A New "Catholic" Community
What happens when a religion that was started and given to us by a God who is love and infinitely selfless gets turned inward to focus on the selfish needs of the person practicing it? Abominations like what this article describes is what happens.
A New Catholic Community
October 2006"My name is Victoria Rue. And I am a Roman Catholic womanpriest."
So began Sunday Mass on April 2, 2006, at the Spartan Memorial Chapel at San Jose State University in California. Concelebrating with Victoria Rue was Don Cordero, a married former Jesuit priest. For those present, this was a momentous occasion: It was the inaugural Mass of a "New Catholic Community" that, says Rue, reverences people who "seek authenticity and inclusion in the worship ceremony, who have experienced divorce and remarriage, who are diverse in sexual orientation, who seek progressive exploration of ideas, who want imagination and daring, who are concerned deeply about God's creation and how to preserve it and who seek personal and spiritual integrity." According to the San Jose State campus newspaper, the Spartan Daily (April 4), this "first official gathering" drew "about 30 participants," of whom "most were elderly."
The high point of this Mass, during which God was referred to as "She," was the vibrant music, Rue told the Spartan Daily, and "when we each turned to face one another, looked one another in the eyes, and then hugged each other [and] said, ‘this is my body, this is my blood'…."
Momentous indeed. To those 30 or so souls present, this was the dawning of a new day: A real Roman Catholic Mass presided over by an actual female priest!
If the name Victoria Rue rings a bell to some readers it is because she was named by Theresa Marie Moreau in her January 2006 NOR article, "A Mockery of Catholicism," as one of nine women who were "ordained" on July 25, 2005, in a ceremony presided over by three women "bishops" aboard the Thousand Islander III tour boat in the St. Lawrence Seaway off the Canadian coast. Rue was described as a 58-year-old "feminist theologian, a writer/director/teacher of theater who teaches Comparative Religions and Women's Studies at San Jose State University."
Rue's "ordination" was part of an ongoing series of women's "ordinations" put on by the Roman Catholic Womenpriests organization. According to the group's website, "Dr. Rue's ministries include teaching, writing and directing theatre. She convenes two weekly Eucharists at San Jose State University (for students and the larger community). She lives with her beloved Kathryn, her partner of sixteen years." So there's more to Rue than we previously knew: In a piece about her just after her 2005 ordination, the Spartan Daily (Sept. 19, 2005) called her "openly lesbian," and related how she "entered a convent once in the late '60s to be a nun," but later dropped out.
Being a lesbian is no small part of what Rue intends to do and represent: "Our Roman Catholic Womanpriest Movement wants to show that priests can be married, can be celibate, can be with a committed partner, can be heterosexual, can be homosexual, that all of the sexualities that are given to us by God are blessed sexualities." All sexualities? Most certainly. "Sexuality," Rue claims, "is a gift from God, not just some sexualities, all sexualities." That would include pedophilia, man-boy sex, bestiality, rape, and who knows what else.
The subtitle of Theresa Moreau's NOR article was "Absolutely Null and Utterly Void." The Vatican has repeatedly affirmed that it has no authority to ordain women. John Paul II, in his 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, slammed the door (once again) on women's ordination and pre-empted further discussion on the matter.
Rue's "New Catholic Community" is but a feeble bastardization of the real thing -- a "mockery" as Theresa Moreau's article put it. But Rue will have none of that: "The Masses that Don Cordero and I preside at…and the Mass that I preside at [alone]…are Roman Catholic Masses that are in union with the Roman Catholic Church. I am a validly ordained Roman Catholic priest" (Spartan Daily, May 10, 2006).
Not so fast, said the Bishop of San Jose, Patrick McGrath, who is not generally known for vigorous defenses of Church teachings. Bishop McGrath released this statement in The Valley Catholic, the official newspaper of the Diocese of San Jose: "Victoria Rue is not a validly ordained priest of the Roman Catholic Church. Members of the Roman Catholic Church should not participate in celebrations of the sacraments that are conducted by Victoria Rue, as those celebrations are not in union with the local or universal church." Bam!
But is it enough?
Beyond issuing his terse statement, Bishop McGrath has no plans to reprimand or excommunicate or in any other way acknowledge Victoria Rue. And the silence, Rue admits, dismays her. "The bishop did not try to communicate with me before making his statement that was published in all parish bulletins of San Jose. I want the bishop to hear my story of how I have been called to be a priest and how I was ordained a priest." (He could do that by simply reading Theresa Moreau's Jan. 2006 NOR article.) Reacting to Rue's request for dialogue, diocesan director of media relations Roberta Ward told the Spartan Daily, "Quite frankly, it would be a short conversation because she is simply not a validly ordained priest."
But Rue refuses to go quietly into that dark night. Being ordained a Roman Catholic priest "felt like something I had been called to all my life," she told the Philadelphia Inquirer (April 12, 2006), and was something "I was now able to live out loud about." For someone determined to "live out loud," the silent treatment must be particularly frustrating. Nevertheless, recalcitrant she remains: "If anything, [Bishop McGrath's] statement has only helped to clarify why people are there [at her Masses]. And these Masses will continue" (Spartan Daily, May 10, 2006).
With "anywhere three to 30 people" attending Rue's "Masses" (San Jose Mercury News, May 28), Roberta Ward maintains that there is no point in drawing more attention to them. But the attention of the secular media -- both local and national -- has already been drawn, as well as that of the San Jose State campus community. And as diminutive as Rue's "New Catholic Community" is, it is not a singular aberration. We question the wisdom of employing an ignore-it-and-hope-it-goes-away tactic. Souls are at stake here, that of Rue and those snared in her web.
Note to Bishop McGrath: Admonishing the sinner is one of the seven Spiritual Works of Mercy. But silence in the face of sin -- public and repeated sin -- where is the mercy in that?
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Technorati tags: Catholic Teaching, Women Priests
Source: New Oxford Review
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