Victoria Rue

From standing on the icy sidewalks outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral to historic ordinations on the St. Lawrence Seaway, Victoria Rue reflects on four decades of priesting outside church law.

—

A Lesbian Catholic Reflects on her Three Ordinations
originally published by Victoria Rue on the Substack, This is My Body.

—

Dear Reader, I want to talk with you about my ordinations—not the one I was excommunicated for, but the one that actually consecrated me a priest.

October, 1987. Cardinal Ratzinger writes his “Halloween Letter” : “homosexuality is intrinsically, morally, disordered….”

Members of Dignity NYC, once a month, stood silently in pews all over St. Patrick’s Cathedral during Cardinal O’Connor’s sermons. In Dec. 1987 the Cardinal called the cops and all were dragged out of the church onto 5th Ave.

I was studying for my M.Div. at Union Theological Seminary NYC, not thinking about ordination. – Jan. 1988. I received a call from gay activist Charles Frederick of Dignity– will you be our priest next Sunday? On that bitter cold Sunday, wearing a priest’s vestments, I stood with an out gay male priest, and together we celebrated a lesbian-gay liberation Mass on the sidewalk across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral saying NO to Ratzinger.

300 people spilled out onto 5th Ave. Walt Whitman’s “I sing the body electric” was one of the readings. After our ecclesial disobedience, many of us laid down on 5th avenue and did civil disobedience and were arrested. It was this community that ordained me.

This was my ordination, an experience that shaped everything that followed.

For 4 months we continued on the sidewalk of 5th Ave.—celebrating an LGBTQ Mass, offering bread to passers by — then being arrested.

In June, I moved to California, and The Cathedral Project went on for several more years.

By 1993, now living on the West Coast, I was finishing doctoral work at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and co-founded with Monica Kaufer and a group of lesbian and straight women– A Critical Mass: Women Celebrating the Eucharist. We cleaned the city park in Oakland –where St. Mary’s Cathedral had stood before the 1986 earthquake — fed the homeless, and then celebrated a feminist Mass where there was no presiding priest. That group continues as a house church today.

Years later in 2005 when I chose to be ordained by women bishops and friends assembled on a boat on the St. Lawrence Seaway, it was largely symbolic. But it was important because:

1. I hoped It was going to be the beginning of an international movement for women’s ordination.
2. I hoped it would be different from the Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC) because it was an action rather than an inspiring idea.

However, the early movement was focused on the ordination of WOMEN priests. My out lesbian identity was not something anyone wanted to emphasize. People were concerned. And I colluded with that. But soon after, our movement of Roman Catholic Womenpriests-USA (RCWP) publicly embraced and celebrated lesbians, gay men, trans and non-binary/queer priests (and yes, all of us have been excommunicated).

So that’s my priesting journey.

42, 47, 59… not my measurements but my ages during ordinations and “priesting”—less a noun than a verb for me. In many ways, priesting is what Nelle Morton called hearing people into speech…

At age 79, I realize that for the last 40 years of my life, I’ve been priesting in many forms: traditional priesting in founding and pastoring a small faith community in S.F., being a hospice chaplain, teaching comparative religions, teaching theatre, creating theatre with women with cancer, also with senior women who had abortions pre-Roe, with Palestinians living in Bethlehem, and with Christians and Muslims as they ponder who Mary/Maryam is.

If half my life has been priesting in many forms, then what is ordination for me? Most importantly, a community ordained me. It is not being special or unique. It is not being set apart. That is the church’s deadly game of hierarchy and power over.

A community ordained me —to live a consecrated life serving others—but widening serving to working for social justice, widening sacraments to include birthing, tending the earth, the mysteries of the cosmos, wonder at all life crackling and struggling around us, and yes, enduring arrest in our struggles for justice.

But make no mistake about it, the process of living a consecrated life is like the potter’s kiln, it can be a fiery place where simply being one’s lesbian, transgressive self –is in itself transformative.

What then is consecration? Consecration is not about making something holy. It is about making something whole. Dedicating my life to what the Beguines called “becoming what God is.” And what is God?

I hear God, the Source, calling in the trees, a star, a dragon fly, myself. In all matter. This is incarnation, not just a one time event in the historical Jesus. All matter is incarnating, as theologian Diarmuid O’Murchu has said.

Each tree or star reveals God the Source in a particular way. This Source is energy. Matter is congealed energy. Energy does not die. This life-energy continues to evolve, to transform and to resurrect anew. This energy—God––is becoming, is unfinished, as we are, as theologian Ilia Delio has said.

As Dorothy Day says, we are called to engaged living. Quantum theory calls it entangled.

From the future, from the not yet, our oneness with all that is will manifest. And at the same time, our feet are on the earth as we walk with the poor, we feed the hungry, we break laws that are unjust, we stand with the marginalized, we leave no one or no thing outside our circle of love and dignity.

Be assured of this. What each of us does best, we must do. And do it now. Our future depends on it.

So if you ask me what the future holds—it holds all of us, if we dare to live it OUTLOUD.