Women push for more from Vatican, Francis
Kate McElwee, executive director of Women’s Ordination Conference, explained to NCR that she and Deborah Rose-Milavec, executive director of FutureChurch, spoke with Bishop Dusan Spiner, a priest who was ordained to serve the underground church in the 1973 by Bishop Felix Maria Davidek.
Rose-Milavec described the opportunity to meet Spiner as “an especially poignant moment” as it gave them some understanding of “the rich and often violent history of repression he and so many other Catholics suffered under a totalitarian regime.” It also exposed the official church’s determination to suppress those who had ensured its survival through the underground church because they raised uncomfortable questions.
The Vatican was aware of the underground church in Czechoslovakia under the communist regime and recognized the consecration of Davidek, who went on to ordain women. It seems the hierarchy countenanced these women priests due to the adversity of the circumstances.
For Davidek, ordaining women was a pastoral response to provide the sacraments to the people of God. His own imprisonment made him aware that women in prisons were denied the sacraments. Women priests could bring the sacraments where men, even clandestinely ordained priests, were not permitted.
McElwee explained how, with the collapse of communism in Czechoslovakia following the Velvet Revolution in 1989, the institutional church moved to hush up the existence of these women priests.
“The women who were ordained and served their communities were dismissed and ignored by the institutional church,” she said. “The only name that is widely known is Ludmila Javorova, a woman ordained in 1970 by Bishop Felix Maria Davidek. But even today, the others stay silent about their underground ordinations.”
“Those ordained in the underground church are part of a living history of courageous women who took great risks to live their faith. It is no surprise that the Vatican has attempted to erase women from the story,” McElwee added. “But we know — and these women know — what happened to them was valid. The continued silencing and fear that these women experience is familiar to many Catholic women today who are dismissed, discredited or silenced for advocating for equality or living their priestly vocations.”
“Our work today is to bring the underground parts of our church, those that are kept silent, into the light,” McElwee said. “The Catholic Church must confront its own participation in systems of oppression.”