‘If you’re not going to ordain women, then quit dressing like them!’

FREETHINKER founder George W Foote once observed:

It will yet be the proud boast of woman that she never contributed a line to the Bible.

So why, we wonder, would a woman ever want to be a priest, let alone support an institution that has done nothing but denigrate and demonise females over the centuries?

But if a woman wants to engage in mumbo-jumbo and prance around in fancy dress, why should anyone stand in her way?

Janice Sevre-Duszynska

We pose these questions in light of the Catholic’s Church’s decision to excommunicate Rev Roy Bourgeois – a remarkably youthful 70-year-old American priest and nationally known peace activist – following his participation in a ceremony in which Janice Sevre-Duszynska, a member of a group called Roman Catholic Womenpriests, was ordained.

The Rev Roy Bourgeois, left, with Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich, at a recent peace procession

According to this report, the Vatican considers ceremonies for the ordination of a woman as a priest illicit and invalid – a stance which gave rise to a popular bumper sticker in the US:

If you’re not going to ordain women, then quit dressing like them.

Sevre-Duszynska is a veteran campaigner for women’s ordination, and the 35th American woman to claim ordination from the increasingly vocal Womenpriests group. The Womenpriests group has been holding its own ordinations of women as priests, deacons and even bishops across North America and Europe, often in secret, starting in 2002 with a ceremony on a boat on the Danube River.

In response to a letter a received last month from the Vatican, Bourgeois pulled no punches:

Sexism, like racism, is a sin. And no matter how hard or how long we may try to justify discrimination, in the end, it is always immoral.

Hundreds of Catholic churches in the US are closing because of a shortage of priests. Yet there are hundreds of committed and prophetic women telling us that God is calling them to serve our Church as priests.

According to USA Today (Feb. 28, 2008) in the United States alone, nearly 5,000 Catholic priests have sexually abused more than 12,000 children. Many bishops, aware of the abuse, remained silent. These priests and bishops were not excommunicated. Yet the women in our Church who are called by God and are ordained to serve God’s people, and the priests and bishops who support them, are excommunicated.

Ouch!

Silence is the voice of complicity. Therefore, I call on all Catholics, fellow priests, bishops, Pope Benedict XVI and all Church leaders at the Vatican, to speak loudly on this grave injustice of excluding women from the priesthood.

Yeah, and pigs will fly!