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Sabina Clarke, Philadelphia, PA
Volume 38 Issue 1, 2, & 3 | Posted: April 3, 2023
In 2008 Roy Bourgeois a Maryknoll priest for 40 years, Vietnam veteran, Purple Heart recipient and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize nominee — did the unspeakable. He called for the ordination of women priests in the Roman Catholic Church and publicly participated in a woman’s ordination at a Unitarian Church in Lexington, Kentucky.
For this transgression and for refusing to recant, Bourgeois who had worked among the poor in El Salvador and Bolivia was excommunicated by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012. His response was “The Vatican and Maryknoll can dismiss me but they cannot dismiss the issue of gender equality in the Catholic Church.”
Since then the climate has changed and there is now more than a glimmer of hope for real dialogue on the subject of women priests and gender equality in the Church.
The Catholic Church has lost its moral authority and is dangling from a precipice –struggling to survive with declining Church attendance, the abuse scandal and fewer vocations to the priesthood.
The time is ripe for real dialogue on women priests with the increasing interest and demand from the laity and from scores of Catholic women who have already been ordained Catholic priests outside the Church and without the Church’s blessing.
Male Supremacy in the Catholic Church…An Insider’s View, by Roy Bourgeois makes a compelling argument for why women should be ordained priests. He describes a Church in peril with declining attendance at Mass in traditionally Catholic countries in Europe such as France, Ireland and Italy.
His thesis is buttressed by facts and statistics on the background of the pedophile abuse and strengthened by examples of female power in the Church’s long history going back to Mary Magdalene.
He believes that his experience working with the poor in Bolivia and the danger he experienced daily prepared him to take on the bullies in Rome and the bullies in government. During the years he spent in prison for his political activism calling out U.S. Foreign Policy in Latin America, he took solace from the Book of Psalms during the dark nights of his struggle.
If anything, the Pope, the Bishops, and the Church elders might take note of what their excommunicated brother Father Roy Bourgeois has to say. Would that we could have more clergy as courageous as he—more interested in saving the Church than clinging to old stereotypes.
Male Supremacy in the Catholic Church… An Insider’s View
By Roy Bourgeois
2022
Available at Amazon.com
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Sabina Clarke, Philadelphia, PA
