-Last weekend, we joined with thousands of others to once again protest the School of the Assassins at Ft. Benning, Columbus, GA. The weekend of moving testimony, music, puppetry & activism ended with a powerful mass die-in on the street outside the US Army base. And the next day--with decidedly cowardly timing--the Vatican announced that it had dismissed from the priesthood the founder of the SOAW movement, Father Roy Bourgeois, for his support of gender equality in the Catholic Church.
In our Dec 2008 enewsletter, we wrote:
The Friday of this year's vigil was also the day that SOAW founder, Fr. Roy Bourgeois, was to be excommunicated from the Catholic Church. Not for standing up to the military or to the US government, for that matter, but for participating in a Mass to ordain a woman priest.
Fr. Roy delivered the homily at that ceremony in August, saying:
"Sexism is a sin. . . The hierarchy will say, 'It is the tradition of the church not to ordain women.' I grew up in a small town in Louisiana and often heard, 'It is the tradition of the South to have segregated schools.' It was also 'the tradition' in our Catholic church to have the Black members seated in the last five pews of the church. No matter how hard we may try to justify discrimination, in the end, it is always wrong and immoral."
In October, the church hierarchy sent Fr. Roy a letter demanding he recant his position or be excommunicated. But, Fr. Roy didn't back down. He wrote a letter in response and he and others have pointed out the disturbing fact that, while it took the Vatican twelve years to begin to respond to the sexual abuse of nearly 5,000 children by US priests (with none of the priests, nor the bishops who remained silent about the abuse, being excommunicated) it took only three months for the Vatican to respond to Fr. Roy's support of women's ordination with the threat of excommunication.
Fr. Roy's letter has now been turned into a book. Read it online then show your solidarity and sign the pledge "I Stand With Father Roy."
-And, we continue to have cautious optimism that the uneasy cease-fire between Israel & Hamas will hold. And we were heartened to hear Secretary of State Clinton's words: "There is no substitute for a just and lasting peace. Now that there is a cease-fire, I am looking forward to working with the foreign minister and others to move this process." Perhaps the first time we've heard "just peace" used by a US official.
