Thoy Smith calls herself a “liberal thinker,” someone who lived
through Vatican II, and watched its promise of a more open-minded
future vanish under the orthodoxy of Pope John Paul II.
As television broadcast the recent papal transition, she witnessed a microcosm of the Roman Catholic Church: the liberals and conservatives, the Africans and Asians, the Europeans and Latin Americans.
Mostly, she saw the glaring void.
“It should break any Catholic woman’s heart to see no women involved anywhere,” she says.
No women elected the pope.
No women buried the pope.
“One woman did a reading at the funeral Mass,” she says. “But for the most part it was all males, with the exception of five little nuns cowering in the pew.”
The swift election of Pope Benedict XVI suggested a continuation of the same thinking critics say has oppressed Catholic women for centuries.
Sixty-eight percent of American Catholics believe women should be priests, according to a recent Gallup poll.
But in 1994, Pope John Paul II forbid further discussion of the controversial topic – enraging many Catholic women.
Tall, thin, and angular, Smith wears her silver hair in a stylish bob and enjoys being active with her husband at Pax Christi, where both serve as Extraordinary Ministers of Communion.
She struggles with disappointment and despondency, however, over the lack of equality for women.
They’re banned from the highest levels of church hierarchy, with its power of jurisdictional and sacramental authority. Women are not allowed to become deacons, and in some ultra-traditional dioceses, even altar girls are prohibited.
“In a world that has so much turmoil and hatred, how can we as a church – with such incredible power to influence the rest of the world – fail to utilize the gifts that women bring?” says Smith, 67. “How can we have the audacity to do that?”
Her husband, Bill, is retired from his career at a large oil company, where he trained the first wave of women to enter that work force.
“The question is, ‘Are you more Catholic than American in relationship to change?”‘ he says one morning in his home office, dressed in shorts and a Ride the Rockies T-shirt, sitting near a stack of Smart Money magazines.
“I’m right along with America, moving toward change and the equality of women. The church has not progressed, so I can’t say I’m in step with it.”
Born and raised in New Orleans, the Smiths are cradle Catholics who attended parochial schools. Back then, most women didn’t have careers, so Smith never thought about college.
She married her husband two years after high school graduation. They didn’t practice birth control, and she soon became a mother of three boys.
And when she finally started college, the year her youngest son went to first grade, it wasn’t for a degree.
“I thought it would be important for my husband’s career,” she says. “I was just going to take a couple of classes so at cocktail parties I could say I’d been to college.”
But she got hooked and went on to earn a master’s degree in education. Eventually she worked as associate superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of Denver, and then as founding principal for St. Thomas More Parish School in Centennial, the first school built by the Archdiocese of Denver in more than 30 years.
A pioneer of today’s work-life issues, Smith learned to balance career and family with a busy parish life. In the 1960s, she and her husband were vanguard Catholics, among the first to become Extraordinary Ministers of Communion immediately after Vatican II allowed expansion of lay participation.
“There was an excitement after Vatican II that the church would be different,” she says.
Many Catholics believed they would see female priests during their lifetime. The heyday of that hope came in the 1970s, when women flooded prominent theology schools to earn master’s degrees in divinity, preparing to become ordained Catholic priests.
The backlash hit in 1976, when the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith banned female priests in its encyclical, Inter Insigniores.
About this time, Smith’s consciousness was raised. Ironically, it wasn’t in a secular women’s group but at her parish, in a reading group led by a nun. “Honest to God, it hadn’t been on my radar before,” she says. “The most painful part of that recognition is that I had been betrayed by the church.”
Each night in bed, she would nudge her husband and say, “Listen to this!” Then she’d read aloud about gender inequities in the church.
“At first I was afraid to acknowledge certain things,” Bill Smith says. “I didn’t want her to go overboard.”
But then he noticed that if he could listen, really listen, she’d feel better. “So when it came to a pretty obvious inequity,” he says, “I began to acknowledge it more and more.”
Smith isn’t the type to explode with rage, but her husband trod carefully. “Her anger was a simmering thing, always in the background of our relationship,” he says.
He became her captive audience during their long drives each summer from Colorado to vacation in South Carolina, when she’d read aloud from women’s spirituality books. “Sometimes I even had to listen to her feminine tapes,” he says with a grin. “But that was fine. It was part of my enlightenment too.”
Returning to work after vacation offered Smith no escape.
“Mrs. Smith, why can’t I be a priest?” the young girls would ask their school principal.
How to communicate hope to these Catholic children she was charged with training?
Honesty, Smith figured, was best. “At this time, our church does not allow women to be priests,” she would say. “But we have to hope and pray it will someday soon.”
Back at home, her husband and children asked why she stayed in a church that she believed relegated women to second-class status. Her answer remains the same today.
“It’s a paradox,” she says. “I am so disturbed by the way women are treated in the church today – I can’t even say how disturbed I am.
“But I balance this with love for this church I am so disturbed with. I can’t be who I am apart from the Catholic Church. It’s in my blood, in my bones.”
Pax Christi appreciates the gifts of women, she says. Women acolytes assist the priest. Women hold seven of the 10 seats on the Pastoral Council, which helps the parish priest, the Rev. Ken Przybyla, guide the parish ministries.
“He creates an atmosphere that is so all-inclusive – in the best way he can, under the constraints he’s under – that you just say, ‘This is the best we can do, right now, under these circumstances,’ ” says Smith.
On Ascension Sunday, she stood next to the priest, participating in the rite of giving bread and wine to the faithful. Wearing a long coral dress topped by a white sweater, she leaned toward the man facing her, and tipped the chalice to his lips.
“The Blood of Christ,” she said.
Bill Smith stood nearby, serving with her. In accompanying his wife on her difficult journey, he has been transformed. “The symbolism of women priests would be fantastic,” he says.
“First you have to be a priest before you can be anything else in this church. That means women as priests would blow the doors off the church.”
Right now, however, Bill Smith’s highest expectation for the church is glacial change.
MORE TO KNOW
On July 25, nine women will defy the Vatican by becoming the first female Roman Catholic priests and deacons to be ordained in North America.
The controversial ceremony will take place on a boat in the international waters between Canada and the United States where no diocese has jurisdiction and cannot block the action, and it will follow a conference on women as priests at Carleton University in Ottawa.
“There is no doubt the church has to change,” said Canadian Archbishop Anthony Meagher to the Catholic News Service. “There has to be more involvement of women in leadership and in decision-making.”
But this is not a valid ordination, he said.
A similar ceremony took place in 2002 on the Danube River between Germany and Austria, when seven women were ordained by a schismatic bishop – and swiftly excommunicated by the Vatican.
MORE TO KNOW
On July 25, nine women will defy the Vatican by becoming the first female Roman Catholic priests and deacons to be ordained in North America.
The controversial ceremony will take place on a boat in the international waters between Canada and the United States where no diocese has jurisdiction and cannot block the action, and it will follow a conference on women as priests at Carleton University in Ottawa.
“There is no doubt the church has to change,” said Canadian Archbishop Anthony Meagher to the Catholic News Service. “There has to be more involvement of women in leadership and in decision-making.”
But this is not a valid ordination, he said.
A similar ceremony took place in 2002 on the Danube River between Germany and Austria, when seven women were ordained by a schismatic bishop – and swiftly excommunicated by the Vatican.