Women Called to the Priesthood, by Jean Cowden Moore, Ventura County Star, July 25, 2011

Women Called to the Priesthood

By Jean Cowden Moore
Ventura County Star
July 25, 2011

http://www.vcstar.com/news/2011/jul/25/women-called-to-the-priesthood/

JOSEPH A. GARCIA/THE STAR Cindy Yoshitomi is part of the Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement that is promoting an alternative to church requirements that priests be male and celibate. Yoshitomi, who feels herself drawn to the priesthood, has been a campus minister at Occidental College and UCLA.

Picture a Roman Catholic priest. He's male and celibate, right?

But a small group of women is trying to expand that definition of priesthood — a fundamental tenet of the Catholic Church — to include female and marriage.

They belong to an organization called Roman Catholic Womenpriests, an international group that ordains women as priests. And they include a local woman who feels herself drawn toward being a priest in the faith she loves.

"We're Roman Catholics, and it's our church," said Cindy Yoshitomi, 63, of Port Hueneme. "You can't get around that. We're starting this grass-roots movement. ... We're creating a space where these disillusioned Catholics can find community."

Roman Catholic Womenpriests, formed in 2002, has about 120 members worldwide. The organization started in Europe but has spread more rapidly in the United States, said spokeswoman Suzanne Avison Thiel, ordained by the group as a priest. Members include a mix of young and old, single and married, Thiel said. Some are or have been nuns.

"We're trying to take back what was rightfully ours," Thiel said. "Traditionally, the early church shows that women were involved as priests and deacons."

Roman Catholic Womenpriests believes its ordinations are valid, because a male bishop ordained its first female bishop, and the line of ordinations descends from there.

But the Catholic Church disagrees. First, priests are considered direct descendants of the apostles, who were men, so they also must be male, said Tod Tamberg, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Second, for an ordination to be valid, it must be approved by Rome, and Rome does not approve the ordination of women, Tamberg said.

"It's not that the church doesn't want to admit women to ordination, but it is unable to because of scripture and tradition," he said.

Sharon Reiser, 34, agrees, saying women play important roles in the Catholic Church, but those roles don't include the priesthood.

"Holy orders are a sacrament, and the sacraments aren't things we make up," said Reiser, who lives in Ventura. "They're given by God. ... We can't change that."

Yet in a survey conducted in 2005, 61 percent of respondents agreed "it would be a good thing if celibate women were allowed to be priests." Just over half supported married women becoming priests. The survey was conducted by Catholic scholars and published in the book "American Catholics Today."

Yoshitomi grew up with a Catholic father and Mormon mother. She lived in a Jewish neighborhood and attended Greek and Italian weddings.

"I grew up with a great appreciation for other cultures. ... I was just a real spiritual kid," she said.

As an adult, she has been a campus minister at Occidental College and at UCLA, where she worked with gay and lesbian students during the AIDS epidemic and then the sexual abuse scandal.

Eventually, however, she could no longer reconcile her work with the church's teachings on homosexuality.

"You became fork-tongued," she said. "Because of the duplicity, I just couldn't do it anymore."

While she decides if the priesthood is her calling, Yoshitomi is active in the Catholic Church of the Beatitudes in Santa Barbara, where a female priest presides at Saturday night services.

"We're here, not to take people away from the church but to offer services for people who can no longer find a place within the Catholic Church," said Jeannette Love, a priest at the church.

In September, Yoshitomi will take a major step toward being a priest — being ordained as a deacon. Like others, she has considered the Episcopal Church, which does ordain women priests. But she's Catholic, not Episcopalian.

"It's a culture that's being lost," Yoshitomi said. "I'm saying people should stand up and take our rightful place in changing the church."