Womanpriest

This book is openly available in digital formats thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. While some Catholics and even non-Catholics today are asking if priests are necessary, especially given the ongoing sex-abuse scandal, The Roman Catholic Womanpriests (RCWP) looks to reframe and reform Roman Catholic priesthood, starting with ordained women. Womanpriest is the first academic study of the RCWP movement. As an ethnography, Womanpriest analyzes the womenpriests’ actions and lived theologies in order to explore ongoing tensions in Roman Catholicism around gender and sexuality, priestly authority, and religious change. In order to understand how womenpriests navigate tradition and transgression, this study situates RCWP within post–Vatican II Catholicism, apostolic succession, sacraments, ministerial action, and questions of embodiment. Womanpriest reveals RCWP to be a discrete religious movement in a distinct religious moment, with a small group of tenacious women defying the Catholic patriarchy, taking on the priestly role, and demanding reconsideration of Roman Catholic tradition. Doing so, the women inhabit and re-create the central tensions in Catholicism today.

Macrina McGrath, a young 23-year-old Catholic ex-Marine and unwed mother, begins to see cracks in the Church she grew up loving. Bad priests preying on children, harsh treatment of the divorced and LGBTQ, a deep-seated and toxic sexism, and archaic dogmas force her to choose between leaving the Church or trying to make it better. Pursuing graduate school in theology at Georgetown and a trip to India help form her resolve: She will stop at nothing to take the Church out of the Middle Ages and deliver women from their abject status. Macrina McGrath joins and soon after heads the excommunicated Womanpriest movement and, with the help of the Archbishop of Boston, begins an ascent she never imagined. But her love for Ezra, a Jewish physicist and colleague at Amherst where they teach, is getting in the way.

"My God! Pardon me if I have dared to make sacred things serve a profane love; but it is you who have put passion into our hearts; they are not crimes—I feel this in the purity of my intentions." —Agatha, writing to Zoé In pre-revolutionary Paris, a young woman falls for a handsome young priest. To be near him, she dresses as a man, enters his seminary, and is invited to become a fully ordained Catholic priest—a career forbidden to women then as now. Sylvain Maréchal's epistolary novella offers a biting rebuke to religious institutions and a hypocritical society; its views on love, marriage, class, and virtue remain relevant today. The book ends in La Nouvelle France, which became part of British-run Canada during Maréchal's lifetime. With thorough notes and introduction by Sheila Delany, this first translation of Maréchal's novella, La femme abbé, brings a little-known but revelatory text to the attention of readers interested in French history and literature, history of the novel, women's studies, and religious studies.

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the ordinations of “The Philadelphia Eleven,” this expanded and revised edition serves as the definitive account of the courageous women who shattered stained glass ceilings and sparked a global movement to revolutionize faith and society. Nearly fifty years after eleven audacious women made history as the first female priests ordained in the Episcopal Church, Darlene O'Dell revisits their inspiring journey in a revised and expanded edition of her acclaimed The Story of the Philadelphia Eleven. Through extensive interviews and tireless archival research, this definitive account was the first to vividly resurrect the pivotal moment that tore down barriers and changed the Episcopal Church forever. Both critics and scholars hailed the book, calling it “a needed history and a brilliantly told tale” (Mary E.Hunt) and “enthralling reading…O'Dell certainly has the novelist's gift of making her story come alive and in maintaining her readers' interest” (Bernard Palmer). Now fresh interviews unveil dozens of never-before-told perspectives, while updated chapters lend contemporary relevance to a history we can't afford to forget. Additionally, the author has included exclusive conversations with one of the “Washington Four,” a chapter on the impactful Barbara Harris, and insights into the wider Anglican church's role in what is now universally considered a landmark event. This edition doesn't just look back; it casts a critical eye on what's changed and what hasn't, questioning the patriarchy that persists in faith institutions and how these ordinations echo in today's political culture. Both an intimate character study and a sweeping examination, The Story of the Philadelphia Eleven is a renewed call to understand our past in order to better navigate our collective future.

This collection of essays challenges the traditional patriarchal approach to sacred literature by highlighting gender parity in sacred texts and envisioning the rise of the matriarchy in the future. The authors redefine Biblical Greek words like malakoi and arsenokoitai used in condemnation of homosexuality, and Qur’anic words like darajah and qawwamun, used for establishing patriarchy. One author reexamines the role of the Nepalese Teej festival of fasting and worship of the god Shiva in promoting male hegemony in Hinduism. Other papers examine passages like Proverbs 31:1-31, the stories of Sarah and Rahab in the Bible, the role of Mary in the Qur’an, and the Dharmic conversion in chapter 27 of the Lotus Sutra. This book makes it clear that sacred literature is subject to human understanding as it evolves through space and time. Today, as more women are educated and actively engaged in political, economic, and social life, religions are challenged to redefine gender roles and norms.

It has often been thought that participation in fertility rituals was women's most important religious activity in classical Greece. Matthew Dillon's wide-ranging study makes it clear that women engaged in numerous other rites and cults, and that their role in Greek religion was actually more important than that of men. Women invoked the gods' help in becoming pregnant, venerated the god of wine, worshipped new and exotic deities, used magic for both erotic and pain-relieving purposes, and far more besides. Clear and comprehensive, this volume challenges many stereotypes of Greek women and offers unexpected insights into their experience of religion. With more than fifty illustrations, and translated extracts from contemporary texts, this is an essential resource for the study of women and religion in classical Greece.

This volume introduces Roman Catholic Womenpriests and bishops who are shaping a more inclusive, Christ-centered, Spirit-empowered Church of equals in the 21st century. All proceeds from the sale of this book go to RCWP-International for the furthering of the movement.