Call Waiting

From the June 2006 issue of Minnesota Monthly magazine, a great article abour Regina Nicolosi's call and impending ordination to the priesthood.

Nicolosi felt the tug toward the priesthood renewed when her husband, a physician, was ordained a deacon in 1978. She had gone through the training with him, but that was as far as the church permitted her to go. “We may have [had] all the training and qualifications,” she says, “but we, as women, were only able to hold our husbands’ stoles.” Which meant the priesthood was no closer to being a serious option. Indeed, in his 1994 epistle Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, Pope John Paul II reasserted that “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and…this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.” Period. End of discussion.

“I did what a lot of women do,” Nicolosi says with a sigh. She earned a master’s degree in pastoral studies—“to be ready if the church opens up.”

She raised her children, served as a prison chaplain, headed a senior housing center, volunteered on her parish council, and began work on a doctorate in ministry, but none of that diminished her desire to be ordained. “My spiritual journey has been to find the feminine face of God,” she says. “It’s a very important part of my call that God is both male and female and that the female body is sacred, too. I want to represent God at the altar.”

For the complete article, click here

For more on the ordination of Regina and other women, visit Roman Catholic Womenpriests.