Only two years after it became impossible to ignore his defiance of Church doctrine, the Maryknolls have finally gotten around to dismissing Fr. Roy Bourgeois, a strident and persistent advocate of women's ordination to the Catholic priesthood.
Oh, wait. Apparently two years isn't enough time to be fully pastoral. They're only warning him of possible dismissal and laicization.
Faithful Catholics know this for what it is: justice delayed and delayed and delayed, open defiance going unpunished. And justice delayed, they say, is justice denied.
Non-Catholics, I suppose, are surprised at the fuss, since women are ordained all the time in Protestant denominations. The fuss, my friends, is that Catholic teaching, for good and sufficient reasons, states that only men may be ordained. It's part of the "brand", if you will.
And we view employees who bash our brand the same way that a Ford dealership would view salesmen who openly sell Chevys out the back door.
In 1867, Matthew Arnold wrote "Dover Beach", a haunting poem evoking the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the Sea of Faith. As a boomer who finished Catholic elementary school in 1964 and then watched my Church falter, I've found the roar all too audible. So here I wait, listening for the whispers of that Sea's invincible return.
