Marellen Mayers - The Womanpriest

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MARELLEN MAYERS: The Woman Priest

Marellen Mayers laughs easily and often as she shared the story of her vocation.  Sometimes the laughter is ironic, because the road she’s taken to the ministry has had twists, turns and detours that might have discouraged others from following through on answering the call.

Marellen is a Roman Catholic Woman Priest.  It’s a provocative title and one that she is fiercely proud of.   Roman Catholic Women Priests, or RCWP,  is a an international movement that was born in 2002 when seven women were ordained on the banks of the Danube River in Germany.  The group openly challenges the Roman Catholic Church’s Canon Law 1024, which states that only a baptized man can validly receive sacred ordination.  RCWP describes the law as unjust and discriminatory.  Today there are more than 130 Roman Catholic Women Priests worldwide.

The Catholic Church does not recognize RCWP as a movement within the church or the ordinations.  However, the women priests contend that they have been accepted by the Catholic people and will continue to serve in “grassroots communities where all are equal and welcome.”

Marellen’s ordination 2011 was the fulfillment of a calling that began to feel when she was growing up in Baltimore.  As a child she often “played priest” with her brother and sister.  A few years later, as a young woman she joined the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent DePaul, an apostolic community of women throughout the world dedicated to helping the poor.

But her deep devotion to the church has been accompanied by a need to understand why the church does what it does.  She has always asked questions and those questions have not always been met with comfortable or satisfactory answers.  Among the questions she feels was never fully answered was why, in May 1980, she was asked to leave the Daughters of Charity after serving five and a half years.

During the ensuing 31 years, she worked as a nursing assistant, child live specialist, social worker and campus minister.  It was also during this time that she met her husband, Craig, to whom she’s been happily married for more than 25 years.

The embers of her calling were not fully extinguished when she left the Daughters.  In fact, they began to burn hotter, leading her to feel that she was being led to serve in a higher capacity than she had before.  But she was also conflicted by this feeling, knowing that as a Roman Catholic there was no way she could become a priest.  She and Craig considered moving to the Episcopal Church, but Marellen ultimately did not want to walk away from the Catholic Church.

Then one evening, a friend who not only recognized her calling but also the struggle she was having with it, asked if she had ever heard of the Roman Catholic Women Priests.  Marellen initially thought the friend was joking, but after he told her more about the group and she did her own research, she reached out and contacted RCWP.  She was ordained June 4, 2011.

The path since has not always been smooth.  The ordination has cost her one job and perhaps prevented her from getting others.  But Marellen will tell you that the fulfillment of a life-long call to answer Christ’s call to ministry has been worth it.

In the following excerpt, Marellen describes finding out about RCWP.

RECALLED

I started at Shelam Institute in what was more of a residency program than an internship.  It was 10 days in the summer of ’07 and 10 days in the summer of ’08. In the summer of ‘07 when I met my class there were 15 of us in the class, all women, all Christians, but there were eight different denominations represented.  Of those 15 women, there were also eight women who were ordained in various ministries – Episcopalian, United Church of Christ, Lutheran, Methodist.  I felt like  I had hit a gold mine of , “Wow, can I talk to these people!”  And they were very helpful, too.  And in ’07 I shared with them that I kind of had this calling to priest hood and I didn’t know what to do with it because I’m Roman Catholic and it’s not going to happen in the Roman Catholic church, or so I thought.  That’s when, it was the year of ’07, that Craig and I started talking about the Episcopal church.  He said, “If you want to do that we can do that, part of my family’s High Anglican anyway.  This is important to you and you can go to seminary and  you can be ordained and you can get a parish somewhere.”  So that was the year that I took to really discern about the Episcopal church.   My classmates thought that when I came back in ’08 that I’d be telling them that I’d been accepted into the Episcopal seminary.  In the meantime, a dear priest friend of ours came to dinner and we were talking, and I’m forever asking him, “When do you think this is going to change?”  And, “When do you that’s going to change in the church?” When I mentioned the role of women and I mentioned women’s ordination – and I had looked up the women’s ordination conference and that kind of stuff.  And he said, “Haven’t you ever heard of Roman Catholic Women Priests?”  When he said that, I said, “What did you say?”  And he repeated it and I threw my napkin across the table at him.  Craig didn’t know what was going on.  I said, “Oh, come on, you’re pulling my leg!”  And he said, “No, I’m not.  When you get a chance, go to your computer and look them up.”  Lo and behold, that night that’s exactly what I did and I was on the computer about three hours, reading everything on their website.  And when I finally went to bed – it was like 2:30 in the morning – I woke my husband up and said, “I think now God has found a way that I can be ordained a priest!”