What we need in a pope-Gender Justice-Roy Bourgeois + others

Please forward this email and please respond to the LA Times. They closely monitor their online
traffic, there is a section for comments, so please write in, or call the editor of the op-ed page. If this goes well, Fr. Roy will be their go to Catholic' on women's ordination, the School ofthe Americas,
matters of conscience and other important issues. As many of you know Father Roy, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for his work to close the US School of the Americas, has been
speaking out for women's ordination in the Catholic Church. The Vatican excommunicated him and kicked him out of the Maryknoll Order last October 2012 (he's been a priest for 40years) for not recanting his belief that women are equal to men and can be called by God to be
priests. (Meanwhile the pedophile priests have yet to be excommunicated.)

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-pope-qualities-20130303,0,7041221,full.story
Gender justice
By Roy Bourgeois
The Catholic Church teaches that the call to be a priest comes from God. It also says that only men can be priests. The question I've been asking my fellow Catholics — and would ask the next pope — is this: How can a woman's call to priesthood — which is directly from God — be wrong? In failing to ordain women, the church is guilty of sexism, which is impossible to justify in a faith that preaches that a loving God creates everyone of equal worth. Historically the church's leaders, looking to keep themselves — all men — in power, have said that while all people are created equal, women's roles are separate. This argument for barring women priests reminds me of my childhood in Louisiana. I attended segregated schools and worshiped in a Catholic Church that reserved the last five pews for blacks. In my anger at the injustice being done to women, I am still filled with hope that women will be ordained, just as those segregated schools in Louisiana are now integrated
Roy Bourgeois was a Catholic priest with the Maryknoll Order for 40 years. He was dismissed from the priesthood in late 2012 after he refused to renounce his participation in an ordination ceremony for a female priest.