Marian Ronan

Womanpriest

Womanpriest: Tradition and Transgression in the Contemporary Roman Catholic Church. By Jill Peterfeso. NY, NY: Fordham University Press, 2020. 272 pp. Paperback. $30.00.

I became involved with the women’s ordination movement in 1975 when two of the leaders of the Grail, on the staff of whose organic farm I was serving at the time, told me I was going with them to the first women’s Ordination Conference in Detroit. I was not terribly interested in the issue at the time, but those were the days when people still actually obeyed orders.  So I went, and the conference transformed my understanding of the issue. 

Seventeen years later, when I was beginning my doctoral studies at Temple, I became involved in the Southeastern Pennsylvania Women’s Ordination Conference through Regina Bannan. From there I became a member of the national Women’s Ordination Conference board and served as president of the board for several years.

But I was not enthusiastic about the first Roman Catholic Womanpriest (RCWP) ordinations on the Danube in 2002, or the ordinations in North America and elsewhere that followed. In those days I more or less belonged to the Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza “ordination is subordination” school.

But Jill Peterfeso’s splendid new book, Womanpriest, has forced me to reconsider that position. The book is an ethnographic study of members of the RCWP group that burst on the public stage in 2002, and of the Association of Roman Catholic Womanpriests (ARCWP) that more or less split off from the original group in 2010.  Ethnography is based on field work with a particular group, involving interviews, observation, data collection, etc. But Peterfeso expands this into a kind of dialogic ethnography in which she includes, especially in the introduction and conclusion, some of her own experiences in womanpriest communities, and how this has influenced her own Catholic identity 

Peterfeso draws from her research a number of themes that embody and clarify the reality and impact of RCWP and ARCWP on contemporary Roman Catholicism.  In chapter 1 she details the ways in which womanpriests use the deeply personal narrative of “calling” to dispute the Vatican’s claim that their ordinations are illegitimate. Focusing on the centrality of the experience of “being called” in the lives of five prominent womanpriests, Victoria Rue, Juanita Cordero, Gabriella Velardi Ward, Mary Grace Crowley-Koch, and Kathleen Kunster, Peterfeso argues that such narratives enable these womanpriests to dispute Rome’s claim that only men are “called”, and that they are nothing but activist agitators. Rather they are multidimensional, faithful, reflective women who, in order to obey God’s call, must disobey a patriarchal institution.

Peterfeso begins chapter 2 with the story of a Havertown priest writing to our own SEPA-WOC, claiming that WOC members are not “true Catholics.” She goes on to show that the retention of “Roman Catholic” in the title of the group demonstrates a commitment to Roman Catholic identity, and the ways in which Roman Catholicism since Vatican II has sent out mixed messages, bringing the word “conscience” into the Catholic vernacular as well as refusing women who feel called the right to follow their consciences. Recent Roman Catholic history is precisely what inspires womanpriests to craft ways to make Roman Catholicism work.

These methods combine “conflict and creativity” (chapter 3). In response to what they perceive as the decline of the celibate-male-priest-centered Western Roman Catholicism, womanpriests create “discipleship of equals” communities that give members a way of moving their Catholicism to a better, fuller expression. But such creativity brings conflict with it, as when ARCWP split from RCWP over issues of governance, particularly how to have leadership without authoritarianism.

Womanpriest ordinations (chapter 4) are a prime instance of such creativity and conflict, demonstrating as they do womanpriests’ location on the line between reforming and transforming the institution. Such ordinations elicit not only Vatican condemnation as “contra legem,” but also feminist theological critique for its ostensible collusion in institutional “subordination.” But they also focus badly needed public attention on the issue of women’s subordination in the institutional church, and this is no small achievement.

The emphasis on the centrality of the community in the celebration of the sacraments is another of the transformative effects of womanpriest leadership (chapter 5). Here, too, however, creativity and conflict overlap, with some participants seeing the ontological nature of the sacraments and apostolic succession as more important than community participation. But in this case, as in many others, the most significant thing, in Peterfeso’s estimation, is that womanpriests engage in actions, not just argumentation. (And there’s a photo of our own Eileen DiFranco in the middle of the chapter!).

Peterfeso’s next chapter examines how womanpriests’ reality as “worker priests,” due to the unavailability of congregational salaries, facilitates their involvement with other groups and church leaders, roles that can be both inspiring and confusing. Then, in chapter 7, Peterfeso explores, in a way that I find deeply moving, how the actual bodies of womanpriests have the potential to reposition the gendered, sexual and sacred natures of the priesthood, a revisioning that is especially needed in light of the sex abuse crisis.

What is, for me, however, the most moving part of Womanpriest is Peterfeso’s concluding chapter, in which she brings into clear view the dialogic dimension of her ethnographic research. She does so by returning to material in the introductory chapter about her involvement in a womanpriest congregation in St. Louis, Therese of Divine Peace Inclusive Roman Catholic Community.  Initially, Peterfeso was unable to decide what to make of the womanpriest Masses there. Did they remind her of the thousands of Catholic services she had attended throughout her life or did they unsettle her because womanpriest culture is unlike the Catholicism that she knew?” Such concerns led her into a reexamination of larger questions about Roman Catholicism as well as about women and religious authority.

By the end of her research, however, Peterfeso realizes that her initial uncertainty about the womanpriest phenomenon had receded considerably. At the beginning, for example, she missed kneelers—RCWP liturgies are rarely in churches. She also had mixed feelings about the “enthusiastic affection” of RCWP liturgies which deviated from the relative anonymity of standard Catholic Masses. Gradually, she came to like engaging more directly with others, as in shared homilies, concelebration of the Eucharist, and interacting more before and after the liturgy. Her research also made her more unhappy about the many manifestations of the institutional church’s “history of viewing women as less holy than men.” Ultimately, she writes, “Like the Roman Catholic liturgy, like the Catholic liturgical calendar, my annual visits to Therese are becoming ritualized. I find comfort in this familiarity” (120).

These shifts in her personal assessment of the womanpriest phenomenon did not stop Peterfeso, scholar that she is, from raising further critical questions, such as those about the whole future of the womanpriest movement—its small, aging membership, for example—or about conflicting attitudes toward women in the fastest growing part of the church, the Global South. But the shift in her own perceptions illustrates graphically her compelling argument that participating in a womanpriest community, and experiencing a womanpriest celebrating the liturgy, is one of the surest ways to bring people around to supporting women’s ordination.

It is not possible, even in a long review like this one, to do justice to the careful and original thinking Jill Peterfeso brings to the issue that is so important to us, women’s ordination. But if what I have written here doesn’t send you dashing out (or dashing on-line!) to buy a copy of Womanpriest, consider this: I now think that ordination isn’t always subordination. And I think that dancing back and forth across the line between tradition and transgression may well be just the strategy we need to reform the Roman Catholic Church.

This review appeared in the Nov. 2020 to February 2021 issue of EqualwRites, the newsletter of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Women’s Ordination Conference.