"It feels so good to be discussing this," Victoria Rue tells me, the note of mischief clear in her Californian drawl. "Officially the Vatican has decreed that Catholics can't even talk about women priests, let alone ordain them, but here we are doing it."
In her white alb with the decorated stole that is the trademark of the priesthood hanging round her neck, Rue, professor of religion at San Jose State University, California, looks and sounds every inch a Catholic cleric.
Last July, she was ordained as one of the world's first Catholic women priests. Tomorrow she will be in Britain to say mass in Leeds, in the north of England, with members of Britain's 300-strong Catholic Women's Ordination (CWO) association. The service will take place in an Anglican church because, in the eyes of the Vatican, Rue, 59, is not a priest. It has responded to the ordinations of a handful of American, German, Austrian and South African women with threats of excommunication.
Rue's visit comes at what many see as a crucial moment in women's struggle to achieve equality before God. In America, the Episcopal (Anglican) Church has just elected its first woman leader -- Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori, 52, a marine biologist and former pilot who beat six men for the job. Meanwhile, in Britain the Church of England's General Synod voted last Saturday to allow women to become bishops.
Many see it as the next logical step after women were admitted to its priesthood in 1994. A recent report by the British think-tank Demos highlighted the fact that 50 percent of those now entering Britain's Anglican seminaries are women. But these women's advancement has opened up powerful divisions among the faithful.
The pressure for women to be given something more to do in church than flower-arranging is building from both within Catholicism -- 70 more American women are preparing for ordination as Catholic priests, 120 in total worldwide -- and from outside because of the example of what is happening in the Anglican Church.
The figures contained in the Demos report on the rapid rise of women priests in the Church of England have taken many by surprise. To reach parity with men in terms of numbers in just a dozen years is remarkable. In other professions, it has taken women generations.
"Initially, there were a number of women waiting in the wings who had had a vocation for years but had not been able to follow it," says Reverend Angela Tilby, vice-principal of Westcott House Theological Training College in Cambridge, England. "But that first wave should have passed. What I see today in the students I train are two sorts of women -- recent graduates with a calling and women in midlife looking for a second life track. Because women still often take responsibility for bringing up children, I think they have more flexibility than men, who are locked into careers, and so can embark on something new."
The move to allow women bishops -- specifically excluded in 1994 but permitted elsewhere in the worldwide Anglican communion -- is important, Tilby believes.
"The ecology of our church feels wrong without them. A Church of England bishop who had initially been opposed to women priests said to me recently that we needed women bishops because he no longer trusted resolutions coming out of the House of Bishops in the General Synod because as a group the bishops were so unrepresentative of the clergy," she says.
She hopes that women will not experience the same "glass ceiling" found in other professions, but feels that women are often not as "testosterone-driven" as men and therefore may not want to give up parish life for the bishop's palace.
The appointment of women bishops in the Church of England will, when it happens, only exacerbate the divisions in the worldwide Anglican communion. Some Anglican churches in Africa, for example, are utterly opposed to seeing women in positions of authority. They reacted with predictable horror to the election of Jefferts Schori. However, among those who campaign on women's ministry, the American vote has caused jubilation.
Christina Rees, chair of Women and the Church and a member of the General Synod, regards Schori's election as public confirmation of her belief that the tide has at last turned in women's favor.
Change as a process
"As primate of the Episcopal Church, she has the status of an archbishop and that means that at every meeting of the senior figures of the churches in years to come there will finally be a woman at the table," Rees says. "It is often said that change in the church is a process not an event, but in future they will pick out this event as a key moment."
Rees believes a more profound change is afoot.
"We are witnessing a belated coming together of secular understanding of women and theological understanding of women. We are now seeing words usually used in the secular sphere such as equality, justice and discrimination creeping back into the church's language and practice after a long absence," she says.
Victoria Rue tried life as a nun in the late 1960s but then turned her back on the church to work in the theater. A trip to Central America in the 1980s brought her back into contact with Catholicism. Seeing it operating alongside the poor in the slums of Nicaragua inspired her to take up Catholic liturgy. She began taking part in and leading an unofficial "women's mass" in Oakland, California. That experience confirmed her vocation and eventually led her to seek "ordination" last year.
The ceremony took place aboard a boat in the St Lawrence River in Canada. Using a floating church meant that those who took part were outside the jurisdiction of any local archbishop. The moment of consecration was, Rue recalls, extraordinary.
"Every cell in my body rearranged itself. At once I was connected to all parts of myself. Something totally new was happening to me. The presence of the Holy Spirit was palpable," she says.
She refers to the Spirit as "she." Rue -- she doesn't use the title Father because it sounds too patriarchal -- now celebrates mass twice a week on San Jose university campus. She still receives a regular dose of hate mail from traditionalist Catholics who regard her as the Devil incarnate, but does not let it deflect her. Sometimes it rebounds to her advantage.
"The local bishop sent a letter to Catholics saying I was an invalid priest. That was wonderful publicity. A crowd turned up to see me. A lot of them have stayed on. Once they experience us, they know there is nothing to fear. Poll after poll of American Catholics shows that a majority wants women priests. The Vatican is refusing to listen right now but how much longer it can go on doing that, I don't know," she says.
Schori's election has, Rue believes, given "huge moral and symbolic encouragement" to Catholic women wanting to be priests. That Jefferts Schori grew up a Catholic but had to join the Anglican Church to answer God's call to the priesthood lends her example particular piquancy. But before we start preparing for a female Pope -- there was one, Joan, legend has it, in the 9th century, but she pretended to be a man -- it is worth listening to the official teaching of the Catholic Church.
"In the name of liberation from male domination women must not appropriate to themselves male characteristics contrary to their own feminine originality. There is a well-founded fear that if they take this path they will deform and lose what constitutes this essential richness," said John Paul II in his 1988 teaching document On The Dignity and the Vocation of Women.
On the defensive
But Rome has been forced on to the defensive by the large numbers of women now studying theology and realizing that Catholicism does not really have a decent argument against women's ordination.
According to the Vatican, the issue is that women were not at the Last Supper. However, since we have no real evidence who was at the Last Supper, this can scarcely be regarded as a knockout blow.
There is, moreover, evidence from gravestone inscriptions that there were women priests in southern Italy and Sicily between 150 and 550. Nearer to our own times, a group of Czech women, fearing that their church would be destroyed in the late 1960s as the communist authorities imprisoned and killed male Catholic priests, were ordained by their bishop in secret and faithfully served the underground church.
Katherine Salmon from Leeds is a member of CWO and organizer of Rue's mass. She also has a vocation and, like many members, has undertaken a two-year part-time course in women's ministry, geared to the Catholic priesthood, at York St John College.
"I had been for 13 years a lay member of a Catholic religious order, the Little Sisters of the Poor," Salmon says. "I had also acted as coordinator of the lay membership, but once my wish to become a priest was known I was told by the order that my `irregular theology' no longer made me a fit person to be involved with them."
Salmon was forced to resign. Her experience mirrors that of many other women in the movement. Those who hold official jobs in the church -- in Catholic schools, diocesan offices or as lay chaplains in prisons and hospitals -- have been forced to keep their link with the CWO and their vocations secret for fear of being sacked. One, who asked not to be named, described it as "a kind of crucifixion."
Tomorrow, Rue will try to put some balm on the wounds. As she stands on the altar, she will be a walking, talking reproach to the foolishness of a group of men who believe that they can simply order those who disagree with them to be silent and fall into line with a teaching that has almost no theological or historical basis. Inspired by the changes afoot in Anglicanism, Catholic women with a vocation are no longer in the mood to put up and shut up.
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