Roy Bourgeois is Detained at the Vatican for the Crime of Showing them What Primacy of Conscience Means

I’ve been following and writing about Father Roy Bourgeois, the founder of SOA Watch for some time now, so I was saddened to learn that the Nobel Prize-nominated Viet Nam veteran-turned Roman Catholic priest and human rights activist was detained by police in Rome, yesterday, as he arrived at the Vatican to deliver a petition signed by 15.000 Catholics in support of him and women's ordination.  

The Vatican is in the process of defrocking and formally excommunicating Bourgeois for supporting and attending women’s ordinations.  In March of this year, Bourgeois was ordered by his superiors to recant his position under penalty of laicization, and he has refused.  

Technically speaking, Bourgeois excommunicated himself the first time he attended a mass celebrated by a woman.  Taking part in a mass celebrated by a woman is one of several means for do-it-yourself excommunication. Indeed many a Catholic “self-excommunicates” without even knowing it.  


Receiving Communion while sexually active outside of sacramental marriage, according to some, is self-excommunicating behavior. Using (so-called "artifical") contraception, engaging in heresy, and being remarried after divorce can all lead to automatic self-excommunication -- especially if one receives the Sacrament of the Eucharist while engaging in excommunication-worthy  conduct.  


If you are thinking that this means most Roman Catholics in the industrialized world areexcommunicated, you are probably right.  So, why does being excommunicated make so little difference to so many active Catholics?  

One reason is that, for a price, the bishops look the other way when self-excommunicated Catholics are faithful to worship.  The vatican would prefer to see Catholics “resolve and sin no more,” but the bishops will settle for full collection baskets. The many “come back home” campaigns designed to lure lapsed Catholics back into church are aimed at excommunicants -- those who left because breaking the rules made them feel unwelcome.  

Another reason the sting and stigma are now absent from excommunication is that Roman Catholics in the United States and Europe, being reasonably well educated, take “primacy of conscience” seriously. We learn as we study Catechism in preparation to receive First Holy Communion (generally at about age 7) that all Catholics are called to discern with the help of well-formed conscience. 


Men enshrined canon law and doctrine, and men make mistakes. Vatican apologists and strict adherents will fulminate on and on about the first priest Peter receiving the keys to  the church and such, but even if those who ignore the several weak links and breaks in the historical chain of apostolic succession generally freely admit that Peter himself was a bit of a hot-head, the great mistake-maker of the apostles.  "Primacy of conscience" checks the mistakes of priests like Peter, helping to ensure that the failings of men (pontiffs, being men, included) do not come between believers and their God. When it comes to God's truths -- the buck stops with the individual Catholic working together with the Holy Spirit within: 

On their part, all men are bound to seek the truth, especially in what concerns God and His Church, and to embrace the truth they come to know, and to hold fast to it.

This Vatican Council likewise professes its belief that it is upon the human conscience that these obligations fall and exert their binding force. The truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power... (Dignitatis Humane,  2)  

“Primacy of conscience” is not, according to Catholic teaching, some imprecise catch-all term for all manners of religious dissent. Nor is it Vatican II-sanctioned variation on “If it feels good, do it.” “Primacy of conscience” applies when mind and feeling well-saturated with the wisdom of the Word and Catholic teaching shape conscience and turn it in the direction of the God (Holy Spirit) within:

"the most secret core and sanctuary of the human person. There he/she is alone with God, whose voice echoes in his/her depths" (Gaudium et Spes, 16).  

In plain English, if having listened to the gospels, the bishops, and God, a Roman Catholic concludes that obeying a man-made ecclesiastical law is immoral, he or she is obliged to refuse to obey it. 


Father Bourgeois knows "breaking the silence" is not optional. It is an obligation:

 “I’ve always felt that when you see an injustice, really it’s your conscience and faith in God calling you to address the issue and to break your silence. And when your superior tells you to be obedient, then you have to make a decision: Do I follow God or man? And there was no question I must go with my faith in God....

"Over the pope ... there still stands one's own conscience, which must be obeyed before all else, if necessary, even against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority,” Bourgeois quotes from the future pope’s words." (National Catholic Reporter April 8, 2011)

Although most Roman Catholics anguish little -- if at all -- over latae sententiae excommunication, I suspect the sting is not lost on Father Bourgeois. We hear so much about bad priests in the news, and not nearly enough about good ones; but for an exemplary priest like Bourgeois, obedience is not a burden.  More often, a good priest experiences such submission, when it is in keeping with Christ's earthly ministry, a jurors gift. 

The Superior of the Maryknoll order has accused Father Bourgeois of bringing "grave scandal upon the  people of God."  The vatican has threatened to defrock him. 

But if you listened to Bourgeois during the panel, the only scandal he seems to experience is his embarrassment over not speaking out sooner on the issue of women’s ordination. “I just feel bad it took me so long,” Bourgeois admitted sheepishly. (National Catholic Reporter, March 30, 2011.)

Bourgeois is not some frivolous cleric deciding to let a few girls into the He-man Woman Haters Club on a whim. He has devoted his life to the pursuit of justice and recognizes injustice when he sees it. Bourgeois is expert on bullies. It is clear he has long meditated the question of whether Jesus called women as priests.   


I can imagine that a vatican so accustomed to a weaselly approach to defending itself against accusations must find Bourgeois's honesty unsettling.  Why doesn't he save himself? Ratzinger et al may be thinking.  Possibly Ratzinger is not thinking. The truth is the vatican's tyranny may be better served by not defrocking Father Bourgeois.  If they let him get away with his scandalous crime, he gets away with his scandalous crime. If they defrock him, they put him on a path to sainthood. The vatican can't win this one. 


Bourgeois's critics like to focus on the notion that the Maryknoll is an activist seeking celebrity (Think St. John of the Cross meets Kim Kardashian.) and it's easy to see how the bullies would, in their confusion, paint a Nobel Prize nominee Purple Heart as a lens louse in search of his 15 minutes of fame.  So estranged are the vatican and its chauvinists from the kind of holy integrity this prriest epitomizes hat they don't know what to make of him.  


Why even ask a man like Roy Bourgeois to recant? 


His entire existence has been consecrated to laying his life on the line in order to work toward making the world a more noble place. Now his vocation is on the line. For an exemplary priest, his or her vocation is everything. 


The pope can strip Bourgeois of his frock, but he won't have much lucky wresting his priesthood from him, and even his Hitler Youth experience does not leave Ratzinger tough enough to stuff the women's ordination genie back into the bottle.  

Read more about Father Roy Bourgeois:

"A Frock Does Not a Priest Make: The 'Tuning Up' of Roy Bourgeois"

"Christian Sacrifice and the Crusade to Defrock Roy Bourgeois"