Month: June 2023

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Ruth Fitzpatrick, who fought to ordain female priests, dies at 90

— “We will not accept men telling women they can’t be priests because that’s the way God wants it,” Ms. Fitzpatrick once said. “She does not!”

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Ruth M. Fitzpatrick, a prominent and fierce advocate for the ordination of women as priests who called the Catholic Church “the last of the sexist institutions,” died June 15 at a long-term-care center near her home in Fairfax County, Va. She was 90.

The cause was cerebral arteriosclerosis, said her son John Fitzpatrick.

As the longtime national coordinator of the Women’s Ordination Conference, a Washington-based group she initially helped run from her dining room table, Ms. Fitzpatrick was an often combative champion for Catholic women who had, like her, felt the priestly calling of God.

“We will not accept men telling women they can’t be priests because that’s the way God wants it,” Ms. Fitzpatrick once said. “She does not!” Another time, she referred to the Church as a “dinosaur,” saying that “rigor mortis is setting in.”

In 1979, when Pope John Paul II visited Washington, Ms. Fitzpatrick and two other members of her group stayed up all night holding a candlelight vigil outside where the pontiff slept. In the morning, as he left, she shouted, “Ordain women!” The pope smiled and shook his head no.

After the pope issued an apostolic letter in 1994 declaring that priestly ordination “has in the Catholic Church from the beginning always been reserved to men alone” and that the church had “no authority whatsoever to confer” such status on women, Ms. Fitzpatrick blasted him in media interviews.

“We’re being put on a stake like St. Joan of Arc,” she told the Religion News Service. “This is an inquisition. No doubt about it.”

The Women’s Ordination Conference was founded in 1975, and Ms. Fitzpatrick became its first national coordinator in 1977, a position she held for a year before returning and holding the post again from 1985 to 1995. The organization says it seeks to “incorporate feminist, womanist, mujerista, and other liberating spiritualities into every-day Catholicism.”

Other denominations, Christian and otherwise, have allowed women to lead, but the Vatican has persistently declined to entertain the idea, though Pope Francis recently said women could vote at an upcoming meeting of bishops.

Kate McElwee, executive director of the Women’s Ordination Conference, called the pope’s announcement a “significant crack in the stained glass ceiling.”

The youngest of three children, Ruth Louise McDonough was born in Port Chester, N.Y., on March 10, 1933, and spent part of her childhood on Army bases from Georgia to South Korea. Her father was a colonel in the Army National Guard, and her mother was a homemaker.

She was raised in an Irish-Catholic home, felt a priestly call as a child and informed her mother, according to “The Inside Stories: 13 Valiant Women Challenging the Church,” a book she was featured in.

“Hold on,” her mother replied. “It will go away.”

It did not.

After graduating from West Philadelphia Catholic Girls’ High School, she attended Rosemont College in Philadelphia, which was then a women-only Catholic school. She withdrew to move with her family to Fort Benning, Ga., where she taught Sunday school and met John R. Fitzpatrick Jr., a World War II veteran who later served in the Korean and Vietnam wars. They married in 1955.

From 1969 to 1972, Ms. Fitzpatrick and her family lived in Naples. She led Vatican tours and made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. She also worked with homeless children.

The family returned to the United States after her husband’s retirement. Ms. Fitzpatrick graduated from Georgetown University in 1975 with a bachelor’s degree in theology. She received a master’s degree in divinity from Washington Theological Union in 1997.

Ms. Fitzpatrick traveled the world on behalf of the Women’s Ordination Conference. In 1992, she led a trip to the Czech Republic in search of Ludmila Javorová, a woman ordained in the underground Catholic Church.

“Women who want to be priests don’t fall into stereotypes, just as there is no stereotype for a male priest,” Ms. Fitzpatrick said in the book “Catholics USA: Makers of a Modern Church” by Linda Brandi Cateura. “The women have one thing in common: the call comes from God. They have to work on that and it can’t be ignored.”

She added: “If I disappeared tomorrow, we’d still go on. Deep down, I truly believe that our aim is a gift from God; it’s a movement that cannot be stopped. It’s beyond us and is self-perpetuating.”

Ms. Fitzpatrick’s husband died in 2017. Survivors include their children, P. Kelly Fitzpatrick, Michael J. Fitzpatrick and John F. Fitzpatrick; six grandchildren; and a sister.

Ms. Fitzpatrick would knock on any door to advocate for women.

In 1987, carrying a basket of gifts with bread, wine and books about women in the church, Ms. Fitzpatrick and a colleague rang the bell at the Vatican Embassy.

No response. So they knocked again. Same result.

The knocked a third time — the Holy Trinity of doorbell ringing.

“It’s symbolic, don’t you think?” Ms. Fitzpatrick told a Newsday reporter who accompanied them. “We are women, knocking on the door of our church, bringing gifts — and the door is not opened.”

They left the basket on the stoop.

“But you’d better believe,” Ms. Fitzpatrick said, “we’re going to keep knocking!”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Catholics Want Justice For Abuse Victims And More LGBTQ Inclusion, Vatican Says

Pope Francis delivers his homily during the Wednesday General Audience at St. Peter’s Square on May

By Mary Whitfill Roeloffs

The Vatican on Tuesday released the results of a two-year canvassing of churches around the world that showed that rank-and-file Catholics want more rights for women in the clergy, justice for victims of widespread sexual abuse within the church and acceptance for previously shunned groups, including divorced and remarried and LGBTQ+ parishioners—but it’s unclear how the Vatican will act on the findings.

Key Facts

The document raises several key questions brought forward by members of worldwide parishes: Should women be ordained deacons in the church, should married priests be allowed to serve where there is a clergy shortage, how can the church better welcome LGBTQ+ members and should the church’s current hierarchy be restructured in the wake of the clergy sexual abuse crisis?

The prospect of allowing women to be ordained as priests was not discussed, but the document found a “unanimous” and “crucial” call for women in positions of power.

The Vatican also said parishioners wanted “radical inclusion and acceptance” of LGBTQ+ people, minorities and poor people, and called to “reform structures, institutions and functioning mechanisms” that have allowed high-level clergy to get away with abuse.

This marks the first time the Vatican has used the phrase “LGBTQ+ Catholics” instead of “persons with homosexual tendencies,” the Associated Press reported, suggesting a new level of acceptance.

The church acknowledged that its credibility has been “eroded” in the wake of abuse scandals, which include sexual abuse at high levels as well as “abuse of power, money and conscience,” suggesting “conversion and reform” as ways to prevent future abuses and vowing to place “great emphasis on learning to exercise justice” for victims—but it didn’t specify concrete steps.

The study, called the Instrumentum laboris, is meant to be the starting document for the General Assembly of the Synod on Synodality–what the Pope calls his vision of a less bureaucratic church–which begins in the Vatican in October 2023.

Key Background

The Catholic church has been in crisis for more than two decades as a growing overall disinterest in organized religion collided with the 2002 breaking of the sexual abuse scandal in the church by the Boston Globe. The Globe’s investigation into the Boston Archdiocese launched similar efforts across the country and the world, which in turn revealed a disturbing pattern of sexual abuse and cover-ups within the church. About 20 state attorneys general have mounted investigations that have cataloged decades of abuse by hundreds of clergy members, the New York Times reported. Americans’ membership in houses of worship has been dropping for decades, but the Catholic church has been hit the hardest, according to Gallup. Meanwhile, Pope Francis has expressed more support of LGBTQ+ people than anyone in the position before. He was hailed as revolutionary in 2013 when he responded to question about the topic of gay parishioners with a casual “Who am I to judge?” The comment was a stark juxtaposition to the actions of his predecessor, who had banned gay priests. Pope Francis went on to say earlier this year that homosexuality is not a crime, but has maintained the traditional stance that acting on homosexual urges is a sin and has said the Roman Catholic Church cannot bless same-sex marriages.

Big Number

95%. That’s how many dioceses are expected to have been affected by the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests and deacons, a study by John Jay College found. Of the 195 dioceses and eparchies that participated in the study, all but seven reported that allegations of sexual abuse have been made against at least one priest.

What To Watch For

Francis last year announced a plan to restructure the Vatican toward “transparency and coordinated action.” The Pope is looking to move toward a “synodal Church,” according to Vatican News, which is broken down into three main themes: growing in communion by welcoming everyone; valuing the contribution of any church member, rather than just ordained clergy; and restructuring the church toward more communal government.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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In letter, thousands of Catholic nuns declare trans people ‘beloved and cherished by God’

— The letter follows a recent statement from U.S. Catholic bishops discouraging Catholic health-care groups from performing various gender-affirming medical procedures

Nuns gather in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City as they attend Pope Francis leading the traditional Sunday prayer in early March.

By Jack Jenkins

A coalition led by Catholic nuns, representing thousands of women religious and associates at partner groups, released a public a letter on Friday voicing support for transgender, nonbinary and gender-expansive individuals, declaring they “are beloved and cherished by God” and implicitly rebuking recent statements from the U.S. Catholic hierarchy.

The letter is meant to mark the International Day of Transgender Visibility, which takes place Friday.

“As members of the body of Christ, we cannot be whole without the full inclusion of transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive individuals,” the letter reads. It goes on to argue that “we will remain oppressors until we — as vowed Catholic religious — acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ people in our own congregations. We seek to cultivate a faith community where all, especially our transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive siblings, experience a deep belonging.”

The letter also states transgender people are “experiencing harm and erasure” in various ways, listing daily discrimination, a groundswell of state-level legislation aimed at LGBTQ rights and “harmful rhetoric from some Christian institutions and their leaders, including the Catholic Church.”

Prepared by representatives from various communities including the U.S. Federation of the Sisters of St. Joseph, Sisters of Providence of St. Mary-of-the-Woods, Indiana, and Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth JPIC office, the letter lists orders of nuns and other organizations representing more than 6,000 vowed religious across 18 states.

Among the signatories are various offices of the Sisters of Charity; the leadership of the Presentation Sisters of Dubuque, Iowa; Sisters of Loretto/Loretto Community; multiple offices of the School Sisters of Notre Dame; the Dominican Sisters of Houston; and the Justice Office of the Medical Mission Sisters.

The letter also lists ways to take action, such as supporting New Ways Ministry, a Catholic LGBTQ outreach group, or signing a statement highlighting a “Catholic commitment to trans-affirmation” from DignityUSA.

The nuns’ effort comes in the wake of a doctrinal statement published earlier this month by a committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which discouraged Catholic health-care groups from performing various gender-affirming medical procedures, arguing doing so does not respect the “intrinsic unity of body and soul.”

Sister Barbara Battista, the congregation justice promoter for the Sisters of Providence, St. Mary-of-the-Woods, noted the letter was already in the works before the bishops unveiled their doctrinal statement. Battista said she and other crafters of the letter were initially responding to the wave of bills being considered in state legislatures that target transgender rights.

When the bishops’ statement became public, Battista said, it jump-started their efforts.

“There’s a sense of urgency in me to say that there are many, many faithful Catholics who know a different way,” said Battista, who has publicly advocated for other causes in the past.

“We need to find opportunities to speak up and to say, ‘We are with you, we support you.’”

Battista noted that many of the bills working their way through state legislatures revolve around the health-care needs of trans people, an issue that hits home for her as a licensed physician assistant in Indiana. She described her work as “participating in the healing ministry of Jesus,” rooted, she said, in a “sacred trust” between patients and providers.

But Catholic leaders and government officials, she argued, have tried to “insert themselves into the private, very personal and intimate conversations and decisions made between the health-care provider and the person they are serving.”

Another person who assisted in crafting the letter, a nonbinary member of a Catholic religious community who asked to remain anonymous for fear of backlash against their community, echoed Battista’s comments in an interview with Religion News Service. “It’s past time for religious communities to speak out against the injustice, the violence, the exclusion of trans, nonbinary persons within society and the church,” they said.

The person also expressed hope the letter would draw attention to the fact that Catholic communities include transgender, nonbinary and gender-expansive individuals.

“It’s not some outside group,” they said. “There are members of religious communities who identify as transgender or nonbinary. … They’re not ‘out there.’”

In the past few decades, Catholic nuns have shown a willingness to take public stands on issues different from or even opposed to those of the American bishops. Earlier this month, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi recalled when U.S. bishops came out against the Affordable Care Act in 2010, a move that concerned some Catholic Democrats who wanted to vote for the bill. But a broad group of Catholic nuns voiced support for the ACA a short time later, a development Pelosi credited with helping get the bill passed, saying, “Thank God for the nuns.”

But the nuns’ activism was not without consequence. Their support for the ACA is widely believed to be one catalyst for a Vatican investigation of women religious in the United States. The investigation, launched under former Pope Benedict XVI, was discontinued by Pope Francis in 2015.

Battista and the nonbinary religious both said the dangers LGBTQ people face every day were far more daunting than kickback from Catholic officials. Said the anonymous religious: “It takes an enormous amount of courage because of discrimination, the actual real existence of threat of harm to our physical bodies and lives, but also the hatred and rejection.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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High-Profile French Nun Inspires Hope for Catholic Women

Sister Nathalie Becquart, the first female undersecretary in the Vatican’s Synod of Bishops, poses for a photo in front of St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, May 29, 2023.

In her years running Catholic youth programs in France, Sister Nathalie Becquart often invoked her own experience as a seasoned sailor in urging young people to weather the storms of their lives.

“There’s nothing stronger than seeing the sunrise after a storm, the flat calm of the sea,” she said.

That lesson is especially applicable to Becquart herself as she charts the global church through an unprecedented — and at times, tempestuous — period of reform as one of the highest-ranking women at the Vatican.

Pope Francis named the 54-year-old nun as the first female undersecretary in the Vatican’s Synod of Bishops office in 2021. Since then, she has been crisscrossing the globe as the public face of his hallmark call to listen to rank-and-file Catholics and empower them to have a greater say in the life of the church.

That process, which comes to a head in October with a big assembly, reaches a crucial point Tuesday with the publication of the working document for the meeting. It is shaping up as a referendum on the role of women in the church of the third millennium.

Becquart, who has overseen a canvassing of ordinary Catholics about their needs from the church and hopes for the future, says the call for change is unambiguous and universal, with demands that women have greater decision-making roles taking center stage at the meeting, or synod.

“There is this unanimous call because women want to participate, to share their gifts and charism at the service of the church,” Becquart said in an interview with The Associated Press in her offices just off St. Peter’s Square.

For a 2,000-year-old institution that by its very doctrine bars women from its highest ranks, Francis’ synodal process has sparked unusual optimism among women who have long felt they were second-class citizens in the church. Predictably, the prospects of change have provoked a strong backlash from conservatives, who view the synod as undermining the all-male, clerical-based hierarchy and the ecclesiology behind it.

Becquart and Francis aren’t daunted and see the criticism, fear and alarm as a good sign that something big and important is underway.

“Of course, there is resistance,” Becquart said with a laugh. “If there is no resistance, that means nothing is happening or nothing is changing.”

But she also puts it in perspective: “If you look at all the history of the reform of the church, where you have the strongest resistance or debated points, it’s really usually a very important point.”

Francis, the 86-year-old Argentine Jesuit, has already done more than any modern pope to promote women by changing church law to allow them to read Scripture and serve on the altar as eucharistic ministers, even while reaffirming they cannot be ordained as priests.

He has changed the Vatican’s founding constitution to allow women to head Vatican offices and made several high-profile female appointments, none more symbolically significant than Becquart’s.

As undersecretary in the Synod of Bishops, Becquart was de facto granted the right to vote at the upcoming October synod — a right previously held by men only. After years of complaints by women, who had been allowed to participate in synods only as nonvoting experts, auditors or observers, Francis not only gave Becquart a voting role, but expanded the vote to laypeople in general.

Sister Nathalie Becquart, the first female undersecretary in the Vatican's Synod of Bishops, shares a word with Cardinal Arthur Roche on her way to the Vatican, May 29, 2023.
Sister Nathalie Becquart, the first female undersecretary in the Vatican’s Synod of Bishops, shares a word with Cardinal Arthur Roche on her way to the Vatican, May 29, 2023.

In April, the Vatican announced that 70 non-bishops would be voting alongside the successors of the apostles in October, and that half of them were expected to be women. While these represent less than a quarter of the bishop votes, the reform was nevertheless historic and a reflection of Francis’ belief that church governance doesn’t come from priestly ordination but by specific jobs entrusted to the baptized faithful.

Becquart has long held leadership roles in the French church, where she ran the bishops’ youth evangelization program. A graduate of Paris’ top HEC business school, Becquart said she has drawn strength from the women who preceded her at the Vatican and in her own religious community, the Xaviere Sisters, a Jesuit-inspired, Vatican II-era missionary congregation that she joined at age 26.

From them and her grandmother, who was widowed while pregnant with her fourth child, Becquart said she learned that women “carry on this message that life is stronger than death, and that even in the greatest difficulties, crises and sufferings, there is a possible path, especially when you are not alone.”

It’s a lesson she applies when sailing and leading spiritual retreats at sea.

“There will be good weather and bad weather, quiet seas and then big waves.” she said. But eventually, the storm will end.

“That’s our life and that’s the life of the church,” she added.

Australia’s ambassador to the Holy See, Chiara Porro, has praised Becquart’s leadership style, recalling how she managed a room full of bishops during the Oceania phase of the synod consultation process. Becquart’s presence as a female Vatican envoy traveling to Fiji to brief Pacific bishops on the pope’s agenda signaled a paradigm shift, Porro said.

“She doesn’t have any preconceived objectives or outcomes. For her, no issues are off-limits, I think, and that’s very important because people feel that they can bring up what they want to discuss,” she said.

Veteran Vatican-watchers, however, caution that even with women taking on high-profile appointments and winning the right to vote at the October synod, the men still run the show.

“All the reforms that have been made to date on governing at the Vatican, in my opinion, are just appearances,” said Lucetta Scaraffia, a church historian who participated in a 2016 synod and wrote a scathing account of her marginalized role in From the Last Row. Her experiences — of being forced to go through a metal detector and check in each day while the bishops waltzed in unimpeded — were emblematic.

“I realized how the Catholic Church really was another world and what it means for women to be nonexistent. To actually not exist,” she said.

Jean-Marie Guenois, chief religious affairs correspondent for Le Figaro, who has known Becquart for years, said her role at the Vatican and in the synod process would be revolutionary “if it marked a paradigm shift in the Catholic Church where women would achieve parity of power in government.”

“We’re a long way from that,” he said, while nevertheless calling Becquart’s position “simply prophetic.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Jesuits expel prominent priest after allegations of sexual, spiritual and psychological abuse

By Nicole Winfield

Pope Francis’ Jesuit religious order said Thursday it has expelled a prominent Slovenian priest from the congregation following allegations of sexual, spiritual and psychological abuses against adult women.

A statement from the Jesuits, obtained by The Associated Press on Thursday, said the Rev. Marko Ivan Rupnik was dismissed from the Jesuit order by decree on June 9 “due to stubborn refusal to observe the vow of obedience.”

Rupnik is one of the most celebrated religious artists in the Catholic Church, whose mosaics decorate churches and basilicas around the world, including at the Vatican.

Late last year, the Jesuits acknowledged he had been accused by several women of sexual, spiritual and psychological abuses over a 30-year period. But he had largely escaped punishment, apparently thanks in part to his exalted status in the church and at the Vatican, where even Francis’ role in the case came into question.

The Jesuit statement said Rupnik has 30 days to appeal the expulsion order. He remains a priest, just not a Jesuit priest, and has no authority to celebrate any sacraments publicly. He could eventually join a diocese, but such a process would take years and require a bishop to agree to take him in.

The Rupnik scandal exploded in December when Italian blogs and websites reported that consecrated women had complained for years about abuse by him, only to have their claims discredited or covered up by Rupnik’s superiors. The case posed a problem for the Vatican and the Jesuits because of suspicions that the charismatic priest received preferential treatment by the Holy See, where a Jesuit pope reigns and Jesuit priests are in top positions at the sex abuse office.

After the allegations erupted, the Jesuits reluctantly admitted Rupnik had been declared excommunicated in 2020 for having committed one of the gravest crimes in church law — using the confessional to absolve a woman with whom he had engaged in sexual activity — but had repented and had the sanction quickly removed.

The next year, Rupnik was accused by nine women of having sexually, psychologically and spiritually abused them in the 1990s at a community he co-founded in Slovenia. Even though the Jesuits recommended a church trial, the Vatican’s sex abuse office refused to waive the statute of limitations and declared the crimes too old to prosecute.

That outcome underscored how the Catholic hierarchy routinely refuses to consider spiritual and sexual abuse of adult women as a crime that must be punished, but rather a mere lapse of priestly chastity that can be forgiven, without considering the trauma it causes victims.

After the scandal, the Jesuits invited anyone with other claims against Rupnik to come forward, and 15 people did.

The Jesuits then asked Rupnik to respond, but he refused, according to the statement Thursday.

“Thus, we forced Father Marko Rupnik to change communities and accept a new mission in which we offered him one last chance as a Jesuit to come to terms with his past and to give a clear signal to the many aggrieved people who were testifying against him to enter a path of truth,” the statement said. “Faced with Marko Rupnik’s repeated refusal to obey this mandate, we were unfortunately left with only one solution: resignation from the Society of Jesus.”

Francis’ role in the Rupnik case also came into question, given the unusually quick turnaround in which Rupnik had been declared excommunicated and then had the penalty removed — a period of less than a month — as well as the Vatican’s refusal to waive the statute of limitations when the second set of allegations were lodged.

In a Jan. 24 interview with The Associated Press, Francis denied he had any role other than to intervene procedurally to keep the second set of accusations with the same tribunal that had heard the first.

He added that he was shocked by the allegations against Rupnik, with whom he had reportedly been close.

“For me, it was a surprise, really. This, a person, an artist of this level — for me was a big surprise, and a wound,” Francis told AP.

While the Jesuits had barred Rupnik from public preaching or engaging in artistic activity earlier this year, his expulsion from the order ostensibly leaves him free to do as he wants, since he now reports to no religious superior.

That freedom is a perennial problem in the church’s canonical system, where the worst punishment for an abusive priest is to be defrocked, or laicized, and thus free to keep on abusing without any oversight.

“As we see it, expulsion from a community of priests does not stop an alleged abuser from potentially committing further harm to others,” said the U.S.-based survivor advocacy group SNAP. In addition, it noted that the expulsion “does nothing in the form of justice” for his victims.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!