Womanpriest - (Catholic Practice in North America) by Jill Peterfeso (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This book is openly available in digital formats thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

While some Catholics and even non-Catholics today are asking if priests are necessary, especially given the ongoing sex-abuse scandal, The Roman Catholic Womanpriests (RCWP) looks to reframe and reform Roman Catholic priesthood, starting with ordained women. Womanpriest is the first academic study of the RCWP movement. As an ethnography, Womanpriest analyzes the womenpriests' actions and lived theologies in order to explore ongoing tensions in Roman Catholicism around gender and sexuality, priestly authority, and religious change.

In order to understand how womenpriests navigate tradition and transgression, this study situates RCWP within post-Vatican II Catholicism, apostolic succession, sacraments, ministerial action, and questions of embodiment. Womanpriest reveals RCWP to be a discrete religious movement in a distinct religious moment, with a small group of tenacious women defying the Catholic patriarchy, taking on the priestly role, and demanding reconsideration of Roman Catholic tradition. Doing so, the women inhabit and re-create the central tensions in Catholicism today.

Review Quotes

We have desperately needed a book on the Roman Catholic Womenpriests, a growing movement with one foot in the Roman church and one foot dragging it toward reform. Womanpriest is that book. Jill Peterfeso draws on rich interviews with RCWP women, as well as ethnographic participation and primary documents, to show how different womenpriests understand the balance between tradition and reform; how they hold positions for women's ordination and against clericalism at the same time; and how numbers of Catholic communities are already formed and transforming in relationship with priests who are women.---Julie Byrne, Hartman Chair of Catholic Studies, Hofstra University, and author of The Other Catholics: Remaking America's Largest Religion

Author Jill Peterfeso has done an excellent job getting behind the movements that have fostered women for ordinations, the women priests themselves and the communities they lead outside the normal parish structure.---Rev. Alexander Santora, The Jersey Journal

Her ethnographic account, based on five years of interviews, digital questionnaires, and participant-observation of liturgies, offers the most measured analysis of RCWP to date. Neither sensationalizing the women as heroic renegades nor condemning them as fringe heretics, Peterfeso instead offers readers a nuanced portrait of their lives and worship spaces, letting them speak for themselves.-- "Commonweal"

...a valuable contribution to a complicated set of issues, a welcome narrative about one segment of the movement that is in the process of transforming one of patriarchy's last bulwarks.-- "Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual"

About the Author

Jill M. Peterfeso is Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department at Guilford College. She is a cultural historian of American religion whose published scholarship focuses on gender and sexuality, resistance to authority, and social justice, specifically in Roman Catholicism and Mormonism.