Mission
Father Anne's mission is to see women welcomed into the Roman Catholic priesthood within her lifetime.
photo by Nathaniel Tetsuro Paolinelli
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who is father anneFather Anne was ordained a Roman Catholic priest on October 16, 2021, through a reform movement called the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests. Because the Roman Catholic Church prevents the full participation of women in Church life, Father Anne was forced to choose between obedience to God and obedience to Church law. Choosing God, she was excommunicated, ending her career in the Church she loves. She now devotes her life to gender justice in one of the most powerful institutions in the world. Father Anne has a Master of Divinity from Jesuit School of Theology and a Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Writing Studies from San Diego State University. Her deepest desire is to serve as a parish priest in the Roman Catholic Church. She works for the day this dream comes true.
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why use father?The priest is one of the most powerful symbols in the Roman Catholic tradition. Like with the sacraments, God enters through the symbol, making present and more perceptible the hidden realities of God so that we can encounter them more fully. Because the priest symbol is restricted to the male form alone, it produces a narrow, lopsided encounter with God, limiting the full range of experiences God desires to bestow upon us. This robs us of a more full understanding of God's nature, God's desires, and God's invitations to us. Such misunderstanding of God both produces and legitimates the subjugation of women--something that is against God's desires.
A central part of my ministry is to claim the traditional priest symbol and expand it with the female form. I embrace the givenness of the Catholic tradition, that is the recognizable signifiers of a Catholic priest–the Roman collar, the discipline of celibacy, the Roman Missal, and the title Father. By embracing the tradition as it stands at this moment in history, I signal to the Roman Catholic Church that I am a part of its community, that the Church is my primary audience. At the same time, I put the traditional priest symbol at the service of God, who through the power of the Holy Spirit expands the Catholic imagination by using the flesh of my female form to invest new and renewed meaning in what it means to be a Roman Catholic priest. In other words, as Father Anne, I am a continuation of the tradition, and at the same time, I am something new. |
Philadephia, 2015
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the call to new life
It can be difficult to grapple with aspects of Church life that are out of alignment with God. While the institutional Church is masterful in presenting itself as unchanging, the truth is that Catholic tradition has changed dramatically over its 2000-year existence. This is fact. These changes include total reversals in doctrine on issues like religious freedom, celibacy, the presence of truth in other religions, the sinfulness of slavery and anti-Semitism. By pretending tradition doesn't change, the institutional Church commits a disservice to the Body of Christ because it leaves us ill-prepared for the awakenings that naturally occur when authentically engaged with a teaching God. We are called to cultivate a disposition of humility, allowing God's Holy Spirit to ever-deepen our understanding of who God is, what God desires, and how God calls us into relationship with God and one another. In other words, we must as a Church live the paschal mystery, giving the Holy Spirit the freedom to teach--something that requires our willingness to die to the self to be brought to new life.
