Tag: Misogyny

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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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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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Archbishop of Canterbury urges Ugandan Anglicans to reject anti-gay law

The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby attends the Church of England General Synod meeting in London, Britain, February 9, 2023.

by Estelle Shirbon in London and George Obulutsa in Nairobi

The Archbishop of Canterbury has urged the Anglican Church of Uganda to reject the country’s new anti-LGBT law, saying there is no justification for Anglicans anywhere to support legislation that goes against the Christian teachings of the Gospel.

Under the law, approved by President Yoweri Museveni in May, gay sex is punishable by life in prison while “aggravated homosexuality”, including transmitting HIV, attracts the death penalty.

Justin Welby, leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, said he had written to Archbishop Stephen Kaziimba, the Primate of Uganda, to express “grief and dismay” at the church’s stance.

“There is no justification for any province of the Anglican Communion to support such laws: not in our resolutions, not in our teachings, and not in the Gospel we share,” Welby said in a statement on Friday.

Kaziimba said in May he was grateful for the new law. He said homosexuality was being forced on Uganda by “foreign actors … who disguise themselves as human rights activists” and went against Ugandans’ religious and cultural beliefs.

The Church of Uganda says 36% of Uganda’s population of around 45 million are Anglicans.

The Anglican Communion, which numbers tens of millions of people across 165 countries, is deeply divided over the ordination of gay clergy by some churches in some Western countries, and attitudes towards same-sex marriage.

The Ugandan church has been at the forefront of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), a conservative group. In April, GAFCON said it no longer had confidence in Welby because of his comments in support of the blessing of same-sex unions in churches.

Welby said in Friday’s statement he was deeply aware of the history of colonial rule in Uganda but “this is not about imposing Western values on our Ugandan Anglican sisters and brothers”.

“It is about reminding them of the commitments we have made as Anglicans to treat every person with the care and respect they deserve as children of God,” he said.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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In rare move, Vatican official chastised Texas Bishop Strickland at conference

Bishop Joseph E. Strickland

by Religion News Service

If Texas Bishop Joseph E. Strickland is known outside of his diocese for anything, it’s for controversy.

The conservative firebrand, who oversees the Diocese of Tyler, Texas, has sparked backlash from critics for everything from voicing support for priests who refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19 to offering a prayer at a “Jericho March” event in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. More recently, Strickland challenged Pope Francis, announcing on his Twitter feed that he believes the pontiff is “undermining the Deposit of Faith.” His efforts have inspired some detractors to call for Strickland’s resignation, while others have urged Vatican intervention.

But according to multiple sources, Strickland has already been on the receiving end of the Vatican’s ire for more than a year: He was chastised by a representative of the Holy See in 2021, they say — a move that simultaneously signals the potential for formal Vatican disciplinary action and exemplifies the difficulty of reining in a controversial cleric.

“(Strickland) doesn’t really care,” Barber said of the alleged encounter. “It’s the truth that sets us free. If he goes down because he’s speaking the truth, oh well.”

A separate source who is familiar with the meeting but who chose to remain anonymous, as they have not been given permission to discuss the matter publicly, told Religion News Service the incident took place in November 2021 at the annual USCCB meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. The source said the nuncio specifically confronted Strickland about his Twitter feed, which had garnered controversy at the time for, among other things, posts that opposed the three major COVID-19 vaccines distributed in the U.S. at the time.

Asked about the encounter via email this week, Strickland said he would “prefer not to comment.”

The nuncio’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

For his part, Barber told RNS he did not wish to speak further about the incident and would not name the source of his information. Instead, he criticized Pope Francis, accusing him of being ambiguous about important moral questions and calling the pontiff a “disaster for the Catholic Church.”

Strickland would hardly be the first cleric in U.S. history to be reprimanded by the Holy See. In the 1980s, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — headed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who went on to become Pope Benedict XVI — launched an investigation into Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, an outspoken liberal cleric and critic of nuclear power, who oversaw the Archdiocese of Seattle at the time. The Holy See ultimately appointed an auxiliary bishop to the region who shared authority with Hunthausen.

But it’s highly unusual for the public to learn about less formal admonishments doled out to bishops by Vatican officials behind closed doors. What’s more, Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University and an expert on U.S. Catholicism, said a nuncio privately dressing-down a U.S. bishop at a conference is particularly rare, and showcases the delicate situation facing modern popes when it comes to cowing outspoken, media-savvy clerics who buck the party line.

Strickland has become a popular figure in right-wing Catholic circles for his criticism of President Joe Biden and oppositional stance against COVID-19 vaccines, which includes expressing support for priests who have challenged their own bishops by refusing to get vaccinated. (Strickland’s position contrasts sharply with that of Pope Francis, who has advocated repeatedly for the use of vaccines, even calling them an “act of love.”) In addition to the Terry and Jesse Show, Strickland has appeared on a number of conservative and far-right Catholic websites, ranging from EWTN to Church Militant.

Church Militant also organized a protest outside the same November 2021 USCCB meeting where the nuncio is alleged to have confronted Strickland. Speakers at the event, where some participants waved anti-Biden “Let’s go Brandon” flags, praised Strickland from the stage. He also posed for photographs with staffers from Church Militant, an outlet that has railed against other bishops using language critics have decried as homophobic and racist.

Church officials wishing to curtail Strickland’s influence could take dramatic steps like they did with Hunthausen, Faggioli said, but “there’s no measure that can deprive him of the access to these various blogs or influencers” the bishop often utilizes to amplify his message.

“I believe that the fear is that, if he’s removed, his visibility will be amplified,” Faggioli said.

What’s more, if the alleged scolding was meant to cow Strickland, Faggioli said, it doesn’t appear to have had much of an effect. Since the 2021 meeting, the Texas bishop has been embroiled in multiple controversies over challenging the authority or rhetoric of church officials — be it his fellow bishops or the pope. And while Strickland’s much-maligned tweet about Pope Francis earlier this month was an attempt to distance himself from a podcaster who questioned whether Francis is, in fact, the pope, his effort still resulted in controversy.

“I don’t know how much that dressing down worked,” Faggioli said.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!