at every turn” she said. A Vatican decision to place the commission under the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which has responsibility for dealing with priests accused of sexual abuse, was “anomalous”, she said, as “its [commission’s] brief is to prevent abuse and to address the care and healing of victims/survivors”.

In short, the commission has become a joke, presided over by an ineffectual Cardinal O’Malley, its president since 2014.

In Germany last week a report accused Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, former head of the German bishops’ conference, of shielding abuser priests

It was said about the Bourbon rulers of France after the French Revolution, that they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The same could be said about Rome and the abuse scandals.

The 2009 Murphy report, which dealt with the handling of clerical child sex abuse allegations in Dublin’s Catholic archdiocese, was in “no doubt”. It said “clerical child sexual abuse was covered up by the Archdiocese of Dublin and other Church authorities over much of the period covered by the commission’s remit (1975 -2004). The structures and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated that cover-up … The welfare of children, which should have been the first priority, was not even a factor to be considered in the early stages. Instead, the focus was on the avoidance of scandal and the preservation of the good name, status and assets of the institution and of what the institution regarded as its most important members — the priests.”

In Germany last week a report accused Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, former head of the German bishops’ conference, of shielding abuser priests. In January 2010, confronted with the first evidence of systemic abuse in the German Catholic Church, the archbishop promised a “complete investigation … and no cover-up”. The report said the archbishop’s 11-year episcopate — until 2013 — in the archdiocese of Freiberg “distinguished itself with concrete cover-up behaviour”.

The report, which uncovered 540 victims of clerical-sexual abuse and 250 documented abuser priests in the period 1945-2020, noted how the archbishop, as head of the German bishops’ conference, “repeatedly expressed his sympathy for those affected and their terrible experiences, [but] this made no difference to his decisions or non-decisions, and no change in his approach to accused priests”.

It continued: “The children, youths and parents affected appear not to have existed for him. He appeared to think his behaviour was the only correct approach, to protect the church.”

They learn nothing.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Pope’s commission vs clergy sex abuse to train bishops

CROWD PLEASER Pope Francis waves as he arrives for his weekly general audience at St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican on Wednesday, April 19, 2023.

The Vatican’s anti-sexual abuse commission will now work more closely with its evangelization branch in order to better protect minors, including training bishops from dioceses far from Rome.

Pope Francis set up the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors in 2014 to fight clerical sex abuse, which will now collaborate with the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization, according to a three-year agreement that the Vatican announced on Friday.

The commission has come under fire recently after its most influential member, Hans Zollner, quit in March, accusing the body of urgent problems related to compliance, accountability and transparency.

The agreement calls for the commission to work together with the Dicastery in training sessions for newly appointed bishops, among other collaborative measures.

In an interview with Vatican News, American Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the head of the commission, said the group would conduct outreach to dioceses to help “develop programs, to be able to receive victims and have a pastoral care for them.”

On the training of new bishops, who are all brought to Rome for such instruction, he said: “If we had had the opportunity to hear about safeguarding and understand [it], the history of the Church would have been different.”

“We always try and take a survivor, a victim, with us, so that the new bishops can hear firsthand just how dramatic the effect of this terrible crime has been on their lives,” O’Malley added.

Francis had asked the commission to work with bishops to ensure “they have the capacity to be able to accompany the victims and to work with them.”

Filipino Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the head of the dicastery, told Vatican News that one challenge for his department involved communicating laws and guidelines imposed by the Vatican to those in other regions.

“My impression is [that] the guidelines are clear for those of us who have been formed in a particular culture, and we tend to presume that what is clear to us is clear to other people now,” he said.

Zollner was the last remaining founding member of the commission to protect minors, where problems emerged just three years after it was established.

Abuse survivor Marie Collins resigned in 2017, saying the group faced fierce resistance within high echelons of the church.

Francis has vowed a zero-tolerance stance on abuse and has changed the law so that suspected cases must be reported, but victims’ associations say he still has not gone far enough.

The pope has recently tried to strengthen the commission by making it part of the Vatican office that processes clerical sex abuse cases.

Asked by Vatican News to respond to criticism of the commission, O’Malley said that, at the body’s founding in 2014, there were “unrealistic expectations as to what this group of volunteers would be able to do to solve all the problems of sexual abuse in the Church and the world.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

US judge who ruled in favor of church in key abuse case donated to archdiocese

— Greg Guidry gave the New Orleans church thousands of dollars and now refuses to step down from a case involving 500 victims

Greg Guidry at a hearing for district court nominees held by the Senate judiciary committee in 2019.

By The Associated Press and Guardian staff

A federal judge donated tens of thousands of dollars to New Orleans’ Roman Catholic archdiocese and consistently ruled in favor of the church amid a contentious bankruptcy involving nearly 500 clergy sex abuse victims, an Associated Press investigation has found, but the judge won’t step down from the case.

Confronted with AP’s findings, which had not been previously reported, US district judge Greg Guidry abruptly convened attorneys on a call last week to tell them his charitable giving “has been brought to my attention” and he would consider recusal from the high-profile bankruptcy he oversees in an appellate role.

“Naturally,” Guidry told them, “I will take no further action in this case until this question has been resolved.”

Guidry indicated he would seek guidance from the federal judiciary’s committee on codes of conduct. And in a separate hearing called on Friday, he told attorneys in the case that the committee had approved his continuing to handle appeals related to the bankruptcy.

The reporting by Jim Mustian of the AP on Guidry is only one example of how many links are shared by the New Orleans area’s legal establishment and the local archdiocese, which serves a region with a half-million Catholics and is the oldest to declare bankruptcy amid the clergy sex abuse crisis.

Several of Guidry’s colleagues have recused themselves from the bankruptcy or related litigation, including one who previously worked as the archdiocese’s general counsel, another who has served on a non-profit which supports numerous archdiocesan ministries, and one who acknowledged a role in behind-the-scenes media relations campaigns that executives of the New Orleans Saints football team helped the archdiocese mount after reporting on church sex abuse cases in 2018 and 2019.

The third of those judges last year, though, struck down a Louisiana law which allowed sexual abuse victims to sue the church and other institutions no matter how many years earlier the alleged molestation took place.

Meanwhile, attorneys representing abuse victims in the bankruptcy are seeking to unseal thousands of secret church documents produced as evidence in lawsuits and in an ongoing federal law enforcement investigation of clergy abuse in New Orleans going back decades. Agents involved in that investigation last year spoke with a retired Catholic priest from New Orleans named Lawrence Hecker who has been publicly accused of molesting “countless” children, but he has not been charged with any crimes.

A local federal magistrate, Michael North, ruled against a request to unseal a deposition of Hecker that was taken in a lawsuit accusing him of molestation, even though North’s wife served on a board that manages an archdiocesan-owned healthcare system. North later recused himself, without elaborating on why.

Guidry, for his part, had denied at least one request to unseal some secret church documents. He also recently upheld a $400,000 fine against local attorney Richard Trahant, who represents clergy abuse victims and was accused of violating a confidentiality order when he warned a local principal that his school was employing a priest, Paul Hart, who admitted to sexually molesting a teenaged girl. Hart died last year in November.

Ethics experts had told the AP that Guidry, 62, should recuse himself from handling church bankruptcy appeals to avoid an appearance of a conflict of interest, even if it could significantly delay a proceeding that was initiated in May 2020. But Guidry made clear on Friday he has no intention of doing that, though it remains to be seen if that is the final word on the matter.

AP’s review of campaign finance records found that Guidry, since being nominated to the federal bench in 2019 by the Donald Trump White House, has given nearly $50,000 to local Catholic charities from leftover contributions he received after serving 10 years as a Louisiana state supreme court justice.

Most of that giving, $36,000 of it, came in the months after the archdiocese sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection amid a crush of sexual abuse lawsuits. That included a $12,000 donation to the archdiocese’s Catholic Community Foundation in September 2020 on the same day as a series of filings in the bankruptcy, and a $14,000 donation to the same charity in July of the following year.

But Guidry’s philanthropy over the years also appears to include private donations. Newsletters issued by Catholic Charities of New Orleans, the charitable arm of the archdiocese, recognized Guidry and his wife among its donors for unspecified contributions, in 2017 listing both the judge and his campaign.

The judge previously provided pro bono services and served as a board member for Catholic Charities between 2000 and 2008, a time when the archdiocese was navigating an earlier wave of sexual abuse lawsuits. Catholic Charities was involved in at least one multimillion-dollar settlement to victims beaten and sexually abused at two local orphanages.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Georgetown panel argues for ‘women’s ordination’ in face of papal teaching

Panelists discuss “the question of women’s ordination” April 17, 2023, at Georgetown University in Washington. From left are Annie Selak, associate director of the Women’s Center at Georgetown; Teresa Delgado, professor of theology and religious studies at St. John’s University in New York and dean of its College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Lin Henke, a senior in Georgetown’s College of Arts and Sciences; author Alice McDermott; Angele Cabrini White, founder and chairperson of the Black and Women’s History Ministry at St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church in Washington; and Mary E. Hunt, co-founder and co-director of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual in Silver Spring, Md.

By

A Georgetown panel considered “the question of women’s ordination” April 17, describing the matter as “unfinished” despite Pope Francis’ current teaching and St. John Paul II’s 1994 teaching that Jesus Christ reserved the sacred priesthood to men alone even as the Lord promoted the dignity of women.

In the panel discussion titled “Faith, Feminism, and Being Unfinished: The Question of Women’s Ordination,” participants described the sole ordination of men as exclusionary of women, characterizing it as an example of a patriarchy holding on to power.

Sister Celeste Mokrzycki, a Sister of St. Joseph and chaplain for Georgetown’s School of Health and the School of Nursing, painted a picture during the event that its webpage called “the movement of the Spirit among participants.”

A file photo shows an extraordinary minister of the holy Eucharist distributing Communion during Mass. A Georgetown panel said April 17, 2023, that “the question of women’s ordination” is “unfinished,” despite Pope Francis reiterating church teaching that ordination is reserved for men.

The end result was a depiction of a woman as a priest.

“This painting is a reminder we are all always in progress,” Annie Selak, associate director of the Georgetown University Women’s Center, said. “There are few things that are fixed.”

Theologian Pia de Solenni, a former chancellor for the Diocese of Orange, Calif., who did not participate in the Georgetown panel, said while the church should work to include religious and laywomen in leadership roles, its teaching is fixed on the matter of ordination.

“The gender or sex matters,” de Solenni said. “It’s significant. This person is the bridegroom to the church.”

Discussions about the concept of women’s ordination have increased in recent decades as women in many nations and societies have gained a more equal status to men in civil society.

However, Pope Francis has said that “the last word is clear,” on the church’s position on the concept of female priests, while expressing support for “the feminine dimension of the church.” He pointed to St. John Paul’s 1994 apostolic letter “Ordinatio Sacerdotalis,” which said that sacred priesthood in both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches “from the beginning always been reserved to men alone” in faithfulness to Jesus Christ’s plan for the church. The Holy Father also explicitly invoked his Petrine ministry to say “that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the church’s faithful.”

St. John Paul II also explained women do not have less in dignity than men, and the “presence and the role of women in the life and mission of the church … remain absolutely necessary and irreplaceable.”

However, panelist Mary Hunt, co-founder and co-director of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual, called the church’s limitation of the priesthood to those who are biologically male “dated at best” as society shifts its understanding of gender.

“How can we share the power?” she asked with respect to making women priests. “Yes, women and nonbinary people want power to minister. How can we share the resources of the institutional church that belong to all of us?”

Sister Celeste Mokrzycki, a Sister of St. Joseph of Philadelphia, who is chaplain for the School of Nursing and the School of Health at Georgetown University in Washington, paints during a a panel discussion on “the question of women’s ordination” at Georgetown April 17, 2023.

Panelists suggested women’s ordination would be more inclusive and lead to changes in the church in the areas of financial mismanagement or sexual abuse.

Teresa Delgado, dean of St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and professor of theology and religious studies at St. John’s University, suggested women’s ordination would make the church “focused less on the doctrinal and more on popular religiosity” and help “decolonialize” the church.

Some panelists suggested the church’s teaching against intentional abortion is rooted in women’s exclusion from the priesthood.

After the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, novelist Alice McDermott said she saw her own presence in church that following Sunday “as a kind of collusion, a collusion with misogyny, with hypocrisy, with the conviction that to be female is to be deemed to be the lesser, less complex, less moral, less valuable, less worthy.”

The Catholic Church teaches that all human life is sacred and must be respected from conception to natural death and, as such, opposes direct abortion as an act of violence that takes the life of the unborn child. The same teaching that human life is sacred from conception to natural death also guides the church’s opposition to practices like physician assisted suicide and the death penalty. In the wake of the Dobbs ruling, the U.S. bishops have reiterated the church’s commitment to serving both women and unborn children.

De Solenni described the notion of the priesthood as power as being an example of the abuses of clericalism, and a violation of church teaching, arguing “the catechism is clear that the priest is a servant.”

“The other Sunday, we had the Gospel reading about Jesus washing the feet of the disciples,” she said. “I mean, he was modeling what it means to be a servant; only the lowest servant would wash somebody’s feet. So if you look at this as power, it’s upside down.”

The Gospels demonstrate the crucial role of women in Christ’s earthly ministry, de Solenni said, noting Mary of Bethany washes the feet of Christ shortly before he washes the feet of his apostles.

De Solenni also noted, “His mother’s Fiat precedes his Fiat in the Garden of Gethsemane,” she said.

De Solenni also rejected the argument that church teaching sees women as inferior to men.

“The church teaches that men and women are fundamentally equal,” she said. “So there’s clericalism and other abuses — and yes, there’s a lived experience where women have not been treated as equals — but that is not what the church teaches.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!