BY HEIDI ULRICHSEN
One of just three women in the world who considers herself to be a Roman Catholic bishop visited Greater Sudbury Friday.
Patricia Fresen, 66, was in town to visit with Marie Bouclin, a local woman who will be unofficially ordained a priest at a ceremony in Toronto May 27. Neither woman is considered to be Roman Catholic clergy by the church’s hierarchy.
Fresen was unofficially made a bishop in 2005 by three male Roman Catholic bishops who believe women should be ordained. She had been previously unofficially ordained a priest in 2003.
The woman grew up as a Roman Catholic in South Africa, and was a nun in the Dominican order for 45 years.
She now lives in Germany and is training about 150 women and married men who want to become Roman Catholic priests. She never thought about becoming a priest in her younger years, but gradually started believing it was unfair women weren’t allowed to become ordained.
Fresen has a PhD in theology, and used to work at the seminary in South Africa where men were trained to become priests.
“I was the only woman on the staff, and I was teaching sacramental theology, spirituality and homiletics (preaching). I was good enough to teach them how to preach, but I was never allowed to preach in the chapel myself because I’m a woman,” she said.
“My place in the church was in the corner in the back, and all the students sat in front of me. More and more it began to get to me. I began to realize how unjust it was.
“I had all the same qualifications as the men. I had a doctorate, and some of the priests had a master’s degree.”
Fresen was also a spiritual director at the seminary, and students often came to confess their sins to her and talk about their problems. But because she wasn’t a priest, she was unable to give them absolution or assign them penance.
“A lot of those students would say to me, ‘If I could imagine a woman being ordained, sister, I would imagine it being you’.”
Frustrated, Fresen left the seminary, and got another job at a Roman Catholic university in South Africa. In 2002, she heard seven women were going to be ordained in the Roman Catholic church on the Danube River in Germany.
A few months later, the university sent her to a conference in Frankfurt, Germany. She met two of the ordained women while she was there, and they asked if she also wanted to be ordained. “Everything within me just came up and I said, ‘Yes.’ I had longed for it for years and years and years. It was being offered to me on a plate,” she said.
Fresen was ordained as a priest at a ceremony in Barcelona, Spain in 2003.
The ceremony was performed by two of the ordained women who, by that time, had also been ordained as bishops.
The women were made bishops by three male Roman Catholic bishops who sympathized with their cause.
After Fresen was ordained as a priest, she was thrown out of the Dominican order of nuns and lost her job at the university. She left the country because she was offered a job in Germany training other women and married men who want to become Roman Catholic priests.
“I never thought they (the Dominican nuns) would throw me out. We stood up for justice during apartheid. So many sisters were jailed. If they could stand up against racism, I really believed they would stand up against sexism.”
Fresen was eventually contacted by one of the three male bishops who had helped to ordain the two female bishops.
He said he was afraid the church hierarchy was going to figure out who he was soon, and he and his peers wanted to ordain one more female bishop first.
“He said ‘We need one more.’ To ordain priests, you only need one bishop. But to ordain bishops, you need three bishops. They ordained me as a bishop on Jan. 1, 2005. So I’m a very young bishop, although I’m a very old lady.”
Fresen said the male bishops who ordained her have not yet been caught, but they live in fear that the church hierarchy is going to find out who they are.
The woman said the next step for her and the other female bishops is to ordain a bishop for North America, since it is hard for her to keep travelling across the ocean to ordain women and married men. This bishop will be elected by her peers.
“My ultimate hope with all this is to change a little bit the kind of church we have,” she said.
“The kind of church we have now is not the kind of community Jesus had in mind. I don’t think Jesus would be happy with the hierarchical structures of the church, or the fact that women are excluded from being ordained.”
