ShareThisSACRAMENTO, Calif. - To parishioners in her small Sacramento congregation, Elizabeth English is their Catholic priest: She presides over their Sunday Mass, leads them during Communion and baptizes their babies.
To the Roman Catholic Church, English symbolizes a topic that church leaders consider closed: the ordination of women priests.
English left the Roman Catholic Church five years ago to pursue her calling to the priesthood. She is now a priest in the Independent Catholic Church, a group not recognized by the Vatican. She is the only female Catholic priest in the Sacramento region.
"I had to leave the church; there was no place for me," she said. "I wish there was."
Last week, English joined a Nobel Peace Prize nominee who is also a priest and about 150 others at St. Mark's Methodist Church in Sacramento to discuss the ordination of women priests.
They called on the church to consider women clergy, saying they are necessary for a vibrant and healthy church that needs the "experience, courage and compassion" of women in the priesthood.
"We all say our call to the priesthood comes from God," said the Rev. Ray Bourgeois, a priest with the Maryknoll religious order and social justice advocate. "Who are we as men to say to women: 'Our call is valid, but yours is not'?"
The Vatican has banned women from the priesthood because Christ chose only men as his apostles. Only a baptized male can become a priest, according to church law.
Since 2002, 70 women have been ordained priests in the Roman Catholic Church by sympathetic bishops in secret ceremonies, according to Bridget Mary Meehan of Roman Catholic Women Priests and one of the first female U.S. bishops.
"And we have more coming in," she said. This month, a woman will be ordained a Roman Catholic priest in a ceremony in Los Gatos.
In 2008, the Vatican issued a decree stating that any woman who became ordained as a priest -- and priests and bishops who performed these ceremonies -- would be excommunicated.
Bourgeois, a 2010 Nobel Peace Prize nominee, faces excommunication for attending a woman's priestly ordination. In his speech, Bourgeois said "the sin of sexism" is at the core of the issue. He said many women are already doing the jobs of priests -- from offering Communion to anointing the sick.
He said the reasons given for banning women clergy -- mostly tradition -- "do not stand up to scrutiny." He called on his fellow priests to speak up on women's ordination.
"Oh yes, I think women should be ordained -- why not?" said Mercedes Braga, a nun with the Sisters of the Holy Family religious order. She said she never felt called to the priesthood. "But I know some women who would have made wonderful priests."
Not everyone is so sure. "A lot of what I heard made sense," said Gloria Maldonado, 72. "But I don't know. This would be a big change. I'm not sure I'll see it in my lifetime."
(E-mail reporter Jennifer Garza at jgarza(at)sacbee.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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