Time: The Push to Ordain Female Priests Gains Ground

Women’s Ordination Worldwide was mentioned in this Time article about woman priest Alta Jacko and the women’s ordination movement.

The Push to Ordain Female Priests Gains Ground
By Dawn Reiss

Alta Jacko is the mother of eight children. She is also an ordained priest in the Roman Catholic Church. Jacko, 81, who earned her master’s degree in pastoral studies from Loyola University, a Jesuit Catholic school, says being a priest is what she was called to do.

Officially, of course, the Catholic Church’s Canon Law 1024 says that only baptized men can receive holy orders. But there is a movement against the no-women rule; it began eight years ago when a cluster of renegade male clerics (including a European bishop whose identity the female priests won’t reveal in order not to risk his excommunication) ordained the first women. Now, in Jacko’s hometown of Chicago, three women have entered the priesthood.

Like many other priests, Jacko trained in various parishes before becoming ordained. Unlike many other priests, however, she was not always easily received by her elders. In spring 2009, Jacko approached Father Bob Bossie, who preaches at St. Harold’s Catholic Community in Uptown, for help. "She asked me if I would mentor her," recalls Bossie, a member of Chicago’s Priests of the Sacred Heart who was ordained in 1975. Bossie acknowledges that the concept of females in the priesthood is difficult for him. He says he literally shudders at the thought, saying that when the image of women in robes once flashed in his mind, it "left me cold."

Yet Bossie assisted Jacko anyway. He wanted to help a friend. While Jacko was training to become a deacon, a mandatory step prior to priesthood, it was Bossie who taught her how to say the liturgy. "I did it because she asked me, because she’s very thoughtful," Bossie says. "When someone you like and respect asks you, you try to do it."

Bossie is speaking out publicly for the first time, even though he knows he could lose his job as a priest, his pension and his home. And even though he disagrees intellectually with the notion of women in the priesthood, he says his feelings tend to be more complicated than that. "I’m not going out of my way to support it," Bossie says. "I don’t think that’s sexist. I am a priest, and this is breaking down the hieratical priesthood … But if people ask me for help, I feel compelled to help, out of respect and love. If God called me, why wouldn’t God call a woman?"

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