|
Father 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 ordination 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.
|
The priest is one of the most powerful symbols in the Roman Catholic tradition. As 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 Father Anne's ministry is to claim the traditional priest symbol and expand it with the female form. She embraces the givenness of the Catholic tradition with its signifiers of a Catholic priest–-the Roman collar, the discipline of celibacy, the Roman Missal, the title Father. By embracing the tradition as it stands at this moment in history, she signals to the Roman Catholic Church that she is part of its community. At the same time, she puts 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 her female form to invest new and renewed meaning in what it means to be a Roman Catholic priest. She is both the continuation of the tradition while also being something new. |
2015 Philadelphia
|
