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Läste en artikel av Therese Koturbash om det, som jag på många sätt kan känna igen mig i...

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"As a quiet, faith-filled, observant Catholic who appreciates the opportunity for daily mass, never in my wildest dreams or nightmares could I have imagined becoming a front-line worker in the campaign for women priests.

A lawyer by profession today, during youthful career discernment struggles, I would often innocently pray for a figurative “St. Paul moment” of being “knocked off my horse” by the Holy Spirit so that when I “stood up,” future direction would be clear. St. Paul's experience after all seemed like a tidy and efficient way for moving forward. Yet, as life teaches, there are reasons for the sayings which urge caution about this sort of thing:

— Be careful what you wish for, or

— Pray, then duck.

Years later, during a pilgrimage to World Youth Days in Toronto 2002, the St. Paul moment with all its pain came for me. All my life, I have been fortunate to take for granted a church of the Canadian prairies filled with the spiritual energy of the Second Vatican Council. At World Youth Days, I was awakened to the sight of an unfamiliar church.

The “fall,” or should I say “the reckoning,” bolted me into a painful awareness of discrimination against the women who are called by God to serve as priests. Though at one time I might have written off the women's ordination movement as one of a rebellious rabble-rousing kind, it suddenly dawned on me that the exclusion of women from sacred ministry was more than an issue about equality (as important as that is) but also a matter of critical concern for all God's people — women and men. As a faith community, we must be concerned about all priests called by God to serve us and our church.

The World Youth Days' experience literally did knock me off my horse. I was disoriented, fearful, and enormously grieving for the circumstances that see so many vocations excluded from service to our church just because those vocations happen to be planted in women. My once cherished daily mass had now become a time of painful tears.

Though I tried to reach out for help about the stirrings inside, reactions from others were frequently negative. I felt as though I had been stricken with a disease or a spiritual cancer. I was fearful that “by talking” I would spread what I perceived to be the contagion of the virus or infection which had inflicted this painful new vision of my church. If I caused contagion to spread, I worried about the damage I would be responsible for inflicting on my community of faith."

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