"I was very active on issues, not partisan politics. So I did a lot of organizing on a volunteer basis for the Diocese of Saginaw. I had to spend time in the legislature, and talking to my own representative. It was through that that I got a call one night [from] Bishop Hickey, now Cardinal Hickey. He said that I had been appointed to the Board of Directors of the Michigan Catholic Conference.* And I was the first lay woman on that board. [It] used to be all bishops, and then they added three men, and then I was the first woman named to that board. [And] through that I was appointed to the first advisory council for the U.S. Bishops and that was about, probably around 1968-1969. I was [also] appointed to the first National Campaign for Human Development, and that's the best thing I ever worked on in the institutional church."
* "Later they enlarged the board to include five lay persons, plus a priest. I became a charter member of the Advisory Council."
Women in the Church
"The other day a woman [who is] a close friend of another friend of mine [gave] me a ride [to Lansing] and on the way home she said, 'There's probably only one thing we agree on,' and I said, 'Women in the Catholic church allowed to be priests.' Well Jesus didn't ordain anybody. But for a woman, just because she's born with the wrong body parts, to be denied the chance to see if she has the vocation, how they'd call that anything but sexism is beyond me.
Problems and Progress in the Church
"The church as a whole still has a long way to go. It's a human institution, and all these things [are] man-made. Like when women had to have their heads covered in church, that's a man-made law and that was wrong. I can remember you'd forget your hat [and] you'd put a piece of Kleenex on your head, that's absolutely nuts. But our parish has really come a long way, we have altar girls now, [some other churches] will not have altar girls, only altar boys."
Copyright 2003 Sarah Leonard
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University of Michigan
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