Advent 2019 Appeal to Pope Francis from John J. Shea, O.S.A.

Dear Pope Francis,

I hope you are well and that you are allowed to read this letter. I keep praying for you. Your concern for injustice, the poor, the environment, and administrative reform in the church is inspiring.

Yet again, two letters about the ordination of women: the first I mailed to each member of the Council of Cardinals with whom you soon meet; the second, for background, I mailed at the beginning of Lent in 2014 to each one of the ordinaries of the United States.

When you first spoke about the need for honest dialogue on the issues facing the church, it was quite hopeful. You often said: “dialogue, dialogue, dialogue.” You even said: “dialogue fearlessly.” Unfortunately, there is no dialogue—fearless, gender-inclusive, or otherwise—on the ordination of women. As our Supreme Bridgebuilder, how much longer until you set in motion the one reform most critical for the unity of the church? How much longer must we wait for this blight on the Good News to end, this blight that so dishonors women, the message of Jesus, and the very mission of the church?

How can the church be whole if every woman in it is “not fully in the likeness of Jesus”? Does not the denial of the body-and-soul integrity of women—their imago Dei ignored, disparaged, and nullified—stifle the Spirit and darken the light of the Gospel throughout the world? How long until servant ministry is separated from patriarchal conceit? How long until an intelligent view of gender dawns on an uninformed, inept, inert, loyalty-cast, sheep-droved magisterium? How long until Vatican-championed misogyny—so disrespectful and so immature—ceases to pervert all four traditional hallmarks of our church?

Pope Francis, is this Advent the time for us to wake from sleep?

Sincerely,

John J. Shea, O.S.A.

Copy: Each Member of the Council of Cardinals

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Sidebar: In 2012, Fr. John Shea, O.S.A., an Augustinian priest and theologian, wrote an open letter to Boston Archbishop Sean Cardinal O’Malley, detailing his crusade for women’s ordination and asking the archbishop simply to provide an explanation of the Church’s position on the issue. In his letter, which was published in the Boston College student newspaper, The Heights, Fr. Shea explained how he began calling regularly for a discussion of the topic at provincial chapter meetings of his order in 1986.

In 2010, Shea, who was ordained in 1967, says he “wrote to Father Robert Prevost, O.S.A. in Rome, the Prior General of the Augustinian Order, asking ‘that I be officially recognized as stepping aside from the public exercise of priesthood until women are ordained as priests in our church.’” Receiving no satisfactory response, Shea wrote to Archbishop O’Malley, his Provincial, the Dean of the School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College where he was teaching and his department chairman, informing them that he “was stepping aside from active ministry as a priest until women are ordained.”

The 2012 open letter earned Shea a response, although probably not the one he wished. Boston College decided not to renew the contract of the theologian and pastoral care expert, who had been teaching there for nearly a decade. Shea says he has also received two canonical warnings from his Provincial for expressing his concerns about this issue. However, the author of Finding God Again: Spirituality for Adults (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005) remains undeterred in his quest for a credible theological explanation for the Church’s exclusion of women from Holy Orders.