For Immediate Release 6/25/09

Women in Ministry with St. Paul focus of over 200 international Mary Magdala Celebrations
Organizers Request Vatican to Restore Deleted Women Leaders in Lectionary

CLEVELAND, OH:  In mid-July, organizers across the US and in Canada, Great Britain, Australia and Uganda will join together in a worldwide effortto expand awareness of women leaders in the early Church, especially Mary of Magdala, Phoebe, Prisca, Lydia and other little known women leaders who ministered with f St. Paul.

The Vatican designated this past year as the Year of St. Paul and invited Catholics to more fully reflect on his important role in the church.  FutureChurch’s Mary of Magdala  this year will celebrate the often unnoticed women who ministered alongside of St. Paul.  Participants will also be asked to send postcards to Vatican leaders asking them to include the missing stories of biblical women leaders.

“Many people mistakenly believe St. Paul was anti-women,” Said FutureChurch Director Sr. Christine Schenk, Yet, as Pope Benedict himself has said so well, St. Paul worked closely with women leaders such as Phoebe, Junia, Lydia and Prisca (papal address February 14, 2007).  Unfortunately, Romans 16, a passage that names eleven women and identifies some of them as deacons, apostles, and co-workers, is never proclaimed on a Sunday. Nor are the accounts of women leaders in the Acts of the Apostles (Lydia, Prisca, Tabitha), which are read only on the weekdays of Easter, so most Catholics never hear about their important ministry alongside Paul. (For more information, see “Women in the Bible and Lectionary” by Ruth Fox OSB, published in 1996 by Liturgy 90)

“St. Mary of Magdala was a foremost leader in the early Church, led the group of women who accompanied Jesus at his death, and first proclaimed the good news of his resurrection.  She was not a prostitute as some believe.  For centuries Mary of Magdala’s story, like those of the women leaders in the ministry of St. Paul, has been minimized or excised from the official lectionary used in both Catholic and Protestant churches,” said Sr. Christine Schenk of FutureChurch.

For the past two years, FutureChurch spearheaded a campaign to “put women back in the biblical picture” at last October’s Synod on the Word. For the first time in history Catholic bishops meeting in a synod “recognized and encouraged” the ministry of women of the Word, discussed the need to restore women's stories to the Lectionary, and invited the greatest number of women ever to participate as auditors and biblical experts.

Although the synod is over, the work to open an examination of the Lectionary as recommended by Synod Proposal 16 is not done.  Participants at Mary of Magdala celebrations across the nation will be sending paper and electronic postcards to Cardinal Antionia Cañizares Llovera, Prefect for the Congregation for Divine Worship encouraging him and the synod committee to follow through on this proposal.  Specifically, the postcards ask to: 

• Open an examination of the Lectionary to “see if the actual selection and ordering of the readings are truly adequate to the mission of the Church in this historic moment,” as recommended by Synod Proposal 16.

• Restore women leaders such as Phoebe (Romans 16) and Lois and Eunice (2 Tim 1:4, 5) to Lectionary texts from which they have been deleted.

• Include stories about other women leaders such as Shiprah and Puah, the midwives who saved a nation of Hebrew boy-children, perhaps even Moses.

• Convene a gender-balanced group of biblical scholars and liturgists to decide which women’s stories would be most fruitful for prayer, preaching and catechesis if added to the Lectionary.

“We think it’s important for women and men to learn the contemporary scholarship about women in the early Church and we are especially happy to have a celebration in which women can preside and preach at worship,” said Mary Louise Hartman of Princeton, New Jersey, FutureChurch Board member

To educate about women leaders and to model gender balance in scripture proclamation, FutureChurch began special international celebrations of the Feast of St. Mary of Magdala in 1998.  Each year nearly 300 such events are held in mid July. Participants hear presentations by biblical scholars about early women leaders and experience prayer services at which competently prepared women preach and preside. 

“One of the reasons the Mary of Magdala celebrations have proved so enduring is that Catholic women and men are edified to discover that Jesus included women in his Galilean discipleship.  Most Catholics mistakenly believe that Jesus called only men, when in fact Luke 8:1-3 tells us Mary of Magdala, Joanna, Susanna and many other women accompanied him in Galilee. Since the Lukan reading is never read on a Sunday, the stories of Jesus' women disciples are rarely if ever the subject of homiletic attention,” says Chris Schenk, FutureChurch Executive Director. 

FutureChurch, headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, is a U.S. coalition of 5,000 parish based Catholics striving to educate fellow Catholics about the seriousness of the priest shortage, the centrality of the Eucharist (the Mass), and the systemic inequality of women in the Catholic Church. FutureChurch makes presentations throughout the country, distributes educational and informational packets and recruits activists who call on Catholic leadership to open ordination to all baptized persons who are called to priestly ministry by God and the people of God.

FutureChurch
17307 Madison Avenue, Lakewood, OH 44107
216-228-0869
www.futurechurch.org