Keeler: A fighter for women's ordination

Bob Keeler, a former religion reporter for Newsday, is a member of the editorial board.

One fine day, the Catholic Church will get around to ordaining women. It won't happen in my lifetime. But my two young granddaughters will probably witness it.

Right now, though, it seems very far off. Pope Benedict XVI has just removed an Australian bishop who, facing a priest shortage, suggested that the church might someday have to think about ordaining women. And one of the best loved priests in the Maryknoll order, the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, will likely be expelled soon from Maryknoll and stripped of his priesthood. To protest that and support him, seven peace activists did informational picketing last week outside a Mass for Maryknoll's 100th anniversary.

His crime? In 2008, he preached at what the church views as the invalid ordination of a woman as a Catholic priest -- and he has refused to recant.

Father Roy, as he's known affectionately in the peace movement, is a prophetic figure. He's a Vietnam veteran who has spent months in prison for protesting at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in Georgia, which trains Latin American soldiers -- many of them later implicated in atrocities in their own countries.

"Wherever I speak on the School of the Americas, this injustice closer to home in my church always comes up," he told me. "I reached a point where, in conscience, I could not be silent on this issue of injustice in my church."

Even in his own family, his decision not to back down caused strain -- until his father pronounced that he supported his decision to follow his conscience. And he's humbled and encouraged by letters from Maryknollers supporting his act of conscience.

Primacy of conscience has a long history in the church. But the hierarchy always adds this asterisk: For Catholics, a right conscience has to be an informed one, and that means listening to church teaching.

Not ordaining women also goes way back. But in 1976, the Vatican's Pontifical Biblical Commission said there was no scriptural bar to it. In this country, a task force of the Catholic Biblical Association said the same in 1979, despite the Vatican's rejection of the 1976 report.

In 1994, Pope John Paul II issued an apostolic letter, "Ordinatio Sacerdotalis," or "Priestly Ordination," proclaiming "the church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women." His orthodoxy enforcer, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI), declared this to be infallible teaching. Some saw that finding as overreaching, an example of "creeping infallibility." To me, it looks like patriarchy and sexism dressed up as doctrine.

John Paul's point was this: Jesus chose only men as his apostles. So the church has no authority to choose women. This reading of Scripture discounts the way Jesus broke the taboos of the day and treated women with dignity -- not to mention the pivotal role women played among his followers and in the early church.

In conscience, Roy Bourgeois looks at all this and differs from John Paul and Benedict. He's about to pay for that by losing his priesthood. He stands accused of scandalizing the faithful. But by making Father Roy into Mr. Roy, the church will scandalize the thousands of young people energized over the years by his work for peace and justice.

Someday -- when the church decides that providing enough priests to bring the Eucharist to the faithful is more important than maintaining an all-male priesthood -- he'll be seen to have been right.

"Good will come from all this," he said. "I'm not just this lone voice out there, crying in the wilderness. The majority of Catholics do support and would give their blessing to women priests in our church. . . . This movement is not going away."