Persisting with Justice

Theologian Mary E. Hunt reflects on fifty years of creative organizing for change in her lecture, ‘Catholic Women’s Ordination — The Long View’  given at the recent 50^th Anniversary Conference of the Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC) in Detroit, USA.

As a cradle Irish Catholic, brought up in the 1950’s in Syracuse, New York, ordination was not among my career choices. In the mid-1960s, a priest who taught religion at Bishop Ludden High School confidently assured the girls in my class that only men could be ordained. We girls discussed this after class. In our 15-year-old wisdom, we concluded he was wrong.

I went on to study Theology and Philosophy at Marquette University in 1969, and then to Harvard Divinity School in 1972 where I was part of the first sizeable cohort of women students. Most of them were brilliant and creative Protestants preparing for ordination and jobs with paychecks and pensions. That was new to me. The other Catholic and I were preparing for academic careers, blissfully ignorant of the ministry. Rosemary Radford Ruether taught at Harvard then. Mary Daly was nearby at Boston College writing Beyond God The Father. So, I picked up the basics of feminism from those friends and mentors by osmosis by the age of 23.

I went on to theological doctoral studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, in the fall of 1974. I lived initially at the Episcopal seminary (Church Divinity School of the Pacific). I mistakenly thought it would be a hotbed of feminism because the first eleven U.S. Episcopalian women had just been ordained, validly if illicitly, on July 29, 1974. Imagine my chagrin when some of the women in my dorm preferred not to the discuss that watershed event for fear of endangering their own chances for ordination.

In the fall of 1975, word spread in Berkeley about a Women’s Ordination Conference in Detroit. A local Catholic woman, Judy Whitehead, said although she could not go, she wanted to give a scholarship to someone from Berkeley. I was chosen and jumped at the chance. I praise her name today. I attended the conference like a sponge, soaking up the people and ideas, passions and pains. Who could forget the session when those who felt called to ordination were invited to stand? We young ones sat on the floor to give chairs to our elders in the crowded room. I remember kneeling since I wanted to see who stood. It was exhilarating to know that there were women bold and insightful enough to make their callings public.

In retrospect, I think we all should have stood, not because we all wanted to be ordained to a clerical, celibate, hierarchical priesthood. Rather, we all should have stood because what was at stake then, as now, is a much larger struggle to guarantee every person the right to choose and fulfill their vocations to the best of their ability for the sake of the world.

The non-ordination of women, as the great feminist biblical scholar and WOC collaborator Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza named it, is a symbol and an example of the many ways women and non-binary people, immigrants, people of color, and those with disabilities are systematically marginalized. In the 14^th century, Catherine of Siena declared: “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.” Anything that stands in the way of doing what one feels called to do diminishes the whole world. We won’t stand for it.

Since 1983, when Diann Neu and I started WATER (Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual), we have collaborated consistently with WOC through the Women-Church Convergence. One memorable protest, “Women’s Rights are Human Rights” was at the Vatican Embassy in Washington on August 26, 1987.  A dozen of us were arrested. WOC Founding Director Ruth McDonough Fitzpatrick proclaimed: “We will not accept men telling women they can’t be priests because that’s the way God wants it; She does not!”

In the 1990’s, WOC lobbied the bishops at their annual meetings in Washington. We loitered in hotel lobbies, greeting bishops, and urging them along. We visited the vestment suites in the hotel where bishops would shop for finery in their free time. Some Dutch companies brought especially beautiful robes and mitres. It was shocking for the Dutch salesmen to see women trying on their wares. No one lasts long in this movement without a robust sense of humor.

The installation of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Elisabeth Mullally, underscored our apparent lack of success compared with the achievements of our Anglican siblings. But we have accomplished more than our mission.

What we have accomplished despite the non-ordination of women?

1. Our faithful, sustained, varied, creative, and generous work has changed the face of institutional Roman Catholicism.

The refusal of patriarchal officials to make needed changes in structure and polity, combined with the worldwide clergy sexual abuse scandal, has left the institution weakened to the point of irrelevance. It is tarnished as a source of moral wisdom at a time of global peril. Pope Leo’s anti-war/anti-nuke rhetoric notwithstanding, imagine how much more powerful Catholic non-violence claims would be if they came from a credible institution.

Saint Sr. Theresa Kane, of blessed memory, in her historical welcome to Pope John Paul II on October 7, 1979 at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC, laid out women’s willingness to serve “in and through the Church as fully participating members.” The failure of decision-making men to embrace this generosity astonishes and scandalizes to this day.

The Spirit moves on. More than a billion Catholics are church in no uncertain terms and without apology. We now have women and non-binary priests and ministers, who, with the rest of us, are busy meeting the needs of the world not fretting about the failures of the church. The day will come when those in high office regret the error of their ways. They will come to our grandchildren to ask forgiveness which we would grant them today if they ask us and change their ways. Meanwhile, our energies are trained on stopping war, ending racism, ableism, sexism, and poverty, safeguarding the planet, and ministering to those in need. We are busy.

2. Ordination as we knew it in 1975 is a different sacrament today

Think of your own call to ministry, perhaps your ordination, and the many ways you minister to the needs of the world. Contrast your training with that of young male seminarians who are still educated like hot house flowers, far from the company of women and non-binary people, and limited to a narrow curriculum. My studies in interreligious and non-religious settings, my Clinical Pastoral Education in a women’s prison, and my several years of living and teaching in Argentina during a dictatorship were preparation for meeting the needs of the world as a scholar and as an activist.

Catholic lesbian, bisexual, queer women have a more difficult path than our cis gay male brothers who are in the vast majority in their circles. Women who live beyond the heterosexual norm were the first intersectional challenge to the women’s ordination movement. To our movement’s collective credit, we were met for the most part with hospitality and respect despite what I know is still some trepidation about the movement being seen as queer. More intersectionality is incumbent upon us, especially with people of color and young people who must be accorded the same welcome.

Women, especially queer women, have been the canaries in the coalmine on ordination. We experienced early the need to move beyond the institutional church. In a May 2026 discussion hosted by the Women of Dignity and WATER entitled “Catholic Lesbians and Queer Women Look at Women’s Ordination— Roles, Contributions, and Expansive Options,” two lesbian women described their ordinations.

One, a former WOC staff, spoke about accompanying her beloved father at his deathbed in 1983. A male priest was invited to offer the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. The priest said, “Hello, my name is Ed and I am a priest.”  Her father, near death, replied, “Nice to meet you and so is my daughter.” With good reason, she considered that her ordination. Her powerful artistic and social change work is proof that when you are doing your God-given work, you set the world on fire. Thank you, Marsie Silvestro.

Another lesbian woman priest spoke of her three ordinations. Her first ordination involved religious disobedience. In 1988, she was asked to preside at a Mass with New York Dignity in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral during the HIV/AIDS pandemic. She was also arrested for civil disobedience in New York City protesting the infamous 1986 “Halloween Letter” in which Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger defined homosexual orientation an “objective disorder” and an inclination toward “intrinsic moral evil.” That is still official church teaching, our abundant healthy love notwithstanding.

Her second ordination was as part of a “priesthood of all believers” who founded “A Critical Mass: Women Celebrating the Eucharist.” That group fed homeless people in the park near the earthquake-damaged Oakland Cathedral in California, and then celebrated Eucharist with all.

Her third ordination was in 2005 by Roman Catholic Women Priests bishops and the community assembled on a boat on the St. Lawrence Seaway. She called it a symbolic reinforcing of her already priestly work. She ‘priests’ with style. Thank you, Victoria Rue.

So it goes that women rejected by patriarchy create and find new ways to meet the needs of the world.

3. Thanks to the women’s suffrage movement for inspiration as we persist

The play Suffs reminded me of parallels between the struggle for the right for some women to vote, and our ordination struggle. In 1920, white women, and far too much later Indigenous, Asian, Black, and Brown women gained suffrage. Recent Supreme Court actions threaten to reinscribe Jim/Jane Crow era dynamics, but the constitutional right to vote is clear.

White women made mistakes: they left women of color on the margins of the movement; they fought one another over the right way to proceed; but it took all of their efforts to get it done. Once they won the vote for white women, many turned their attention to the Equal Rights Amendment and to civil, especially voting, rights for people of color. Racism remains strong nonetheless.

We, too, have made many mistakes. U.S. white women have learned that our experiences, our faith, our families are not normative especially in an increasingly diverse global church growing fastest in Africa and Latin America.

A second lesson from the Suffrage movement is that our work is not a quick fix for a single problem. It is the work of our lives, generations from cradle to grave, for which the bonds between/among us are as important as the outcome, and the outcome is far more than women priests.

The suffrage campaign lasted 72 years, from the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 to the Ratification of the 19^th Amendment in 1920. Many who envisioned the goal, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were long dead and the young people of the movement aged into graceful old women. Sound familiar?

Those of us here this weekend who attended the 1975 conference as young people are not dinosaurs but relics. Some of our siblings here today will, by the grace of God, celebrate WOC’s centennial whether women are ordained by then or not. Why? WOC’s mission is “to advocate and pray for women’s ordination as deacons, priests, and bishops into an inclusive and accountable Roman Catholic Church.” That is a worthy project which may not be finished even in another fifty years. But it is what the Divine invites in us, with us, and because of us in service of a safer, fairer, greener world that matters.

Suffrage leader Alice Paul dedicated herself body and soul to the movement in a laser-focused way although she was a bit of a pain in the neck. Other women got sick and died trying. We have lost many along our way, some to old age, some to broken hearts as their dedication was rewarded by stones not bread. All of us challenge and fortify one another.

Like our suffrage sisters, sometimes we are driven wild by the demands of purists or by the compromises of those who practice expediency. We know those people; we can be those people! But the bottom line is that the vote was not won by one strategy, nor will ordination be won by one path. There is no one, right way to justice. There are many, varied, sometimes seemingly contradictory strategies. Viewed from the far side of the moon, as we now can, the differences fade and the struggle is really one. The bonds between/among us are what endure in epic struggles like suffrage and ordination. These struggles require commitments of a lifetime and generations of people to bring about not a single goal but a transformed Earth.

Mary E. Hunt is an American feminist theologian who is co-founder and co-director of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER) in Silver Spring, Maryland, US. A Catholic active in the women-church movement, she lectures and writes on theology and ethics with particular attention to social justice concerns.