Catholics are still waiting: Reflecting on CTA's Advent action

Outside Old St. Patrick’s Church in Chicago

On the first Sunday of Advent, CTA members across the country came together to witness for ordination justice.

Our Re/Gen team — Claire DesHotels, Kascha Sanor, Lindsey Myers, and myself — had originally hoped to plan an in-person action.

However, like all plans, ours were upended by COVID-19.  We ended up planning a witness that people could do, wherever they were, by sharing flyers about ordination.  With our message, “Catholics Are Still Waiting,” we wanted to highlight that over the past fifty years of the ordination justice movement, one denomination after another has made strides towards ensuring equitable leadership. Meanwhile the Catholic Church maintains its misogynist status quo.

On our flyers we included the dates when other Christian denominations first ordained cis women and out trans people, often decades ago.

Our slogan was meant not to discredit the work of those who haven’t waited for the old hierarchy and instead have formed alternative Catholic communities, like those led by Roman Catholic Women Priests.  Rather, we wanted to highlight the failure of the Vatican institutional church to follow the spirit present in these communities.

Thirteen people participated as they were able: wheat-pasting flyers outside churches, a seminary, and a Jesuit Residence; posting flyers at parishes; doing an in-person witness; mailing flyers and letters; and emailing diocesan offices.

We had folks participate in Chicago, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Richmond, VA, Detroit, Streamwood, IL, Auburn Hills, MI, Orchard Lake, MI, Seattle, and Tacoma, WA.

In total, CTA members and friends contacted 27 parishes across 10 cities.

I was moved by the creativity of our community and the directions people took their witness.  One person prayed the rosary outside a church.  Someone used the back of our flyers to share her vocation story with bishops. CTA Chicago member, Natalie Lall, made a vlog about canvassing:

For many who participated, this action had deeply personal meaning.  That was the case for our team.  As three cis women and one trans man, we are all affected by the Church’s misogyny.  We saw our action as a way to lift up the experiences of those whose genders are marginalized within the Church.  

Each of our team members spoke about how deeply this action planning has impacted our own vocational discernment.  Being part of Re/Gen gave us a chance to be leaders in a faith tradition where doors are often closed to us.  I don’t think I am the only one who found this experience to be healing.

Lindsey reflected, “It wasn't an effective action, an action where we change the institutional church to include and to see all its members … It was an action where those of us who have been made invisible became visible once again.”

We became visible to our communities of care and to ourselves.  In other words, this action wasn’t for the bishops. It was for us.

Kascha said, “This action came truly from our discernment, our time together. We gathered (virtually) on good days, in prayer, through struggle, and looking for hope. It’s as if our commitment to one another sanctified the action — Church as we know it could be. I hung these fliers with my team, for my team, in deep humility and gratitude for their divinity embodied.”

Planning this action has given me the gift of reflecting deeply on why it felt important to me.  I experienced grief at not being able to pursue my own felt sense of vocation as a priest.

But beyond that grief, I realized that not having to become a priest is a gift.  That being on the margins can be a position of freedom, where I feel the gravity of the center less strongly.  

It was a gift to meet at five a.m. on a freezing December morning to wheat-paste flyers downtown.  Our team saw each other in person, masks on, for the first time in months, and hope was in the air.

And now I can ask the question that feels like not the end of my process of discernment, but its beginning: If I knew that the institutional Church would never change, what would I do then?