The Women’s Ordination Conference and the Durkin-Dierks Family are happy to announce the awardees of the 2018 Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship for Women Discerning Priestly Ordination: Allison Connelly, Josefina (JoJo) Gabuya, and Maryclare O’Brien-Wilson.
Please join us in celebrating the courage and resilience of Allison, JoJo, and Maryclare, who walk a prophetic path toward equality. We challenge our Church to open its doors to truly listen to their voices and learn from their experiences. God is calling women to lead.
Allison Connelly is currently living in Minneapolis, MN, preparing to begin a Masters of Divinity program at Union Theological Seminary this fall. Once in seminary, Allison hopes to focus on disability liberation theology, with an emphasis on liberation theology of mental illness. As a Catholic woman with a call to ordination, Allison will use her time in seminary to discern the next steps in her vocational journey.
Allison and her three siblings were raised in Knoxville, TN by their parents, who instilled in them the fundamental Catholic values of nonviolence, radical inclusion, and the presence of God in all people. Allison completed her undergraduate education at Vanderbilt University, graduating with a Bachelors of Science in Child Studies. After graduation, Allison moved to Minneapolis, MN to begin the St. Joseph Worker program, a service year program coordinated by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. During her year in the program, Allison worked at a local nonprofit and lived in intentional community with other young women connected by a passion for spirituality, social justice, leadership, and simplicity.
Allison’s experience in the St. Joseph Worker program awakened her call to ordination. Her calling is inspired and supported by the prophetic witness of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, the community of women in the St. Joseph Worker program, and the diversity of Catholic communities in the Minneapolis area. Allison sees her ordination, and the ordination of people of all genders, as the only way the move into an authentically Catholic church.
Recently, Allison transitioned out of her job as a health insurance navigator with a local nonprofit. In her role as insurance navigator, she provided health insurance enrollment and access assistance to people from communities disproportionately affected by HIV. Allison’s work exposed her to the interconnectedness of all oppression, including the oppression of non-citizens, people of color, indigenous people, queer, nonbinary, and transgender people, women, sex workers, disabled people, incarcerated and previously incarcerated people, and people with stigmatized illnesses. That interconnectedness sparked Allison’s relationship with liberation theology, a relationship rooted in the understanding that an incarnate God is always on the side of the oppressed and always opposed to Empire and systematic dehumanization in every form.
Allison is an openly gay woman, and as such has experienced rejection and invalidation by the Catholic church not only for her gender and vocational call, but also for her sexuality. Instead of allowing that rejection to reshape her theology, Allison chooses to live into her fundamentally Catholic understanding of incarnational sexuality and body as tabernacle. Allison remains in the church in the hopes that her voice and witness can make the church a safer space for others whom the church names as less than holy.
Allison is honored to be a recipient of the Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship, and is grateful for the generosity of the Durkin Dierks family. The support of this scholarship provides hope and grounding for Allison as she journeys through seminary and continues claiming her place in the church as a gay Catholic woman called to ordination.
Read Allison’s final reflection on her scholarship here.
Josefina “Jojo” V. Gabuya is an incoming third year Master of Divinity (M.Div.) student at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. They are an international student from the Philippines, where they completed a Master’s degree in Religious Studies, majoring in Women and Religion. Josefina’s master’s thesis, titled “Prisca: Leader, Minister and Missionary in Romans 16:3-5a: Implications for Women of Today’s Church,” affirms women’s leadership, ministerial, and missionary roles, just like those of men, in the early Church. The thesis was in direct response to the hierarchical Roman Catholic Church, where Jojo was originally baptized and raised, and how it has not acknowledged women’s gifts for leadership, ministry, and mission.
Jojo is currently a member of the Berkeley Chinese Community Church (BCCC) United Church of Christ (UCC), which has journeyed with them towards realizing their childhood dream to be a pastoral minister/priest. They are also Member in Discernment (MID) of the Northern California Nevada Conference (NCNC) United Church of Christ (UCC), which is BCCC’s conference.
Before coming to the U.S., Jojo worked as regional coordinator for the United Nations Development Programme Philippines’ Bottom-up Budgeting Project that helped alleviate poverty and empowered marginalized communities in Mindanao. Prior to this, Jojo joined the VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) and worked as results-based management advisor for the Ministry of Gender in Zambia, Southern Africa. During their five-month stint in Zambia, they wrote a policy brief on the incidence of gender-based violence and collaborated with a World Bank project that helped bring girl children/victims of child marriages back to school. For this work, Jojo drew from their extensive professional experience as a social development worker/researcher for nonprofit organizations, both foreign and local, as well as their concern for others. Most of their social development efforts and research work were focused on improving the socio-economic conditions of the poor and marginalized sectors of society, including farmers, laborers and peasants, especially women and children.
As a human rights activist, and a follower of Christ, Jojo has worked with people from the margins to find the meaning of life (theology) and strengthen community:
- In 1986, they actively participated in the 5-day Epifanio de los Santos (EDSA) Revolution 1, which ousted long-time Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos;
- In 1989, they joined the sit-down strikes against Del Monte Corporation, which was using toxic chemicals on leased lands that have been rendered non-arable;
- In 1996, they walked hundreds of miles overnight to support the Anti-APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) rally;
- In 2003, they facilitated the implementation of the Children’s Empowerment Programme in East Timor in 2003; and
- In 2008, they lobbied the Congress of the Republic of the Philippines for the passage of the Anti-Discrimination Bill (in support of her LGBTQIA community).
Jojo’s previous nonprofit undertakings and their current M.Div. studies are part of their continuing personal commitment to emulate Jesus the Christ’s deeds and abide by his words. This commitment has been influenced by their initial experience of the theology of Eucharist and thanksgiving.
They believe that the still-speaking God is calling them to use their professional as well as their pastoral ministry skills in creating, empowering, and sustaining faith communities in “the most disrupted situations and among the most vulnerable people in the world” and other communities where people are in relationship with others.
Read JoJo’s final reflection on their scholarship here.
Growing up in rural Northwest Washington, one of three daughters of parents who are pastoral ministers, Maryclare O’Brien-Wilson found a second home in the Catholic Church. She grew up volunteering in parish programs to migrant families, which connected her faith to service. Empowered by the example of her parents and the spirit of her Church community, she boldly declared at the young age of seven that she would pursue priesthood.
In May of 2017, Maryclare graduated from Gonzaga University earning degrees in Religious Studies and Psychology and a minor in Women and Gender Studies. She participated in Spring Break immersion trips to work with homeless populations, experienced first hand the racial tensions in Montgomery Alabama, studied abroad in Zambia, and spent three years as a student intern on the Campus Ministry Team. The intersection of these fields of study and experience enabled Maryclare to explore the intricacies of being female in this world in connection to the complexities and beauty of our Catholic faith. She became more aware of the unique loneliness that women, especially women of color, often feel in religious spaces where their experiences are seldom explicitly represented. She hungers to invest in shaping a comprehensive theology that addresses reality from a perspective that is both intercultural and interreligious, which is reflected in her undergraduate thesis on womanist theology.
Maryclare completed a year serving in Cleveland with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, in a campus ministry placement at St. Martin de Porres High School, part of the Cristo Rey Network. Fall 2018, Maryclare will begin her Masters of Divinity studies at Boston College in the School of Theology and Ministry. She pursues her degree convinced that theological study provides a common language with which to dialogue among diverse theologies throughout our universal and intercultural Church. In speaking the language of our faith leaders and holding the same degree as her ordained brothers, she hopes to act as a translator and witness to the story of women contributing to unifying the Body of Christ.
By receiving the Lucile Murray Durkin scholarship and through the support of the Women’s Ordination Conference she is affirmed in her belief that as women of God we have the power to bring a new perspective to every corner of ministry in our church. When women speak on their own experience, when women sit in confessionals and can relate to the struggles of other women in relation to the world, we can bring the the Body of Christ into greater communion with God. If we understand and live by the visceral, social justice centered Gospel, we will actively aid in dismantling oppression and in turn, build the Kingdom of God.
“We know that it is tremendously important that women, knowing a beckoning to sacramental service, have a pathway of encouragement and hope. We believe that the Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship will signal for young women their right to answer their calls, and become well educated to do so. ” – Sheila Durkin Dierks
Support the Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship with a gift today!
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