Call me 'Mother'

...His most recent report in Commonweal was "No Melting Pot" (September 25...

...Above all, he was an artist in helping people to reimagine God--as much greater and more giving than they had dreamed...

...spokesman stated that Ch~vez's coup attempt six years earlier against the government of Carlos Andr6s P6rez had "dishonored" the Venezuelan armed forces, although the spokesman failed to explain why countless other military coup leaders have merited more cordial treatment...

...He took his woes to God: 'They won't let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner.' 'What are you complaining about?' said God...

...There is no doubt that Frances Meigh's ordination has attracted an extraordinary amount of publicity--she told the London Guardian with "childlike glee" that she had given more than sixty media interviews, and has a list of well-wishers that includes such unlikely bedfellows as Chief Buthelezi of South Africa and Tony Benn, the former British Labor Cabinet minister...

...Church sources maintain both that the episcopal line which has emerged in Father Buckley is theologically tainted, and that in any case, as Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger have insisted, the church has no power to ordain women, even if it wanted to do so...

...Steve Ellner REPORT FROM VENEZUELA Beating back neoliberalism t is possible that when Madeleine Albright and other State Department officials first spoke harshly of Venezuelan presidential candidate "Commander" Hugo Ch~ivez last spring, they had no idea he would become the nation's front-runner in this December's elections...

...De Mello lets the church off easy in comparison...

...And while it is true that normal Catholic episcopal ordinations tend to muffle, at the very least, the New Testament concept of the "election" of bishops, the ceremony at which Pat Buckley was consecrated, and the ordination of Frances Meigh at which he subsequently presided, were redolent of a type of essentialist 1950s theology in which power and ceremony provided the leitmotif...

...Bishop Crowley is a former private secretary to Cardinal Basil Hume of Westminster, and reputedly destined for further promotion in the hierarchy: the embarrassment potential of the event is therefore significant...

...What came out of that pedestrian principle was a radical doctrine of divine abundance and grace...

...Every good Christian," says the preface to Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, "ought to be more ready to give a good sense to the doubtful proposition of another than to condemn it...

...at worst, her wellmeaning actions may further reinforce Vatican attempts to tie the hands of future popes on this most controversial of issues...

...At best, she is an unlikely successor to Mary Magdalene, described in medieval homilies as "the apostle of the apostles...

...The man was a mesmerizing storyteller, of course, and could have made it as a standup comic in the Catskills...

...In April, the State Department turned down Ch~ivez's request to visit the United States to meet with multinational representatives...

...He also should have been sued for violating copyright laws, for the stories he "borrowed," without credit, from others...

...Would that this text were inscribed over the door of Cardinal Ratzinger's office...

...In May of this year, he was ordained as a bishop by the equally dissident Bishop Michael Cox, David Toolan, S.J., is an associate editor of America magazine...

...At various points in his books," says the CDF's explanatory note, "institutions of the church are criticized indiscriminately...

...The coup was immediately denounced by parties across the political spectrum, n Commonweal | II October23, 1998...

...What would the Vatican have done, do you suppose, if it had had to deal with that Galilean upstart who went about calling the religious authorities of his time "whitened sepulchers" and "hypocrites...

...John Horgan CALL ME 'MOTHER' Ordained to be renegades he campaign for the ordination of women in the Catholic church took a dramatic turn on September 14----but whether it moved forward, backward, or sideways is difficult to determine---with a ceremony at a small church north of Dublin in which a sixty-seven-year-old female hermit went through a ceremony of ordination presided over by a dissident priest who had himself undergone a rite of episcopal "consecration" five months earlier...

...he was a collector of parables, and loved to shake people up, get them thinking or reimagining...

...But what I most remember is his image of God--beyond words yes, but boundless in generosity, love, and forgiveness...

...Ch~vez laughed off the visa d e nial and said that he would apply for a MasterCard instead...

...And what did I find...

...De Mello used an odd principle to get at the unfathomable goodness of God--the idea that God couldn't be worse than you and I, but had to be at least as good as we are at our best...

...They won't let me in either!'" Has Rome lost its sense of humor...

...For his part, Pat Buckley has said that he will ordain a further four priests--all men--for his newly formed Society of Saint Andrew...

...The line of episcopal ordination from Vietnam to Dublin is certainly questionable, insofar as it relies for its justification primarily on the contention that an exercise of sacramental authority may be valid even if unlawful...

...There are, nonetheless, aspects of what has happened which should at least give pause to proponents of the ordination of women...

...That provision was originally devised as a protection for lay people, rather than as a way in which clergy could take power to themselves without the need for accountability...

...But in the early 1980s I finally gave in...

...The ordinand is Sister (or Mother, as she now wishes to be called) Frances Meigh, who was born an Anglican, converted to Catholicism at the age of twenty-one, married and had three children, had her marriage annulled, and was consecrated as a hermit under canon law 603 in 1994 by Bishop John Crowley of Middlesborough, in the North of England...

...And in that period of my life I wanted a silent retreat...

...The cleric, Father (or "bishop," as he now describes himself) Pat Buckley, is a validly ordained Roman Catholic priest who worked for some years in the ordinary parochial ministry before falling out with his bishop...

...For the time being, therefore, it is likely that the battle will continue to be fought more on the question of chromosomes than on the aspects of canon law involved in Frances Meigh's ordination...

...For years I resisted attending one of his retreats--because in adapting to American culture I thought he talked too much...

...The ceremony, which was attended by about 150 people, represents the conjunction of a series of unlikely occurrences and extraordinary people...

...Ordinand and cleric alike believe that the ceremony, though unlawful, was valid...

...The abortive coup he staged on February 4,1992 against President P6rez pitted middle-level officers like himself against the military establishment...

...Since then, he has operated on a free-lance basis, but has not hesitated to take initiatives--such as officiating at wedding ceremonies for Catholics who have undergone civil divorce proceedings--not calculated to endear him to his former episcopal superiors...

...What I found, in other words, was the gospel, and the very orthodox spirituality of the fourteenth-century classic, The Cloud of Unknowing--a God who is incomprehensible to intellect but knowable to love and to love alone...

...A story from de Mello's The Prayer of the Frog (Gujarat Sahitya Prakash) is cited as evidence: "A public sinner was excommunicated and forbidden entry to the church...

...Ch~vez's short political career has been marked by bold initiatives...

...But of course...

...Otherwise, since he borrowed freely from other religious traditions, especially the Sufi tales of Idries Shah, he will be misconstrued...

...Nor is she without support in Ireland, where traditionally there are wellsprings of sympathy for people who challenge established authority in the pursuit of apparently hopeless causes...

...Rome sometimes gives the impression it has forgotten that our roots lie in the Hebrew prophets, the force of whose criticism is directed against the home team...

...A U.S...

...The key to understanding de Mello's writings (largely story collections) is to have made one of his retreats...

...The Vatican complains of "ambiguity" and "perplexity" in interpretation...

...John Horgan teaches journalism at the Dublin City University...

...De Mello was not writing theology...

...Commonweal | 0 October 23, 1998 who traces his line of succession through a Bishop Kieran Broadberry, who was episcopally ordained at the age of seventeen by Bishop Clemente Gomez, who now describes himself as Pope Gregory XVII, and who was ordained some years ago by a formerly orthodox but subsequently dissident Vietnamese bishop...