Read The Silence We Keep: A Nun's View of the Catholic Priest Scandal for Free Online

governed: by love, by including everyone, and by a diversity of divine works shared equally by men and women. In the beginning, the Jesus Movement was seen as a religious-renewal movement within Judaism, aimed at correcting its abuses and relieving the oppression of the poor and the outcast. Maybe it was meant to be a divine renewal movement in all churches and priesthoods, aimed at correcting clerical abuses and aiding the poor and the outcast, once and for all. It was never intended to be a church, always a renewal movement within religion and priesthood. To me, the Jesus Movement became the most unchurch possible, and Jesus the most unpriestly priest. The visions Jesus reveals consistently of church and priesthood still seem unlike anything this world has ever believed in or seen. Thus we still don’t know how to make peace on earth.
    Unlike any priesthood, then or now, the priesthood Jesus guarantees heaven only for society’s rejects, for three distinctly mentioned groups of outcasts: the sick and disabled, children and the desperately poor, and his favorite dinner guests—prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners. Consistently, Jesus makes a public divine point of welcoming, touching, healing, and dining with those who are hated, persecuted, and condemned by everyone else. Those no one wants around the table, Jesus invites to be seated next to him. In the Jesus Movement, the last are always called to be first. The lowly are always raised up.
    Not only do the last become the first in the Jesus Movement, but the leaders and presiders of the table community and the Eucharist become the ones who serve. And in every corner of every world, even now, who knows best how to serve but women? History has taught us that lesson for thousands of years. Women were servants extraordinaire, as well as constant companions and disciples of Christ. Because of how they were treated and touched by Jesus, theologians note that women and children were drawn in large numbers to the Jesus Movement. Wherever Jesus went, women and children followed. I see nothing in the Gospels that would lead anyone to believe that Jesus would exclude women from priesthood. In the Gospels, we repeatedly find evidence to the contrary. In story after story, Jesus breaks Jewish laws almost on purpose in order to make their divine point clear, in order to reveal the real intent of God. And in story after story, we find Jesus violating publicly (occasionally on purpose) society’s and Judaism’s most oppressive customs: breaking the Sabbath to heal the sick and feed the hungry, breaking nearly every law through the inclusive, even intimate, way he relates to women in public. It’s as though there’s some instant, intuitive, divine connection between Jesus and women. Nothing stops Jesus from seizing every opportunity toheal women, to free them, to save them from being stoned to death, even inviting himself to dinner in their homes. From city to city Jesus seeks intentionally the hospitality of the women disciples, finding himself at home in the company of those who believed in him. Just one look was all it took for women and children to see clearly that Jesus was God. As story after story reveals, it’s the women whose lives were most miraculously changed and liberated by Jesus and his teachings. And it was the women who remained in touch with him, both before and after his death and resurrection.
    The Gospel of Saint Mark (6:21—34) tells a powerful story of a woman with a hemorrhage, whom biblical society would have avoided like the plague and condemned as evil. After twelve years of expensive and unsuccessful medical treatments, she hears Jesus is in town and goes out to see him. The story says, “She came up behind him in the crowd and put her hand to his cloak. ‘If I just touch his clothing,’ she thought, ‘I shall get well.’” And she did. “Immediately her flow of blood dries up and the feeling that she was cured of her affliction ran through