A LONG WALK TO FREEDOM:

I was born and bred in South Africa. My grandparents had emigrated there, my father's parents from Germany and my mother's from Ireland and England. I grew up in the racially segregated society of South Africa, where people were forcibly separated by law. According to the Group Areas Act (1950) White, Black and Coloured people all had to live in their own areas: the best areas, in and around the cities were for the Whites, while Blacks were assigned to the poorest, most undeveloped rural areas and the Coloureds were somewhere in between.

Apartheid had become official policy following the 1948 electoral victory by the National Party. That party's ideological roots were in the historical experience of the Dutch-origin "Afrikaners." Especially important was their sense of divine election. They understood themselves as God's Chosen People. South Africa was their Promised Land. As an English-speaking White South African, I learnt to blame apartheid on the Boers, the Afrikaans-speaking White South Africans. With hindsight, I can see now how arrogant this was on our part: we English-speakers had all the advantages of apartheid, all the privileges of being White, but we did not feel that we were to blame for apartheid.

I went to a White school; lived in a White neighborhood; all my friends were white. Everything was separated: beaches, buses and ballgames (the Whites played rugby while the Black game was traditionally soccer/football.) I went to a White church: there were a few Black people who came but they always sat in the back row. Most Black people were poor, many were poverty-stricken; most White people, even those like us who were certainly not rich, were not in want. In fact, we White children had very little to do with Black people, except for the Black women who worked as cleaners or cooks or nannies in White people's homes, or the Black men who were gardeners or factory-workers or had other rather menial jobs. These Black people arrived every morning for work and went back in the evening, in the crammed buses that went from the White cities to the Black rural areas, to their crowded little houses or huts.

And when I was a child, I thought the whole world was like that. And in some way, I thought God had ordained it so, but sometimes I wondered why God had created some people White and others Black - and it was clear to me that the Whites had a much better deal in life than Black people. But I simply accepted the status quo as the way things were and got on with my life. (I had the same attitude to the place of women in society and church: it was just the way things were, and as a child I did not question this.)

However, things were changing in South Africa and an awareness of how wrong apartheid was, was growing. It was the Black people themselves who began to take matters into their own hands. We all know that this is usually the way in human society: it is not the oppressors, the ones with all the power and privilege, who come forward to put things right. It is the oppressed who become aware of their oppression and that they need to band together and stand up for their rights, often at great cost. They are the ones who overturn the systems of oppression and bring society one step closer to justice and the recognition of human dignity and human rights. We know about the overthrowing of oppression on the part of the oppressed from, for instance, the French Revolution and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. In South Africa the African National Congress was gaining strength. Nelson Mandela, Wlater Sisulu and Oliver Tambo were among the leaders. In the 1950's they wrote the Freedom Charter and the in 1960's the developed a Defiance Campaign.

Mandela was arrested and imprisoned in 1962.

His statement from the dock in the Rivonia Trial ends with these words:

I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

He remained in prison for 27 years, but even from prison he had an enormous influence. Many White people were also becoming aware of the evil of apartheid. The South African bishops sent out a letter, “Call to Conscience”, to the whole country in the early 1970's, condemning the evils of apartheid. It had little effect.

In Sept. 1985 a group of South African theologians from many Christian churches wrote the Kairos Document. This had a wide and unique influence both at home and abroad, because of its spontaneity, its hope, and its call to action. Its description of "state theology" is a concise critique of the religious pretensions of the white establishment. Its critique of "church theology" is a poignant protest against well-meaning but compromising anti-apartheid Christianity that could not clearly join the issue even in a day of prayer. The Dutch Reformed Church declared, at the end of the 1980's that “Apartheid is a sin”. This was a huge turnaround. In 1989 F.W. de Klerk became Prime Minister. Mandela was released from prison in1990 and in 1994, in the first ever free and general election, in which all South Africans of all races had the vote, Mandela became State President.

Ø South Africa became the “rainbow nation”. That this major breakthrough was accomplished without civil war, is little short of a miracle. We now have another president, Thabo Mbeki, but it is still the personality of Nelson Mandela that holds the nation together. We are not without problems: crime, AIDS and the divorce-rate are among the highest in the world. There is quite a lot of “reverse apartheid”: White people can hardly find a government job and much of the crime in the cities is against Whites. Many Whites are very much in denial about their racism. Many Blacks still carry bitterness and pain. Until this is in some way acknowledged and dealt with, we will continue to be a very violent society. That is the negative side of the picture. On the positive side, it is incredible how well people work and get along together, in business, at the universities and in the schools. The younger generation did not know apartheid and has a different perspective.

Mandela and those led the resistance struggle in South Africa lived by what we call “prophetic obedience”.

In prophetic obedience, one sees that things can be different and one obeys, not the unjust manmade laws that entrench oppression and injustice, but one follows one's inner truth towards justice and right.

Let us examine the words: prophetic and obedience.

Obedience:

In the older worldview, obedience was understood as doing what you were told by those in authority. But obedience is not doing what you are told by someone else, unless you are a child. Obedience for adults, as we know, comes from the Latin ob-audire, attentive listening:

Ø listening in the first place to myself, my own formed conscience, my values, my sense of what is right and wrong, listening to my heart;

Ø attentive listening to the signs of the times, to what is going on the world and the church, to new levels of awareness and new developments within humanity

Ø listening, individually and together, to the Spirit, whom we believe is always moving and awakening us to new levels of awareness. As Isaiah says so often, speaking in God's name: Listen to me, pay attention and your soul will live. (e.g. is. 55:3)

Prophetic:

Why is this obedience called prophetic? I think it is because the prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the New Testament and our contemporary prophets like Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day and Nelson Mandela, and yes, the leaders of the women's ordination movement, were and are women and men who ‘listened to a different drum’. They became aware of what was wrong within their own society and they felt impelled to take a stand, to speak out, to name what was wrong. And, as we know, those in power usually do not want to hear what the prophets say, because it means giving up their positions of privilege and power - or at least sharing privilege and power, and once are shared, the entire system changes from being dualistic to being one in which the equality, dignity and freedom of all are respected.

In summary:

Ø Prophetic obedience often involves taking a stand for justice in the face of injustice or discrimination. [1]

Ø In prophetic obedience, our understanding of authority and of obedience changes. The role of leadership is not to give orders but to call the community to be about what they have said they are about, challenging them to be who they are. Prophetic obedience leads us towards the recognition of equality: Schüssler-Fiorenza's “discipleship of equals”, rather than the older ‘family’ model (Father, Mother, superior-subject) still often found in the Church. In prophetic obedience, we are moving away from this older model towards co-authority, co-obedience and interdependence.

Ø We each live out of our personal center, our inner authority but at the same time within the framework of the vision the community holds in common.

Ø Prophetic obedience may at times require disobedience to an unjust law for the sake of God's reign (In Europe we are often called the ‘contra legem’ group, because our way is to break what we regard as an unjust law).

Learning prophetic obedience in South Africa

As I have explained, I learnt about prophetic obedience in SA, our great role

model being Nelson Mandela. There are many parallels between racism and

sexism. Both racism and sexism attempt to give all the power and privilege to

one group of people to the exclusion of the other group. Both racism and sexism

are horrendous systems of injustice. Once one becomes aware of the injustice

within these systems, one cannot go back. We learned, in the apartheid years in

South Africa, that sometimes the only possible way to change an unjust law is to

break it. But one person alone cannot achieve this. It takes the voice and the

protest of a group, a community, who stand together in the face of injustice. And

when the previously-excluded group moves into the structures set up by the group

that was in power, the structures change.

Today, in this post-apartheid time, what we have is a transformed South Africa, a rainbow nation, and there is no comparison with the divided apartheid society in which I grew up. It is not perfect; there are still many problems, but the transformation has truly begun and we live and work together in a way that most South Africans would never have believed possible. The system of apartheid, of racial discrimination, has gone from our law and very largely from South African society.

Now we in the Church are on another ‘long walk to freedom’, this time freedom from sexism, from unjust discrimination against women in the church, freedom from oppression by the privileged clerical caste in the church. Once again we need to stand together in protest, to break the unjust laws because we cannot wait forever, and we need, at least at the beginning, to move into the structures that exist and change them.

My own journey to priesthood

I never dreamed that my experience of the breaking-down of racism in South Africa would in part lead me to where I am today: an ordained Roman Catholic woman whose journey towards ordination has led me to stand up against unjust church laws.

My longing to be a priest began to make itself felt within me during my seven years of studying theology in Rome in the 1980's. Like so many other women, I always suppressed it, since it was unthinkable. But it kept coming back, often at the most unexpected moments.

Back in South Africa, I was invited to join the staff of our national seminary in Pretoria, where I taught systematic theology, homiletics and spirituality for seven years. During these years at the seminary, I experienced much gender discrimination but the desire to minister as a priest was growing stronger. Many people who knew me confirmed their sense of my call to priesthood, including seminarians, priests, friends and even a bishop. No one, however, thought that ordination for women was possible in the R.C. Church.

However, I then read about and also met some of the women who had been ordained on the Danube in 2002. They offered to ordain me. It was an offer I could not refuse. I felt so strongly that God was calling me to priesthood and offering me a way to be ordained.

I was ordained during the Women's Synod in Barcelona in a private ceremony in August 2003.

Because of my ordination, I had to leave the Dominican Order. This was a great sadness for me and my life has changed considerably since then. But, as so many ordained women have discovered: some doors close and others, often ones you never dreamed existed, open for you.

The ordinations continue: 2004 through 2006

After my ordination, I was asked to co-ordinate the Program of Preparation for Priesthood for women. I thought that coordinating our program would not be too much work. Seven women had been ordained in 2002. In 2003 there were only a handful of women in the program. But from 2004 onwards, the enquiries and applications started to roll in and since then, the numbers have snowballed. There are presently well over 100 women (and a few men) working their way through our program to prepare for priestly ministry. The total number of ordained women at present, from the first seven ordained on the Danube, including those ordained in “catacomb” ordinations, is 41.

WHY ORDAIN? OUR VISION AS R.C. WOMENPRIESTS:

Why not build up a different model of church and simply bless ministries? Since the dualistic system of clerics and laity in the church has become corrupted by the abuse of power, why ordain women to become part of that system?

The response to this question is in fact an outline of the vision of our group, the RC Womenpriests:

Because we are in a transitional time: we need to claim for women their equal right with men to be ordained. And we have no option but to do this ‘contra legem’ (against the law): to break an unjust law and yet to remain firmly within the church. This is what we did in South Africa to break down the unjust apartheid system: we had to break the unjust laws and yet we remained South African. Some South Africans were punished by being imprisoned. The church punished the first seven women ordained in 2002 by excommunicating them, but has not excommunicated any of us ordained since then.

Please note that excommunication does not put one outside the church: it is a punishment that forbids one to participate in the sacraments.

People have suggested that we should not ordain women, because by doing so we are buying into the clerical system and becoming part of the clerical caste. We should, they say, simply bless their ministries and thereby start a new system. We reply:

If, in this initial transitional stage we do not ordain women, but merely bless the ministries of everyone, we will do nothing towards claiming equal rights for women in the church. And I believe that no one would take us seriously as priests. We would be seen as just another sect. We need to take clear action for the equal right of women to be ordained, to break down the sexism that is so rampant in our church structures. One day in the future, perhaps in the next generation or two, there may well be a return to the practice of the very early church when there was no ordination of priests: people in the community took turns in leading the Eucharist, often depending on whose home they were meeting in.

1. I believe strongly that we need to break the unjust law which excludes women from ordination. We must not try to jump over this stage of claiming justice, but allow the process to evolve organically. Later there may well come a time when ordination can be done away with, and ministries, including the ministry of leadership, will nourish the life of the community without ordaining some ... but right now, it is vitally important to ordain women and thus claim for them their right as human beings and as Roman Catholics, to be ordained.

2. We believe we need to reform the church structures from within. By staying outside of official church structures, we will achieve nothing. We are already excluded and this would mean accepting our exclusion.

3. By ordaining women, we are re-imagining, re-structuring, re-shaping the priesthood and therefore the church: We believe that it is possible to live and build up a new model of priesthood: that in itself would help bring about a new model of church. Let me list some of the ways in which we strive to avoid the trap of dualism, clericalism and hierarchy. We do not want to perpetuate the present model of the “providing church” with its deplorable passive consumer attitude of its members:

Ø Among the womenpriests, priesthood is not part of a power structure. We try to see and live it as a ministry of servant-leadership, not as part of a system of domination or exclusion. We do not use the words “clerics” and “laity”. Everyone is included in decision-making. Ordination gives one a different function but not more power. When we in RCWP have a meeting, the bishops and priests do not have more say than anyone else. Leadership is important, but in a model of shared power: a “discipleship of equals”.

Ø We recognize the gifts and talents and responsibility of each person in a differentiation of ministries and live and work together as a community.

Ø We do not have obligatory celibacy; in fact we do not link celibacy and priesthood. Our ordained women and men may be married or single, hetero- or homosexual, some are grandmothers, a few are divorced and have had their marriages annulled: we are in fact a cross-section of the Christian community in our lifestyles.

Ø We do not promise obedience to the bishop(s). Among the men, obedience to the bishop is an essential part of the hierarchical structure within the church. Rather we try to live prophetic obedience: to find and walk together the ‘holy road’ along which we trust the Spirit is leading us. A symbol of this attitude is that, during an ordination, the candidates do not kneel or prostrate in front of the bishops but rather in front of the altar. The bishops and priests sit to the side if it is logistically possible.

Ø We are worker-priests: we are financially independent of the Church and we each earn our livelihood in some other way. Financial dependence of priests on their bishop or their Order is a very strong aspect of the power structure in the hierarchical church.

Ø We use no titles: we have no equivalent to ‘Father’ once we are ordained, we do not even refer to ourselves or one another as ‘Reverend’. We do not think we are more reverend than anyone else.

Vestments, chalices, stoles are simple, rather than elaborate or expensive. The

bishops do not wear the mitre, which would make them look taller and more

important than everyone else. A bishop’s staff is a symbol of being a shepherd

and symbolizes the bishop's pastoral role. But mitres, tiaras and elaborate

vestments were for kings and emperors and from the time of Constantine, popes

and prelates copied these symbols of temporal power, as power became more and