Street roots
Aug. 17, 2012
FERVOR, from page 4
something other than they are. It’s not
going to work,” Raab says.
One nun who declined to have her name
used, said the work done on an individual
basis with people in need will continue, and
nothing is said or explicit that would give
the church reason to come down on them.
“Because we’re careful. By design, we’re
very, very careful,” she said. “What happens
in my counseling office, nobody’s ever going
to know, and I ain’t going to tell.”
But, she says, it’s work to keep it under
the radar. “That’s the piece that’s just
horrible to have to do. To mind, who am I
talking to? Who is this going to get back to?
There isn’t that freedom.”
ne area that firmly divides the views of
many women religious and the Vatican
is the ordination of women to the
priesthood. In 2010, the Vatican -
ostensibly to update a decree on the
handling of priests involved in sex abuse
scandals - added the attempted ordination
of women among the most serious crimes
against the church, alongside pedophilia and
heresy. It was already condemned by the
church, but punishable by automatic
excommunication by the women attempting
to be ordained and by the bishop
conducting the ceremony. No notice from
the Vatican is necessary.
Yet beyond Rome, the Catholic Church is
in motion on this issue. In May, hundreds of
priests meeting in Dublin, Ireland, called for
an end to compulsory celibacy for priests
and for the ordination of women. The
Church of England recently moved closer to
approving ordained women priests in
establishing options to accommodate
traditionalists who want to exempt
th e m se lv e s from w o m e n in th e pulpit.
And women priests are at work
throughout the Pacific Northwest. From the
first legal ordination in 2002 in Europe,
women priests have been ordained around
the world. The international movement,
Roman Catholic Womenpriests, counts 130
women priests worldwide, 96 in the United
States. Several have gone on to become
bishops, ordaining more women into the
priesthood.
Portland’s Suzanne Thiel is an ordained
priest and the president of the West Region
of Roman Catholic Womanpriests, an
international movement within the Catholic
Church. She says the people are the
church, and the male clergy are, for the
most part, out of touch.
“The Vatican hierarchy especially, but
also our U.S. bishops as well, must continue
to grow and change with the signs of the
times,” Thiel says. “That means there must
be room for dialogue and input from the
non-clergy and especially from the voice of
women on all matters of Church teachings.
Women will no longer tolerate taking a
second-class position in the Church’s
leadership.”
Pastor Rev. Toni Tortorilla of Portland
was ordained in 2007 and leads services for
the Sophia Christi Alternative Catholic
Community in Portland and Eugene. Like
other women around the world who have
been ordained, she has been automatically
excommunicated, but the term doesn’t have
the same impact today as it might have had
100 years ago. When she heard about the
bishops criticism of LCWR’s support for
women priests, she saw it as a deflection
from the sex abuse scandal within the
church hierarchy.
“I thought, oh, my God. Here we are in
the middle of the worst scandal in history,
the sexual abuse crisis, the bishops have
absolutely no moral authority anymore, and
now they’re going after the nuns? That is
the group that does have moral authority in
the church. There are lot of things said
about nuns over the years, but one thing
people know is that where social justice
issues meet the road in the Catholic
Church, the nuns are right there.”
Tortorilla, who has identified as a lesbian
O
from an early age, says social justice has a
very narrow identity within the church
hierarchy — one focused on sex — that is
abusive to the women and gay and lesbian
members of church. Tortorilla doesn’t look
at the consequences of this showdown
between the nuns and the bishops in
individual terms as much in the larger
impact on the women’s movement within
the church.
“Any advocacy for reproductive health for
women or gay and lesbian issues is
definitely in the crosshairs. Anything that
works for women’s rights, and any issue
that addresses women’s health, whether it’s
psychological or physical, is going to be in
the crosshairs,” she says. “It’s crazy.
Making contraception into a political
football that everybody has to deal with is, I
think, abusive.... Trying to insist that the
Catholic population get behind the bishops
on the contraceptive issue, when there are
women sitting in the pews who are using
contraception, and their husbands, their
families need to be using contraception and
they know it, that’s abuse. They’re not
dialoging with anyone. They’re not asking
what your story is. There’s no pastoral care
involved. It’s top down and it’s abuse. That’s
what I see.”
Tortorillo also used the example of
Archbishop Sartain’s letter to priests
instructing them to petition congregations
against Washington’s gay-marriage proposal.
“Then you abuse the gay and lesbian
population within your congregation as well
as within the whole state of Washington,
and you use the pulpit to do it,” she said.
According to other media reports, at
least seven priests have refused to circulate
the petition in their parishes.
A request for an interview with
Archbishop Sartain was not answered.
everal nuns were contacted for this
story, and most declined to speak on the
record, deferring instead to the statements
from the LCWR, which is still in discussions
with the bishops. One wrote that they had
been asked by LCWR not to comment
publicly on the situation. The LCWR has
also declined interviews, with the
significant exception of a July 17 interview
on NPR’s Fresh Air with the LCWR’s
president, Sister Pat Farrell.
In her keynote address to the conference,
Farrell said this: “This is not the first time
that a form of religious life has collided with
the institutional Church. Nor will it be the
la st.... The historical impact of this moment
is clear to all of us. It is reflected in the
care with which LCWR members have both
responded and not responded, in an effort
to speak with one voice. We have heard it in
more private conversations with concerned
priests and bishops. It is evident in the
immense groundswell of support from our
brother religious and from the laity. Clearly
they share our concern at the intolerance of
dissent even from those with informed
consciences, the continued curtailing of the
role of women.”
And while big picture politics are
definitely in play, most in Portland agree
that on the ground, the work of women
religious will continue on course.
“I don’t think they will in any way be able
to stop women religious work in the field.
Their commitment to the poor, to those
who are underprivileged those who are not
honored — that’s their commitment to social
justice,” Galluzzo said.
“We’re known for making lemonade out
of lemons,” said one nun, who didn’t want
her name used. “Just what the LCWR is
doing now, we’re going to be doing on an
individual level. Most of us have said it’s
nothing new. They’re just coming down a
little harder.”
P H O T O B Y K R t S T IN A W R I G I I T
S
Joanne Z u h l is the managing editor o f
Street Roots. You can write to her at
joanne@streetroots. org.
BY JOANNE ZUHL
STAFF W R IT E R
F | "V>ni Tortorilla remembers being
I five years old, standing in the back
X of her church, and feeling a
compelling magnetic force drawing her to
the altar and to priesthood.
“That’s the only way I can describe it
— pulling me to the altar, and in that
instance I knew that that’s what I was to
do. That’s my life. I knew that,” she says.
Now in her 60s, Tortorilla says that
that calling never left her - throughout
disappointments, depression, and the
turmoil of an evolving church.
Throughout her life, her education and
vocation was structured toward the
priesthood in a church that didn’t allow
it. Through the Second Vatican Council,
as the church opened itself up to changes
of the 1960s, women had newfound
freedoms within the church — except
ordination. But following the calling, she
says, was in a way, part of the calling.
With the turn of the century, however,
even that began to change. Seven women
in Germany were ordained on the
Danube River, and the future for
Tortorilla and others who felt a similar
calling would never be the same.
Tortorilla was ordained in 2007. Today
she leads services in the Sophia Christi
Alternative Catholic Community in
Portland and Eugene.
Still, the ordination of women is one of
the core disputes between the Vatican
and women religious, who have tacitly
approved of the practice. For Tortorilla,
who also identifies as a lesbian, it is an
age-old battle of the sexes still in play.
J.Z.: A t what point did it occur to you
that you actually could be a priest?
T.T.: That didn’t become a reality
until 2002.1 always pursued being a
priest in whatever way I could. I knew
that I wasn’t called to be a minister in
another denomination. Inside I never
stopped being called to priesthood. Many
times I was depressed. I would get my
hopes up and sort of pursue this line,
thinking this will take me closer to doing
what I’m called to do.
J.Z.: During this whole time, were you
thinking that the church was empirically
wrong, or was there an internal struggle
that the church is empirically right and you
just don’t get it.
T.T.: The hierarchical church was
telling me I couldn’t do what I was called
to do. I felt that God was telling me to be
a priest. The men were standing in the
way. In fact, in the 70s, many of us
believed that women were going to be
ordained soon.
T.T.: Exactly, and we felt like that was
going to happen in our church, too. It
was just the conflict between feeling that
call so strongly, and knowing that the
barriers were not coming down, and in
fact were becoming more and more firm.
J.Z.: Did you ever hear any argument
that you considered valid as to why a
women could not be a priest?
T.T.: Never. In fact, there was a
commission of biblical scholars that were
pulled together to study whether or not it
was biblically possible for women to
priests, and that commission came out
with their findings that there was
absolutely no reason in scripture to deny
ordination to women. None. And it was
See ORDINATION, page 11