Called to the altar

By Stephen McKinley

A billboard campaign calling for the ordination of women in the Roman Catholic Church will be launched in Ireland in the next few weeks.

The campaign, mounted by Irish members of Women’s Ordination Worldwide, was inspired by a similar campaign organized by the Chicago chapter of WOW last year.

The billboards will be placed in five Irish cities — Dublin, Cork, Belfast, Galway and Limerick, — and will be timed to coincide with the first-ever international conference on the issue, to be held in Dublin from June 29 through July 2. WOW says the Irish campaign is costing $10,000. The message on the billboards will read, "Women priests: the time is now!" and the background will show a recently commissioned reinterpretation of the Last Supper, which will show many men, women and children surrounding Christ, and not just 12 disciples.

Despite official Roman Catholic Church opposition, the issue of ordination of women has gained strength in recent years as groups like WOW have used more aggressive tactics to make it a matter of public debate — the billboard in Dublin, for example, will be opposite the main entrance of the residence of Cardinal Desmond Connell.

Spearheading the Irish campaign as well as organizing the conference is a husband-and-wife team, Dubliner Colm Holmes and Soline Vatinel, who is from France. Both say that they have been called by God to the priesthood.

"I think first and foremost, if we believe it’s a vocation, if God calls women, who are we to say that He is wrong?" Vatinel said. "If God calls us, it must be good for the church. These calls must be discerned."

Having first felt moved to become a priest when she was 18, Vatinel tried to suppress the feelings, and did not address the issue until she was 34. By then, she was living in Ireland.

"It just happened, coincidence or ‘God-incident,’ that somebody was going to Ireland taking some students," she said. "I arrived for the first time in Ireland, in Tullow, Co. Carlow, in the summer of ’69, the year of the ‘Troubles.’ I think it was a broken girl who fell in love with a very broken country."

By the ’90s, Vatinel had acknowledged her calling, and as a founding member of the Irish chapter of WOW, Brothers and Sisters in Christ, she has been campaigning for women’s ordination, and the ordination of married priests male or female, ever since. But it took some American-style campaign techniques and an Irish American named Deirdre Daly O’Neal to give the Irish campaign a shot in the arm.

"WOW has been around since 1975," said O’Neal, "but it was often just a debate about ordination that was taking place among learned theologians. That did not move the ball down the field.

"Those of us who are more activist-oriented seem to be located around Chicago and Milwaukee, and in recent years we’ve been seeking ways to escalate the message to the public."

Oddly, it was the Chicago Roman Catholic diocese that inadvertently took the first step. Recruits to the priesthood have been declining worldwide, and the diocese decided to launch a poster campaign — billboards appeared that read, "If you’re looking for a sign from God, this is it."

Responding, WOW members responded with almost identical billboards that read, "If you’re looking for a sign from God, this is it. Ordain women." Recognizing the attention the billboards received, Irish members of WOW decided they would try a similar campaign to coincide with the international conference.

For the Irish campaign, the Last Supper is portrayed with a difference. Instead of the traditional image of Jesus and 12 disciples, men, women and children appear surrounding Him at a table. Vatinel, who says she has presided at the Eucharist already, says the image reflects the reality of Passover, that it was a family and friends event. This, she said, was a reflection of WOW’s campaign to bring laity and clergy closer together in a "declericized priesthood of all believers."

Said Vatinel: "There is too deep a division between clergy and laity. The ground has moved, and will continue to move. If you look at the history of the church, that is how change has always happened."

Change unlikely

But changing the church on the issue of women and ordination is highly unlikely any time soon, says Paul Baumann, executive editor of Commonweal magazine in New York, a publication that covers intellectual issues concerning Catholicism.

"I myself have mixed feelings about it, though I certainly see the justice of their cause," he said. "Women are not fairly represented in the church, but it would be a profound change, and I understand why the church hesitates."

Baumann said that the reasons for an all-male priesthood were much more complex than many people understood. The church, he explained, has developed a sophisticated symbolism of itself as female and Christ’s mediators, the priests, as male.

"The priest is an icon of Christ and must be male," he said. "If you ordain women, you are implicitly suggesting that Christ’s maleness is secondary, and that in turn is linked to the very idea of incarnation."

In Dublin, Soline Vatinel approached the church and was told by priests that only a man could die on the cross. She says that the church’s refusal causes her great pain.

"Every year when there was a call in church on Vocations Sunday appealing for priests it was like a wound being reopened," she said. "We have a Church appealing for priests, but not of the wrong kind, the female kind."

Regardless of how the Church hierarchy will react to the Irish billboard campaign, WOW appears set to make its campaign a long one. In Chicago, Deirdre Daly O’Neal summed up the members’ attitude thusly: "There’s only one place to go after this, and that’s Rome."