With Elaine Enns. A section in Making Peace with Conflict: Practical Skills for Conflict Transformation, edited by C. Schrock-Shenk & L. Ressler. Herald Press/Pandora Press. 8 pp

At the beginning of Mark’s Passion narrative, Jesus is gathered with his community at table when a somewhat mysterious woman approaches him and begins anointing his head with ointment (Mk 14:3-9). This highly symbolic act – associated in the Hebrew Bible with the prophet who designates the king (see ) – annoys the male participants at the dinner, who proceed to scold her (14:6). But Jesus defends her initiative and her insight, while rebuking his colleagues sharply: “Leave her alone!! Why do you make trouble for her?” This object lesson concerning female discipleship is so important that Jesus exhorts us to remember it “wherever the good news is proclaimed around the world” (14:9). Sadly, however, the church throughout its history has too often ignored this clear counsel, and persisted in “making trouble for women.”

Mary Ramerman was a lay minister at a dynamic inner city Catholic church in Rochester, NY, well-loved by the large congregation and deeply involved with the parish’s many neighborhood programs serving the poor and the marginalized. In 1993 she was designated “co-pastor” by the congregation, and began sharing in the Eucharistic celebration at the altar during Mass. In September, 1998, upon direct orders from the Vatican, Mary was summarily dismissed from her position by the bishop because of her “quasi-priestly” activity. The parish’s strenuous protests went unheeded, and a remarkable experiment in egalitarian leadership was quashed by a clerical hierarchy determined to keep the priestly franchise exclusively male. Such categorical exclusion of women from leadership is not, unfortunately, unique to the Roman Catholic tradition. Women still labor under second class citizenship in most Protestant and Anabaptist denominations as well.