Jun 3, 2021
Download "Womanpriest" for free as an eBook from Fordham Press here: https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823288298/womanpriest/
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.
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.