Leading Catholic Attacks Ordination of Rome's First Woman Priest
Episcopal News Service. December 5, 1996 [96-1642]
Luigi Sandri, Reporter for Ecumenical News International
(ENI) A senior Vatican theologian has declared that a woman who was recently ordained as an Anglican priest in Rome is an "apostate" and not a real priest.
The attack, by Monsignor Rino Fisichella, who was appointed to a senior post last year by Pope John Paul II, was made in the November 16 edition of Avvenire, a daily newspaper with links to Italy's Catholic bishops. There was concern that the remarks might prove controversial especially since Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey made an official visit to Pope John Paul in December.
On November 3, Ruth Cecilia Monge Teran de Erazo, married to an Anglican clergyman, was ordained as a priest in the Church of St Paul's Within-the-Walls, the biggest Anglican church in Rome. She celebrated her first Eucharist in the same church on November 10.
Those involved in the event went to great lengths to ensure that the Roman Catholic Church would not take offense at the ordination of a woman priest so close to the Vatican. After the ordination of Cecilia Erazo, the Rt. Rev. Jeffery Rowthorn, Bishop of the Convocation of American Churches in Europe, told reporters: "We did not deliberately create this occasion. We are doing what we normally do as Episcopalians, and that includes ordaining people, men and women, who are called to holy orders."
Writing in Avvenire, Monsignor Fisichella deplored the fact that Cecilia Erazo was ordained "in Rome, in the See of St. Peter," and at a time when the pope was taking part in celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of his own ordination as a priest in Cracow on November 1, 1946.
Fisichella, who was appointed by the pope last year as vice chairman of a committee preparing for the celebration of a Roman Catholic jubilee in the year 2000, said the "Cecilia" affair struck a "false note."
Fisichella pointed out in his article that "John Paul II, as Pope, has had the courage to reconfirm the firm teaching of the church on the inadmissibility of women to the priesthood."
Another "false note," said the theologian, was to be found in Cecilia Erazo's "open admission that she was once a Catholic, but then converted to Anglicanism -- conversion from the Catholic to the Anglican faith is called apostasy." (Erazo was born into a Catholic family and converted to Anglicanism in her youth. She and her husband Juan are from Ecuador. They migrated to Rome four years ago to minister to Anglicans among the city's 20,000 Latin Americans.)
The theologian's article concludes: "Cecilia Monge [Erazo] is not a priest, and the use of this word deceives people and falsifies reality. The teaching of Pope Leo XIII in the letter Apostolicae Curae of 1896, on the subject of the sacrament of holy orders celebrated by the Church of England, is in fact irrevocable, namely that, since the apostolic succession... is broken, this holy sacrament is null and void."
On the very same page, Avvenire reported that in London early in November, 10 former Church of England priests were accepted into the Roman Catholic Church and ordained as priests. Some of them will minister as priests in London, even though they are married.
Anglican sources said that Erazo and staff of the Anglican Centre in Rome have found Fisichella's article upsetting. But they have declined to comment until Carey has completed his visit to Pope John Paul in December.
However, a Protestant pastor and journalist, Luca Maria Negro, head of NEV, the press agency of the Federation of Italian Protestant Churches (FCEI), has written a letter of protest to Avvenire, stating: "If Cecilia Monge [Erazo] is an apostate, then what are the 10 Anglican priests who have now become Catholic priests, and who are mentioned on the very same page of the newspaper? Isn't it time Christians ceased this kind of verbal aggression towards one another?"
FCEI's president, Domenico Tomasetto, told NEV: "Now we are on the road to reconciliation in the run-up to Graz [in Austria, where the second European Ecumenical Assembly is to be held in June 1997 under the theme of reconciliation], an article such as Fisichella's is definitely not the best way to greet the Anglican primate George Carey who is expected in Rome in early December."