The Ordination of Roman Catholic Women:
Paraguay

by Glenda Rodriguez, O.P.

New Woman, New Church, New Priestly Ministry

Proceedings of the Second Conference on the Ordination of Roman Catholic Women
November 1978, Baltimore, U.S.A. pp 66 - 68.
Published on our website with permission of the Women's Ordination Conference

Glenda Rodriguez, OP, originally from Trinidad, is a member of the Sinsinawa (Wl) Dominican congregation. She has just returned from five years as a missionary in Paraguay where she was co-pastor of a developing Christian community, officiating at marriages, baptisms, funerals, Sunday liturgies, etc. At present she is a member of the Dominican Missionary Preaching team, based in Austin, Texas.

Thank you for staying, you remnant people. I am very happy to be here.

I just wanted you to have a very short background on Paraguay, because not many people even know that it exists. It lies right in the heart of South America and borders Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina. It’s about the size of the state of California and has only about 2.8 million people. Ninety-four percent of the people are baptized Roman Catholics. Education is minimal, about third grade in the rural areas, maybe junior high level in the larger cities. University education is available but it helps if you belong to the ruling political party to enter the university.

I work in the diocese of Concepcion, which is in the northeast section of the country. The diocese is about 85 percent rural. There were 68 religious men and women in the diocese but only six of us worked in rural pastoral ministry. The rest worked in traditional jobs, teaching and servicing hospitals and so forth, so they were not out where the action really was.

The Bishop sent us into a town of about 4,000 people that bordered Brazil, and there were about 20,000 people in the colonies attached to our parish. He said to us, very honestly, “This is going to be a difficult area.” The people felt abandoned and unchurched because there just wasn’t anybody available; he had no priests he could send, so we were the first people to establish the presence of Church. We went in and he said, “I’ll give you everything that is within my power. Do everything you can do. I wish you could say Mass and hear confessions but at this time in the Church you cannot.” Pleased with his openness of spirit, we took him at his word and began a Sunday service which eventually came to be called the “Sisters’ Mass.” The people, in time, really preferred our service to the priest’s, when he came. We had done a Service of the Word, with communion, in which the people could participate. When the priest came he included the Canon (which we couldn’t) and the people held back. I guess they really preferred ours because they could participate totally.

And so we did baptize, we did marry, we gave the sacrament of the last anointing — although not too often, because we had deaths by murder more often than by illness. We used the sacraments as a means of evangelization, especially with funeral services; many people came, the church was filled to overflowing, and we knew that we could reach them then. We would never get them at a Sunday service. We used everything as a means of evangelization.

Another reason the Bishop sent us in was to begin to form small base communities which you have heard about from the last speakers. We did form one, and from that community the women came forth with all they had to give. In Latin America, women have no concept of self. They are what they feel, absolutely downtrodden, treated like dish rags by their husbands. They have told us that their husbands expect them to be wives, mistresses and slaves. So there you have it.

But springing forth from their communities, the women felt very confident. They were able to minister to their own people in the Guarani language. (All Paraguayans are bilingual; they speak Guarani and Spanish.) We had some knowledge of Guarani, but theirs was much better, so we asked them to come along with us to preach at the services and they said “yes.” We eventually incorporated them into the teaching of other sacraments and they did such a fantastic job that the idea of becoming a priest didn’t enter their heads at that point. It was such a big leap just to go from being nothing to becoming something — in the new church, not the institutional one. These small base communities are the only place I see right now where these women can be themselves, one can get a concept of who they really are and their real strengths, and they are a beautiful force in the Church as evangelizers.

As we began to lead the people to a new sense of Church, sometimes we sisters, too, as we were evangelizing, became ourselves evangelized. I come out of two different cultures now, my own homeland, Trinidad, and now here, because I have lived here 13 years. I came down with certain ideas of what I had to do. But in the process, what came to me was that it doesn’t mean a hill of beans to have mass if they don’t understand it’s a community celebration. And if you are not in community I think it’s farcical to pretend that we’re going along because we have a duty to perform.

And so evangelization seems to be the thing that is more important right now than the ordination of women. I fully agree that we should not be put down and that we are being discriminated against. However, there are thousands and thousands of people waiting out there for the Word to be preached, and I think we as women can address them right now. We can go out, reach them, we don’t have to wait, especially in the healing ministries.

Evil is so rampant in the world; it just floors me to see that it’s reached grade school level. We’ve seen drug addiction, alcoholism, we’ve seen suicide cases. There is a lot of evil and the Church never told us that. No one really wants to see sin, but we’re suffering the causes of it right now in our lives. It is through the healing ministries that we are called to that we can free one another. When Christ said, set the captives free, give sight to the blind - we can do that.

I would like to close with a quotation from Saint Paul:

but how can they call to Him if they have not believed; and how can they believe if they have not heard the message; and how can they hear if the message is not proclaimed and how can the message be proclaimed if the messengers are not sent out? As the Scripture say, ‘How wonderful is the coming of those who bring good news.’ (Romans 10: 14-15)

Thank you.

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