Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Bourgeois faces expulsion from religious order

        The Rev. Roy Bourgeois of Columbus has received a second warning from his religious order, the Maryknolls, and faces expulsion from the order if he doesn’t recant his position on women’s ordination in the Catholic Church.

In recent years, Bourgeois -- founder of the SOA Watch -- has been an advocate for women priests, while the Church ordains only men.
“We’re poking the beehive again,” Bourgeois told the Ledger-Enquirer this week.
In a letter to Bourgeois dated July 27, Maryknoll Superior General the Rev. Edward M. Dougherty repeated an earlier warning that Bourgeois faced dismissal if he “continued (his) campaign in favor of women priests and failed to recant publicly (his) position on the matter.”

Bourgeois, a priest for 39 years, sent a one-page response on Monday.

“After much reflection, study, and prayer, I believe that our Church’s teaching that excludes women from the priesthood defies both faith and reason and cannot stand up to scrutiny,” Bourgeois wrote.

“The Vatican wants to hear those two words: ‘I recant,’” he said Tuesday. “For me, that would be to lie.”

Bourgeois’ attorneys are Bill Quigley, a professor at University of Loyola School of Law and canon lawyer Dominican Fr. Thomas Doyle, an advocate for victims of clergy sexual abuse. Quigley was presenting Bourgeois’ case.

Bourgeois said the “primacy of conscience” teaching in the Church allows him to follow his conscience about women’s ordination, thus trumping Church teaching.

“They’re saying it’s an infallible teaching” that only men can be ordained, Bourgeois said of the Vatican. A 1994 Apostolic Letter issued by then-Pope John Paul II states: “I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”

In 2008, Bourgeois participated in a ceremony in Kentucky in which a purported ordination took place for a Catholic woman named Janice Sevre-Duszynska.

Following this event, the Catholic Church declared both he and Sevre-Duszynska were automatically excommunicated, and that Bourgeois was barred from priestly ministry in public.

Still, the Maryknolls allowed him to stay on, and for now he continues to be paid.

Dougherty’s letter is firm.

Stating that Bourgeois has “remained unmoved” despite being asked by other Maryknollers “to consider the effects of your actions on the Society and the Church,” Dougherty’s decision is “based on your defiant stance as a Catholic priest who publicly rejects the Magisterium of the Church on the matter of priestly ordination.”

As he was warned in the previous letter, if Bourgeois fails to recant within 15 days of receipt of the second letter, Dougherty said he would “proceed with the process of dismissal.”