It’s An Old Joke. God Help Us!
It’s an old joke.
It begins with the question “Do you think women will ever be ordained priests?”
The man in the Roman collar responds, “I don’t think I’ll live to see the day, but I’m certain my grandchildren will.”
At eighty, Father Flynn won’t live to see the punchline become a reality in his Roman Catholic Church. Married and father of two grown sons and a grandfather four times over, Father Tobin has spent his entire priesthood in the Episcopal/Anglican Catholic Church working with woman priests.
[EDITORS’ NOTE: Given the rise in the United States of the ultra-patriarchal Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), which advocates for the absolute submission of wives to their husbands, voting by households instead of the personal franchise and the husband’s right to vote for the household, we believe it’s important to begin offering some perspective on the critical and courageous roles of women in our Churches and Faiths. We’ll offer more background over time.]
Following the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong and parts of China, it was impossible for Anglican priests to reach the faithful in neutral Macau, where there were no resident priests.
Decades before any Anglican church regularized the ordination of women, Hong Kong (Victoria) Bishop Ronald Hall came up with a novel idea – dispatch the not-ordained Florence Li Tim-Oi to Macau with special permission to distribute the sacraments. He explained to Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple:
"I have given her permission to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. If I could reach her physically I should ordain her priest rather than give her permission … I'm not an advocate for the ordination of women. I am, however, determined that no prejudices should prevent the congregations committed to my care having the sacraments of the Church."
Rev. Florence Li Tim-Oi
In January 1944, almost twenty months before the War in the Pacific ended, Li and Harris met in un-Japanese-occupied Hsinxing and traveled to Shaoquing, where he ordained her a priest on January 25, despite the fact that the Archbishop of Canterbury would later take a public stand against the ordination.
After the war and to avoid conflict, Li resigned her canonical license but not her ordination.
Under communist rule in China, Li was subjected to constant public criticism and ridicule for adhering to a foreign religion. When churches across China were closed, she was condemned as counter-revolutionary, compelled to work on a farm and then in a factory and subjected to “political re-education.” Afraid of being seen and reported to communist party officials, she regularly retired to the mountains to pray. During the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976, units of the Red Guards forced her to cut up her own liturgical vestments. In 1974, she was allowed to retire from factory work.
The Anglican Church of Hong Kong officially ordained to women in 1971 and Li was publicly recognized as a priest.
Finally able to leave China, Li settled in Toronto in 1983 and, the following year, was reinstated as a priest of the Anglican Church of Canada, where women were first ordained in 1975. In 1984, she was honored with a Westminster Abbey celebration of the 40th anniversary of her ordination.
In 1969, the Canadian Province of Father Tobin’s Anglican/Episcopal (Catholic) Communion was the first to permit the ordination of female deacons. The first female priests in the United States were ordained in 1974; Canada followed two years later. Barbara Harris was ordained suffragan bishop of Massachusetts in 1989; Victoria Matthews was elected the first female bishop of the Anglican Church in Canada in 1993 and consecrated the following year.
The Episcopal Church of the United States celebrates Florence Li Tim Oi’s feast day on January 24 – the eve of her ordination; she is memorialized in the Calendar of Saints of the Anglican Church of Canada on February 26, the anniversary of her death.
In Judaism, Mirima Shapira-Luria taught in the Yeshiva of Padua in the 14th Century; Asenath Barzani (1590–1670) served as the head of Mosul Yeshiva; Hannah rach-Verbemacher (1805-1880) was known as the Maiden of Ludmir and Chasidic Rebbe in the Russian Empire. Murdered at Auschwitz in October 1944, Regina Jonas (1902 - 1944) was the first woman ordained as a rabbi - December 27, 1945 - under the auspices of the Liberal Rabbis’ Association. At the Theresienstadt Nazi transit camp she ministered to women and worked under the direction of – the later famous psychologist - Viktor Frankl to prevent suicides.
A 2025 version of the old joke:
“Do you think you’ll see the day when your Church will ordain women?” Father Tobin asked Father Flynn.
“I’m pretty sure your grandchildren will,” the Roman priest responded.
Well…
Except…
There is the true story of Ludmila Javorova – Roman Catholicism’s incarnation Florence Li Tim-Oi.
Quick history:
Universally known as Tito, Josip Broz was a Yugoslav communist revolutionary and politician who earned his reputation in the resistance to German occupation during World War II. Following the war, he “served” as prime minister from 1945 to 1963 and president and dictator from 1953 until his death in 1980. As early as 1953, The New York Times (“VATICAN SEES WAR ON RELIGION BY TITO; Persecution of Catholics Laid to Yugoslave Regime in a Note Now Made Public MURDER OF CLERICS CITED….” January 14, 1954) reported:
“Both the regime of Marshal Tito and the Communist party are unceasingly fighting against religion and particularly against the Roman Catholic church and make no secret of their uncompromisingly atheistic ideas, the Vatican said. The Roman Catholic Church has been deprived of almost all its press, all its schools have been closed and children are obliged to frequent schools in which the teaching of atheism is compulsory, it added. The faithful who profess their religion or even go to church are subject to persecutions, the clergy and even the bishops are vexed, attacked, fined, imprisoned and reduced to abject poverty and the majority of seminaries on which the future life of the church depends have been closed, the Vatican said.”
A July 24, 1946 The New York Times headline reflected the future of the Church: “Murder of 230 Priests Reported In Yugoslav Anti-Church Terror.”
Regina Jonas
Yugoslav Father Felix Davidek spent more than 14 years in a Czech prison; he and his brother priests secretly celebrated mass using bread and wine made from fermented raisins brought to them by their families. Davidek was especially moved by the situation of imprisoned lay women and nuns who had no access to the sacraments. Ultimately, Davidek and Javorova combined skills and mutual respect to establish Koinotes, an underground organization dedicated to serving persecuted Catholics and covertly educating male seminarians.
Jan Blaha was secretly ordained a priest in July 1967 and a bishop three months later; he presided at Davidek’s ordination as a bishop for the Koinotes and other underground communities. At great risk to herself, Javorova faithfully served Davidek and the underground Church; because of the ongoing persecution of the Church and the risks to candidates for priesthood and the episcopacy, she memorized the names and data on every one of the approximately 68 priests and the 17 bishops Davidek ordained.
After a secret 1970 council of the underground Church called by Davidek split on the issue of ordaining women, with his brother as a witness and using the Rite of Ordination of the Roman Catholic Church, the bishop ordained Ludmila as a deacon and then a priest in the Roman Catholic Church. Her task was to minister primarily in women’s prisons, where, because of an exclusively male priestly ministry, women had been “left out,” often losing their faith and in need of spiritual accompaniment.
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Rome sought to regularize the underground ordinations – including those of married men who had received special permission to celebrate the sacraments in both the Roman and Byzantine traditions. Married priests of the Koinotes community were permitted to minister only in the Byzantine Rites and communities. The Byzantine had a tradition of married priests and was in union with Rome. In 1996, Rome explicitly prohibited Javorova from exercising any priestly minister and instructed her to tell no one about the prohibition.
Miriam Therese Winter, Ludmila Javorova’s biographer, notes:
"[Ludmila] said, 'The work of the Holy Spirit means you are left with something you have to do. And you will know that you have to do it.' "
It’s a strange world we live in.
In the two most tradition-bound churches of Western Christianity, Bishop Mariann Budde is the spiritual leader for the Episcopal Diocese serving the District of Columbia and four Maryland counties and by naming Sister Tiziana Merletti to serve as Secretary of the Dicastery (Roman Catholic-speak for papal “department”) for Consecrated Life, Pope Leo XIV is continuing his predecessor’s practice of naming women to the highest offices of the Vatican.
Ludmila Javorova
In January 2025, Pope Francis appointed Franciscan Sister Raffaella Petrini as governor of the Vatican City State, the first woman to ever hold the position. Pope Francis had already named several women to some of the highest roles in Church governance and Leo XIV, drawing on his years of working closely with women in mission in Peru, can be expected to follow and expand on his predecessor’s example.
On June 9, 1978 the Deseret News, a semi-official publication of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced, “every faithful, worthy man in the Church may receive the holy priesthood.” The barrier to men of color entering the priesthood and dating to Joseph Smith (1805-1844), the Church’s founder, was finally lifted. The barrier to women remains in effect.
The admission of women to the priesthood will be a race between Rome and the Latter-day Saints into the next century. We’re betting on Rome to win the gold medal for ordaining women deacons long before the starting gun for the priesthood race is fired.
Yet, in the United States, the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, has disfellowshipped some of its most prominent churches – Saddleback Church, a megachurch in southern California; Fern Creek Baptist of Louisville, Kentucky; and First Baptist Church in Alexandra, Virginia among them – because they have employed female pastors. In its 2024 and 2025 conventions, the SBC narrowly rejected an amendment to the Convention’s constitution requiring local churches to only appoint or employ men in the role of pastor or elder. Member churches opposed to female pastors are expected to continue pursuing the issue.
But there’s a (relatively) recent addition to the restricting-the-role-of-women “religious leaders” and “churches” in the United States.
Doug Wilson established the Confederation of Reformed Evangelicals in Moscow, Idaho in 1998. Renamed the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches in 2004, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches in 2011, and the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), it is a network of approximately 150 churches (primarily) in the U.S. and around the world. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and his family belong to CREC churches in Washington, D.C. and Tennessee. The CREC emphasis is on an all-powerful God who has dominion over all society.
Bishop Mariann Budde addresses President Trump, January 21, 2025
In Politico (May 23, 2025. “Doug Wilson Has Spent Decades Pushing for a Christian Theocracy. In Trump’s DC, the New Right Is Listening.”), writer Ian Ward outlines Wilson’s history and goals:
“He is, by his own description, an outspoken proponent of Christian theocracy — the idea that American society, including its government, should be governed by a conservative interpretation of Biblical law…
“In January, Wilson received his most significant political boost to date when Pete Hegseth - who is a member of a CREC church in Tennessee and publicly praised Wilson’s work — was confirmed as Trump’s secretary of Defense…
“His primary message…is that ‘theocracy’ isn’t a scary concept.
“’When you say “theocracy,” people think Gilead and women in red dresses, or the Ayatollah’s Iran… But, he argued, that’s only because most people are thinking of ‘ecclesiocracy,’ or political rule by clerics and church officials. What he has in mind for America is closer to a return to the political order embodied by ‘the Constitution of the late 18th century and early 19th century,’ with a weak state, a small-R republican form of government and high tolerance for displays of Christian faith in the public sphere…
“Beyond these near-term goals, Wilson has floated some more fundamental changes to America’s political system: Amending the Constitution to include reference to the Apostles’ Creed, restricting office holding to practicing Christians and changing voting practices to award votes by household, with the default vote-holder being the male head of the household. His long-term goal, he said, is to inspire a grassroots Christian reformation that would excise the whole idea of secularism from American law and society.
“He admits that this reformation would represent a ‘huge’ departure from America’s current political order, and that even some of his more modest reforms could only be brought about via constitutional amendment – or, if that fails, civil strife.
“I’m fond of saying that reformations never happen to the polite background sound of golf applause,’ Wilson said. ‘It would be tumultuous.’
Would it be violent, I wondered?
“’Well,’ he said, chuckling, ‘that depends on the bad guys.”
The Politico article cited above noted: “In a statement, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell confirmed that Hegseth is a ‘proud member’ of a CREC congregation and ‘very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.’”
Yup.
In Bob Dylan’s words, “The times they are a changin.” And, for some “churches” in the United States, that means moving backward more than a century – to before the August 18, 1920 passage of the 19th Amendment and women’s right to vote.
God, help us!