San Ramon woman to be ordained angering Catholic church

Jeremy Thomas
Contra Costa Times
May 2, 2013

A Catholic from birth, Maureen Mancuso has always felt compelled to minister for the Roman Catholic Church. Now, she's facing excommunication for what she will do Saturday: become the first woman of her faith ordained a priest in Northern California.

"We feel the call by God, and God for us is a higher authority," she said. "I think the church has to recognize that it does have the power to ordain women, and that women can be woven into the tradition." Mancuso, 59, of San Ramon, is a member of the Roman Catholic Womenpriests, an international group that says it has ordained about 150 women as priests, bishops and deacons worldwide -- including two priests who work in Los Gatos and San Francisco. The Catholic Church says the practice goes against the church's official canon, and women who seek the ordinations automatically are expelled from the church.

Mancuso, who was born in San Francisco and is now a teacher, attended seminary and earned a master's degree in divinity in 1996 from the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. She had hoped that by the time she was ready, the church would allow women in the priesthood. Instead, the Vatican hardened against the idea. Mancuso joined the Womenpriests group, which began in 2002 when an anonymous Catholic bishop ordained seven women on the Danube River in Germany.

Suzanne Thiel, the Womenpriests group's western representative and board president, says the group has 116 U.S. members and 152 worldwide. A majority are priests, along with a few bishops, deacons and candidates. The organization is diverse -- members are single, married, gay and straight women; some are even men -- with an average age of about 57.

Unlike breakaway sects that ordain women, such as the American Catholic Church in the United States, the Womenpriests group insists it is Roman Catholic and that its ordinations are legitimate because they were passed down from a Catholic bishop.

"We maintain they're valid," Thiel said. "We're not playing house here. ... We're women who want to make a change, and to do that, we have to stay within the church."

Zach Flanagin, an associate professor of theology and religious studies at Saint Mary's College in Moraga, said the group is the latest chapter of what began with women's rights movements in the 1960s and '70s, as Catholic women began petitioning the Vatican for the allowance of female priests.

Full article at Contra Costa Times