Innovating Conservative Traditions

Evolving RCWP: Ministerial Modeling and Practicing New Priesthoods

Jill Peterfeso, Guilford College

The Roman Catholic Womenpriests (RCWP) movement started in 2001 with the contra legem (“against canon law”) ordinations of 7 women to priesthood. To date, roughly 250 women have been ordained through RCWP. While the women in the movement are not recognized by Rome and are in fact excommunicated for their ordinations, womenpriests adhere to Roman Catholic rituals, retain apostolic succession, and practice priesthood through sacraments, ministries, and community leadership.

Five years following the publication of the first academic book on RCWP, titled Womanpriest: Tradition and Transgression in the Contemporary Roman Catholic Church, Peterfeso revisits her research into the movement and offers new observations and insights. What does today’s RCWP tell us about religious identities in the North American and European church? What does RCWP model about religious change and creativity? And what does RCWP reveal regarding women’s leadership in patriarchal institutions?

While not even 25 years old, RCWP is evolving quickly, all the while keeping its focus on using Catholic faith, sacraments, and theologies to meet the needs of today’s (often disaffected and spiritually seeking) Catholics.

Pastoral-Rabbi: How Orthodox Women Rabbis are Feminizing the Orthodox Rabbinate

Michal Raucher, Rutgers University

As the first Orthodox seminary to ordain women as rabbis, Yeshivat Maharat places significant emphasis on pastoral care in their educational curriculum, intertwining it with text-based studies. This differs from most other Orthodox rabbinical schools, which have typically focused solely on halakhic (Jewish legal) knowledge. Graduates of Yeshivat Maharat credit their pastoral training as essential to their role as rabbis, emphasizing the importance of providing emotional and psychological support to congregants during life cycle events. Notably, pastoral care is integrated into their approach to answering halakhic questions, focusing on understanding the underlying social-emotional needs of the individual seeking guidance. This paper analyzes this approach to halakhic guidance as an example of the feminization of the Orthodox rabbinate. By integrating pastoral care into their approach to halakhic decision-making, they aim to navigate the shifting landscape of authority within the Orthodox community while embracing a democratic ethos in their interactions with congregants. Through this lens, pastoral care emerges as a vital component in shaping the future of the Orthodox rabbinate, as it adapts to meet the changing needs and expectations of the community.

“You might change your mind!”: Early Responses to Women’s Ordination in the 1980s RLDS Church

Nancy Ross & David J Howlett, Utah Tech University

Scholars have documented reasons given by Christians and Jews for supporting women’s ordination, noting that very little changed in terms of formal rationales between the 19th and 21st century (Chaves, 1997; Naddell, 1999; Speight, 2020). Less is known about how people came to change their minds on women’s ordination; that is, how people who opposed women’s ordination came to support it. Our study draws upon 63 first-person accounts of women and men in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS) who, only months after a change in denominational policy on women’s ordination, reflected on how they came to support women’s ordination. To explain their change of mind, we use sociological frameworks drawn from Sullins (2000), Campbell and Putnam (2010), Hairline (2011), Cragun, et. al. (2016). We argue that women and men changed their minds when they prioritized strong, close relationships with people who already supported women’s ordination (or girls and women they assumed would be positively impacted by it) over the pressures of cultural social signaling in which women’s ordination served as a proxy for larger social issues (Chaves, 1997). In other words, changing one’s mind about women’s ordination performed more than just symbolic work; it reinforced pre-existing relational work.