Dr. Patricia Fresen explains RC WomenPriest movement

Bishop Patricia Fresen told CTAers that since her recent ordination, she has been told to recant, repent, and renounce, but since she believes that God is calling both women and men to the priesthood, she will not comply.

International training coordinator for the Roman Catholic WomenPriests movement, Fresen sees new values emerging in humankind. Partnership will reap more rewards than domination. Twenty centuries of Church history form only a small part of the earth’s history, and our view of humanity is changing as we gain new understanding of the universe through our studies of quantum physics. Everything is interdependent. So the new RCWP community is trying to live communally, not hierarchically.
“The irrepressible Spirit is raising up many with a different vision,” she said.

Fresen said Jesus was a revolutionary in his treatment of women, since he included them equally in his ministry in a society where their treatment under the law was repressive and non-inclusive. She cited examples through history in which these repressive tendencies have hardened: apartheid in her native South Africa, the two Germanys and the Berlin Wall, and the Church’s exclusion of women from ordained ministry.

In RCWP’s model of decision-making and priesthood, gay men and married men are included as well as women. No one is excluded if they truly want to serve. “We are tired of discrimination,” Fresen said. The anger of many excluded women who felt called to ministry has turned to longing. Their aim is eventually to change canon law, because although they see themselves as validly ordained, their ordinations are not now recognized by Rome as “licit.” Although the Danube Seven, the original female ordinands, have been excommunicated, the latest ordained have not. If they are, they will follow their individual consciences and probably ignore it.