Activist calls for female Catholic priests

Calling it a just and unstoppable movement, the Rev. Roy Bourgeois stood before a friendly crowd Sunday at Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington to talk about allowing female priests in the Roman Catholic faith.

"This movement in our church . . . the issue of gender equality is unstoppable," he said to about 200 people who watched the documentary film "Pink Smoke Over the Vatican." "It is inevitable."

The Vatican has forbidden church members from speaking about the issue and excommunicated Bourgeois over his outspoken ways and refusal to recant his position. The church is now threatening laicization, or returning Bourgeois, 73, of Columbus, Ga., to the state of a lay person.

The Maryknoll Missionary Order, a religious community Bourgeois has been a part of for more than four decades, is also threatening expulsion.

But he will not budge. "If we are silent when we see an injustice," he said, "our silence is the voice of complicity."

Bourgeois is featured in "Pink Smoke," along with women who have been ordained as priests.

"I could teach these men to preach, but I was not allowed to open my mouth in the chapel," said one woman who taught at a seminary.

The movie uses archaeology and religious texts to highlight that the early church allowed female priests, an idea scoffed at in the film by the Rev. Ronald Lengwin, spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh.

"The church doesn't base its doctrine on archaeology . . ." Lengwin said. "You don't know what you're digging up."

For Bourgeois, it's a policy rooted in sexism.

"Right now, a girl in our times can aspire to almost anything she wants to be -- except a Catholic priest," screening organizer Anne Dowling said.

Bourgeois said fellow priests say they support his views but fear the repercussions of speaking out. He urged the crowd to join the campaign.

Archbishop Peter Brennan from the Ecumenical Catholic Diocese in West Hempstead, which is not affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church, agreed. "I support the ordination of women completely," he said. "I think it's quite overdue. There's no theological reason why they can't be ordained."