Vatican to priest: Recant on women clergy

The Rev. Roy Bourgeois publicly backs the ordination of women as Roman Catholic priests and even took part in a ceremony doing so. Now, the Vatican is threatening to have him removed from the priesthood and his Westchester-based order, Maryknoll.

Bourgeois, who is coming to Huntington on Sunday for a film about women priests and a chance to air his views, says he's simply following his conscience.

"The exclusion of women to the priesthood sends a very clear message -- men are superior, women inferior," Bourgeois said in an interview. "It's about sexism, and sexism, like racism, is a sin."

Bourgeois' advocacy of women priests has resulted in his excommunication by the Vatican, according to Maryknoll spokesman Michael Virgintino. That means he can no longer celebrate Mass or other sacraments, such as baptism, confession or last rites.

He still remains a priest, though, and can engage in ministry that includes helping the poor. But even that's in jeopardy as he moves toward a showdown with the Vatican and Maryknoll.

Rome has ordered him to recant his views and public statements about women priests or face "laicization" -- being returned to the state of layperson.

Bourgeois, 73, who will be at Huntington Cinema Arts Centre at 10 a.m. Sunday for a showing of "Pink Smoke Over the Vatican," a documentary on the issue, says he won't recant.

"What you are asking me to do is not possible without violating my conscience," Bourgeois said of the Vatican's demands. "You are telling me basically to lie and this I cannot do."

Virgintino said the dispute is essentially between Bourgeois and the Vatican, which sets church teachings, and that Maryknoll -- the foreign branch of the U.S. church -- is caught in the middle. Still, Maryknoll has issued two warning letters to Bourgeois that he will face expulsion from the order if he doesn't recant.

"Maryknoll exists because of the blessings of the Vatican," Virgintino said. "If those are the rules of the organization you are involved with, you must follow the rules of the organization."

Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the church limits the priesthood to men because that is the tradition established by Jesus when he selected the 12 apostles during The Last Supper as the church's first "priests."

"Jesus went against many of the rules of his society, but that is one he didn't," she said. "The thought is that if Jesus wanted to ordain women, he would have."

But Bourgeois said that as he traveled the country in the past two decades he has met numerous women who feel called to the priesthood.

"I started asking, who are we to say that our call [as men to the priesthood] is authentic, but God's call of women is not?" Bourgeois said. "Silence when we see an injustice is complicity, and I had to break my silence."