Gananoque Takes the World Stage

I’m back.

By chance, last week I was in my hometown of Gananoque Ontario, usually a pretty quiet little burg of 5,000, when it hit the international news. A few women took a tour boat out to the middle of the St. Lawrence and held a ceremony which, they declared, made them Catholic priestesses.

The unreality of the event is suggested by their reason to do it in the St. Lawrence: the notion that it is international waters, and so under the jurisdiction of no Catholic diocese.

As any local knows, there are no international waters in the Thousand Islands area. But the women had so little interest in truth that they held to this fiction rather than spend the few extra dollars to get into genuine international waters off Halifax, Vancouver, or St. John’s.

That says it. Religion is about Truth above all. These people have no interest in it.

The “ordination” was by a female “bishop” who, just three years ago, was herself “ordained” a priestess in a similar fake ceremony in the Danube. Which also has no international waters. Not bad going, and emblematic of the self-indulgence of it all: from laity to bishop in three years.

Once, when the Globe and Mail seemed to be writing from behind the looking glass, claiming seven or eight impossible things at each breakfast, the National Post at least seemed refreshingly straight.

No more. It would be hard to beat the bias of their recent article on ordaining women, “Called by God, Cast out by Rome” (National Post July 23, 2005, A3). Note the implication in the head itself that these women are genuinely called by God, and that the Catholic Church is wrong to believe otherwise.

The article goes on to consistently refer to the women and their parish as “Catholic” and “Roman Catholic.” How can this be so when they are not recognized by Rome? When they have been publicly declared excommunicate? By this definition, aren’t we obliged to call Anglicans, Orthodox, Lutherans, Baptists, or anyone else who wants to use the term, “Roman Catholic”? Doesn’t it simply empty the term of meaning?

It is not, after all, as if ordaining women is the only departure here from the magisterium. These women “priests” are also, according to the article, married with children, and perform gay marriages. One wonders, if they are legitimately called to the priesthood, how is it they were not given the charism to keep their vows of celibacy and obedience? That, at least, would have given some suggestion it is all something more than self-indulgence.

The article repeatedly refers to the two priestesses as “ordained” (or, indeed, “honoured” with ordination) with no attempt to reconcile this claim with the fact that the Catholic Church does not ordain women. They were “ordained” by a woman “bishop” who herself has been formally excommunicated from the Catholic Church, and who claims she was herself ordained a bishop “secretly” by persons unnamed.

In Catholic terms, it is clear that the ceremony was outside the apostolic succession; it was not an ordination. The women, as a group, conferred this “honour” on themselves.

Leaving the question: why is this given any press attention? Any group of seven or ten women could do the same at any time. Valid ordinations are not covered by the press, and they are a genuine honour.

It is, I submit, yet another example of press bias—against religion, and against men.