Opening Remarks

by M.Luke Tobin

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 15 - 16.
Published on our website with permission of the Women's Ordination Conference

M. Luke Tobin is a former president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) and served eight years in the national office of Church Women United. She was an observer at Vatican II and has been a member of several international peace missions. She is past president of the Sisters of Loretto.

The Women’s Ordination Conference Task Force and Core Commission extend a warm and joyful welcome to the more than 2000 of you who have come to attend this Conference. You have come from Europe, from Asia, from Latin America, and from other parts of the world as well as from most of the states in the union. You have come from California and from the New York island, from the plains and from the foothills and mountain peaks of Colorado, my state.

And why have you come? You have come — there is no mistake about it — you have come because of love for the Church, because you wish to call the church to its best. You would not otherwise have overcome the skepticism, the fears, even the derision of those who tell us it cannot be done.

Your love of the church is faithful, strong in the belief that the church should be asked to speak out boldly and clearly, to be faithful to its own message. We have listened to that teaching when the church has spoken in its official documents, urging us to “eliminate every form of discrimination because of sex;” in its Scripture, which tells us that there is no distinction between slave and free, Jew and Greek, male and female; and in those recent admonitions that seek the “greater participation of women in the life of the church.”

Your love of the church is persistent because you have continued to seek your goal despite the rebuffs and setbacks which have attempted to deter you in your quest. Like the women in the Gospel parables, you have asked repeatedly. With courage you have continued to seek full ministry for women because your vision of Gospel wholeness gives you confidence.

Your love of the church is creative, discouraged by stereotyped objections and undismayed by paternalistic cautions. You have exercised your creative imagination in designing strategies, like this Conference, in the ceaseless effort to challenge the church to its own truth. This perhaps the greatest sign of love.

But will the church hear? Will your voices be listened to? We are entering the era of a new Pope, one who, a few days ago, asked us to “discover together the many sides of women’s mission in the church, which goes hand in hand with the world of women today.”

If Pope John Paul II would wish to explore that mission, perhaps we might urge him, respectfully, to invite us to a personal dialog with him — not a summit conference in which the great meet with the great, but perhaps a foothills conference, one in which a group of women, chosen by themselves, representing various aspects of the mission of women, might sit down with him and dialog about our true concerns (including ordination), our problems, and our reality as only we as women know them.

Just as bishops have regular conferences, synods, with the Pope, so women could also have regular meetings with him. This would be the only way in which the views of half the church could be represented. And the Pope would have a truer picture of the concerns of women and a better understanding of why some among us seek ordination.

Let us begin preparing for such a dialog today, starting now with our reflections on the full ministry of women in the church. A poster on the wall proclaims the good news of our conference, “Where there is love, there is hope.”

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