The Women’s Ordination Conference and the Durkin-Dierks Family are happy to announce the awardees of the 2019 Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship:
Kate Fontana, Molly Minnerath, and Kori Pacyniak.
Please join us in celebrating the courage and resilience of Kate, Molly, and Kori, 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 them to lead!
Kate Fontana
Kate is a Queer Catholic yogi, contemplative, musician, energy medicine practitioner, and a third-year seminarian at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology discerning a call to the priesthood with the Roman Catholic Women Priests. Her journey has been a weave of music, yoga, therapy, friendship, ecology, and contemplative practice. She is deeply informed by Catholic social teaching; mystics of the world’s religions; rhythms of liturgy, bodies and nature; Sacred Feminine traditions of Christianity and Yoga; an unexpected friendship with Jesus; and a theological blend of Harry Potter, the Bhagavad Gita, Battlestar Galactica, Queer Theory, and the Gospels.
Born in Baltimore, MD, she grew up in Yakima, WA and calls the Pacific Northwest home. In 2008 she graduated from Pacific Lutheran University, came out of the closet, found yoga, and started therapy to help with depression and other struggles of being alive in a body. She has taught yoga, meditation, chanting, and yoga philosophy since 2009. From 2010-2017, she worked at the intersection of contemplative, trauma-informed embodiment practice and social justice as Executive Director, and then Co-Director of Samdhana-Karana Yoga, a non-profit yoga studio in Tacoma, WA.
In 2014 she began leading feminine-divine and nature-based spirituality circles and retreats, and she continues to run a spiritual wellness private practice, providing energy medicine, spiritual mentorship and trauma-informed somatic healing.
Having left formal church life, Kate had a rather literal ‘come-to-Jesus’ moment in 2016 that catalyzed enrollment in seminary and the start of a discernment process towards the priesthood. Kate has been most recently interested in the integration of embodiment and spirituality with anti-racism, and envisions part of her priestly call being around bringing somatically-engaged anti-racist work to white spiritual communities.
Additionally, Kate plans to open an interspiritual respite center for women who’ve experienced trauma, believing that when given the support, space, and tools of creatively connecting to one’s own inner wisdom, one’s innate healing capacity awakens. She believes that healing at the personal level is intimately linked with healing at the interpersonal, systemic, and planetary level, and longs for a thriving, just, diverse, harmonious world for all beings everywhere. She is personally enamored by the queerness of Jesus’ life. She seeks the guidance of the abundant Spirit of Sophia-Christ that dissolves false binaries and the fear of the Other and restores harmony throughout creation; and which goes by many other names throughout the world.
Kate lives in Tacoma, Washington, has five siblings and a large extended biological and chosen family, and is the happy aunt to five-soon-to-be-six adorable niblings (her preferred gender-inclusive term for her siblings’ children). During these uncertain and creative years of learning, growing, decolonizing, and visioning, she practices receiving support any and all forms: postcards with affirming words, tea and dark chocolate, donations, heartfelt prayers, stories of radical/queer/non-normative love and beauty, impromptu dance parties, and day passes to the spa are most welcome.
Molly Minnerath
Molly is currently pursuing her Masters of Divinity at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry. She is originally from Alexandria, MN, where she was raised to love the outdoors, especially being on the lake. Molly graduated in 2016 from the College of St. Benedict with a major in Theology, and minors in Hispanic Studies and Latino/Latin American Studies. After graduation, she felt a call to full-time service, and moved to Cochabamba, Bolivia, to spend a year as a missioner with Maryknoll Bolivia Mission Immersion.
Molly spent her time in Bolivia ministering in the prisons as well as working at a home for children that had been orphaned, abandoned or removed from their homes due to unsafe conditions. While in the women’s prisons she specifically worked with a program that supported women in, and transitioning out of, the alarmingly unjust prison system. In this experience, her heart was continually broken open to new ways of understanding love and service, which allowed her to enter into a space of humble accompaniment. After a year of growing through this challenge, Molly’s heart prodded her to continue working with Latin American immigrants specifically in a U.S. context, as she desired to address the horrifically unjust immigration system. So, she moved to California to work full-time at the Oakland Catholic Worker.
The Worker offered Molly the challenge of accompanying recently arrived Latin American immigrant families in their transition to the U.S. through guest accompaniment and community-building. Through her time at the Worker, she was confirmed in her love for intentional, countercultural community-living and saw it as a privilege to reach out to the poor and marginalized in her neighborhood each day through programs directed at food insecurity and housing instability. None of these tasks were easy – Molly quickly realized that one of her spiritual guides, Dorothy Day, truly was a saint. But in learning about injustice, and living in a place plagued with inequality, she confirmed her desire to dedicate her life to ministry, leading her community, and working for peace and justice.
Currently, in addition to pursuing her Mdiv, Molly works at the Episcopal Cathedral in downtown Boston with the MANNA community. MANNA (which stands for “Many Angels Needed Now and Always”) is a community with and for unhoused folks in the area that comes together to share gifts, talents, and struggles with one another. The community gathers to pray, serve and create together; it is a beautiful and holy place. For Molly, it is indescribably life-giving work and it is through encounters and relationships at MANA that she has been able to reflect on her journey more clearly – her call to ordained ministry has always been present, it just took the radical in-breaking of the Spirit at MANNA for it to become unavoidably clear.
Molly is emboldened and excited to receive the Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship and is grateful for the generosity of the Durkin Dierks family as well as the mentorship she has received throughout the years from professors, spiritual guides, and friends. This scholarship enlivens Molly’s commitment to radical hospitality and justice, to continued formation and to discerning her call to leadership and ordained ministry.
Kori Pacyniak
Kori is a second year PhD student in religious studies at the University of California, Riverside in the field of Queer and Trans Studies in Religion. Drawing upon their Catholic background, Kori’s research looks at the lives of queer and trans Catholics, notions of identity and constructive theology, and how to tell the stories of queer and trans stories that have been erased.
Previously, Kori completed a B.A. in Religious Studies and Portuguese & Brazilian Culture from Smith College, a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School with a focus on transgender theology, a Master of Sacred Theology from Boston University School of Theology with a focus on trauma and theology as well as additional studies in Rome, Poland, and Brazil. Kori has presented their work at the American Academy of Religion’s 2016 annual conference (Ex-Catholics: Exile or Exodus in the Borderlands of the Church), at the Queer and Trans Studies in Religion Conference at the University of California, Riverside in 2019 (Wandering through the Liminal: The Holy Ambiguity of Trans and Non-binary Identities), and is currently collaborating with the Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge on a book project entitled Paschal People: Trans Theology through the Liturgical Year.
Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois in a close-knit extended Polish immigrant family, Kori’s free time was often filled with Polish Scouts, Polish Folk Dancing, and Soccer although family always took precedence. Much of Kori’s faith formation came from family traditions and stories as well as the Jesuit priests that served as chaplains to the Polish Scouts for summer camps and holidays. It was here that Kori first served as a lector and altar server, fostering their vocation to the priesthood which truly blossomed at Smith College where they served as co-president of the Newman Association and organized retreats, liturgies, and service projects for the student body. From then on, Kori sought ways to serve marginalized Catholics and pursue their vocation to the priesthood, working with Veterans’ Groups, LGBTQ organizations, and the Episcopal Church. Inspired by stories of gender non-conforming saints like Thecla, Macrina, Joan of Arc, and Pauli Murray, as well as the Danube Seven, Philadelphia Eleven, and Washington Four, Kori has found their home on the margins of the church, seeking opportunities for liturgical creativity and ministry where possible.
As a non-binary queer Catholic, much of Kori’s ministry is focused on repairing the wounds done to LGBTQ persons in the name of religion and on making the church inclusive and affirming of people of all genders and sexuality. Kori is in the discernment process for the priesthood with Roman Catholic WomenPriests (RCWP) and was ordained to the diaconate in June of 2019. Kori currently serves as Pastor of the Mary Magdalene the Apostle Catholic Community in San Diego, California and is in the process of developing a spiritual support group for trans individuals & their families.
Kori is grateful to the Women’s Ordination Conference and the Durkin-Dierks family for this scholarship to assist in pursuing their educational and vocational goals.
“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
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