A delicate dance

The conference taught me the steps of a delicate dance. It is the dance of our many and varied sensitivies regarding the ordination of women in Christendom and in other faith traditions, especially in the current situation of impasse in the Roman Catholic Church.

All the women present at WOW 2005 in Ottawa expressed their deep concern, pastoring one another. The giftedness of 500 deeply spiritual women coming together in mutual respect, despite differences about women's ordination, released the action of Jesus-Sophia, our tender and compassionate Mother and Father holding us in a common bond of recognition.

What more could we have asked of this particular conference?

A CNS report missed the central issues which was raised by the keynote speakers Fiorenza and Ruether. The title, "Supporters of women priests call church hierarchy morally bankrupt," missed the compelling points made by both speakers about sacred domination. People have difficulty understanding this metaphor in the context of the sacred realm. But when I take the word 'domination' and ask them to consider it in terms of their life experience in private and public lives, and then ask them to move their understanding into the realm of church practice, they understand it.

But that is not enough. We must name these practices explicitly and consider how we will not replicate them. We must envision alternate models of ministry and structural practices. Such work asks for clear discernment with each other in community. It asks us to consider in what ways we each personally embody such practices because it is unlikely that we have not been socialized into them on some level.

A few days before I left for Ottawa, I experienced an episode of 'sacred domination' A priest from a different Catholic tradition invited himself to my home, and I agreed he could come. He arrived at my door in a full-length black cassock. He wore a silver cross on a long chain, and a Roman collar. He carried a small square leather case.

We went outside to the patio where he seated himself across from me. He faced me with hands folded in his lap and insisted I address him as 'Father.' He tried to dissuade me from becoming a Roman Catholic woman-priest. I was an offence to everything in his religious tradition, he claimed. Only the male can be a priest, because only a male can be the symbol for transmitting the sacred presence. His wife is a priest, he claimed, but in her mother hood. It was not good enough to stop me from embracing my priesthood within what my life and study had taught me, bringing me to at this historical moment. I thanked him.

From this visit and from the WOW conference, I take a commitment to work in every way I can to address how we can change these practices stemming from patriarchally privileged belief systems. We can teach each other as we go.

My belief is that we must discover, name and stop doing all these dishonouring practices if we are to create an inclusive model of priesthood with the People of God.

Michele Birch Conery writes from Parksville, B.C. She was one of the nine ordinands. Her picture is featured on our cover.

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