Today I went to see a documentary “Pink Smoke Over the Vatican.”  This is a documentary about the struggle of ordinary yet extraordinary Catholics to bring about change in the Church against all odds.  It is about women’s ordination in the Roman Catholic Church.  This is a big ticket item of contention for many who have left the Church.   I have not left the Church.  As I have mentioned before on these pages, my Baptism is part of who I am, it cannot be taken away from me from a mere mortal man in Rome.

I wept a few times during this documentary, not necessarily tears, but inside I wept.  I wept to listen to gentle, peaceful women who were called but were told “no.”  I wept as I listened to a diocesan representative in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania speak the party line in a robot like manner.   I wept when I watched “illegitimate” ordinations take place, as hands were placed on the heads of women, as those women talked of their calling since they were children, and then who were ostracized from their jobs and communities as a result of their ordinations.  I wept for their courage and their pain and ultimately their joy.  I wept as I watched them do what I have watched men priests do my entire life: facilitate the transubstantiation of mere bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ.  I have wept because for reasons that have only to do with power, women of great spiritual calling have been excluded from the priesthood by foolish men of power. This film did not simply document or delve into vocational callings and spiritual drive.  It touched upon archaeology that has revealed that women were priests and bishops in the early Church.  The facts are clear, only the struggle remains.

What does the Three Rivers have to do with this?  My breath was taken away when I learned that the first women in the United States who were ordained, we ordained on a boat at the confluence of the Three Rivers in my beloved Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  Where the Allegheny and the Monongahela meet to form the Ohio, the Holy Spirit descended upon our Church.  This is significant to me only because I feel so drawn to that place, and now I understand why.  The second time I visited Pittsburgh, I had a dream that I was standing on a bluff, directly overlooking the confluence of the rivers, one river flowing on my right, the other river flowing on my left, and the Ohio straight ahead of me. The visual of that dream has stayed with me for ten years, and the meaning has always escaped me.  The last time I was in Pittsburgh, I physically overlooked the confluence from a different bluff and I felt as if I could sit there forever looking at that spot.  Now I know why.  It is a place that is filled with spiritual power.  I am not called to be a priest, just in case you think that’s where I’m going, but I believe that there are places on this Earth that hold sacred energy, and that place must surely be one of those, and perhaps I need to listen more closely to what it is trying to tell me.  

Another thing that struck me deeply watching this movie – and by the way, the theater was filled with women all of whom were over the age of 50 and most of whom were easily over the age of 65 – was that over and over again the women who had been ordained or were fighting the good fight said the same thing I have been saying for at least 30 years and what I have said previously in this blog:  I am Catholic.  I can no more say that I am not Catholic than I can say I am not a woman.  It is my birthright by my Baptism.  There is no fear in their voice, to wavering of conviction that they have been called and will answer.  Only truth can instill that kind of courage in a person.

The fact that I find myself so drawn to the confluence of the Three Rivers and the town that grew up around it, now has meaning to me: that my conviction that I will remain Catholic until the day I die is based on the fact that I must stay, that I need to stand next to these women (and men) who face excommunication for doing the right and moral thing:  opening the eyes of the blinded Church so that those eyes can reflect the wholeness of God that exists in all human beings, and that the calling to the priesthood belongs to us all:  

Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.  Colossian 3:11