Edwina Gateley: Pagan Priestess

The following has appeared on the website for Call to Action:

Do Not Let Bishops Silence Catholic Women!

June 2007

Dear Friend,

Last month Edwina Gateley, a Call To Action member and founder of the lay Volunteer Missionary Movement, was prepared to give a retreat to nuns in Phoenix, Arizona about the feminine dimensions of God in Christian tradition. Bishop Olmsted threatened to tape her talks at the eight-day retreat in order to monitor what she said. She courageously refused to allow the bishop's censorship to intrude on the spiritual space created for the women's gathering. In retaliation, the bishop mandated that the Franciscan Renewal Center cancel the retreat and they did.

Won't you help spread the word so that hundreds more Catholics will hear Edwina's inspiring story of faith? Sign and forward our petition, Do Not Let Bishops Silence Catholic Women, that will be delivered to Bishop Olmsted and Edwina Gateley. Also, we will have a newspaper ad that will be published in the local press so that thousands more will know about the bishop’s actions and Edwina’s courageous response. Although the deadline has passed to sign the newspaper ad, you may still contribute below to support Call To Action and campaigns like this one.

No woman should have her voice silenced. Let's make sure Edwina Gateley's voice is heard. Sign the petition today.

According to a local news report, Edwina Gateley -- alleged Catholic and, as described in her website, "poet, theologian, artist, writer, lay minister and modern-day mystic and prophet" -- not to mention "apotheosis of humility" -- was scheduled to give a retreat to some nuns at the Franciscan Renewal Center in Paradise Valley, Arizona, on the theme, "Women Called to Connect, Bond and Heal in a Broken World." When the diocese asked to record her talks, Gateley refused, whereupon she was barred from appearing at the retreat. Diocesan spokesman Jim Dwyer says that Gateley has a reputation of "not always being in accord with the Church in a lot of different teachings," and rightly pointed out that the diocese was under no obligation to give her a forum in which "to attack what we stand for."

So how did Edwina Gateley get this reputation for "not always being in accord with the church in a lot of different teachings"? Just to begin with, she appears to have a penchant for simulating the Sacraments: Gateley "concelebrated" at a Call to Action "liturgy," parading in priestly vestments on the altar at the organization's Chicago gathering in 1993. Photographs and news reports of this travesty resulted in her disinvitation from a number of diocesan functions around the country. Then there is the substance of her purported "prophecies." It pays to take a good look at some samples of Gateley's specialité de la maison: cloying feminolatry, with a heaping side order of neo-paganism, and a double helping of bastardized Scripture for dessert. A March, 1994 talk entitled "Rediscovering and Claiming the Feminine Soul," is a mine of choice Gateley gems. To begin with, we have an account of the wedding at Cana that manages, all at once, to demean the Blessed Mother, degrade Christ, portray them both in a manner inconsistent with their freedom from the taint of sin, and trivialize Jesus' first public miracle.

Jesus' first great miracle took place at a wedding party at Cana in Galilee. Everybody was having a good time, and there was Jesus, having a few drinks with his mates at the bar. And Mary and the women were having a good time too. But Mary also kept her eye on the food and drink. Isn't that what women do? And she noticed the wine was going down. Nobody else noticed it. The guys were all drinking and telling war stories. She went up to her boy, tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Son, they're running out of wine."

What she did was absolutely wrong. In the customs and culture of that community, it was not simply allowed for an adult female to speak in public to an adult male. Women were to keep silent. Jesus was mortally embarrassed in front of all his friends. He turned to her in humiliation, and said, "Woman, what is that to me and to thee?" How dare you? The rest of the guys were trying not to look or to notice. But Mary knew the power of motherhood, and knew as a woman that the important thing was not the rules and regulations, but rather: "Did you celebrate? Did you have enough to drink? Are you happy?" She called the waiter and said, "Do what he tells you." And Jesus must have thought, "Oooh, where did I get her from?" But Jesus made the choice. He could have told her to get lost, and he would have been fine in the eyes of his friends. But the beauty of Jesus was that he was fair. He listened to his mother, saw that she had a point. He changed the water into wine, and gave the people what they wanted so they could celebrate.

So the sole importance of the wedding at Cana was not that it was Jesus' first public miracle; or that He performed this first miracle at His mother's behest, thereby illustrating the power of the Blessed Mother's intercession; or that it foreshadowed the Eucharist: the important thing is, Jesus fixed it so everybody could party hearty and get drunk. Not only that: we have here a Jesus Who, like the gods of Olympus, is riddled with human faults and failings: a Jesus Who craves human respect; a Jesus wholly unaware of His Mother's extraordinary holiness; a Jesus capable of violating the Fourth Commandment, and indeed, Who is actually capable of being embarrassed by His Immaculate Mother. Interesting how, under the power of her drive to make Woman the center of the universe, Gateley rises no higher than the alimentary canal, and is obliged to fling mud at the greatest woman who ever lived, Mary, the Mother of God, "tainted nature's solitary boast."

Then we have a completely back-asswards version of the Resurrection of Lazarus, in which Jesus appears as a clueless buffoon who needs to have a woman remind Him of His divine power:

Remember Martha, sister of Mary and Lazarus? Martha was the homemaker, great in the kitchen. They were all great friends of Jesus. Whenever he passed by he would stop for dinner and a couple of drinks or whatever. They had a wonderful relationship. Then one day Lazarus got a virus, and got very sick. So Martha, who was very well organized, a real ENFP number 8 in the Meyers Briggs, the kind who always gets her letters out, sent Jesus a letter to come home because Lazarus was sick. Jesus was real caught up in what he was doing - he didn't want to break into the eight-day retreat he was giving, or whatever - so he leaves the letter aside. Later he gets the feeling of fear that Lazarus may not have made it. He says to the disciples, 'Let's go back.' They rush back. And who is waiting for them? Martha - ENFP Number 8, standing there - in the cemetery, no less. She must have seen him coming and looked at her watch and said, 'Where the hell have you been? I wrote to you two weeks ago.' And according to the Gospel of John, she said to Jesus, "If you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that anything you ask in the name of God will be given to you." And she stands right in front of the tomb, and says, "Well, you are the Christ, the son of the Living God. So do it!" And Jesus moved forward at the command of the homemaker, and said, "Lazarus, come forth," and the dead man rose again. The greatest miracle in the New Testament - the resurrection of the dead - is very clearly associated with a woman, a homemaker, who says, 'Come on, man. You know what is possible. For you are the Christ, the Son of the Living God."

Here, I do not blame Gateley for the use of anachronisms, which may at times be quite effective rhetorical devices. But I do blame her for twisting and distorting the Gospel account of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. To begin with, Jesus did not delay coming to Lazarus because He had better things to do. When He heard the news about Lazarus, He said: "This illness is not unto death; it is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by means of it." (John 11:4.) He told His disciples plainly, "Jesus told them plainly, "Laz'arus is dead; and for your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe. " (John 11:14-15.) As for Jesus' being so stupid as to need the guidance of a superior woman, let's find out, when He spoke with Martha, just who needed to be reminded of what (John 11:22-27, 38-40):

When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary sat in the house. Martha said to Jesus, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. And even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you." Jesus said to her, "Your brother will rise again." Martha said to him, "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day." Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?" She said to him, "Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, he who is coming into the world.". . .Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb; it was a cave, and a stone lay upon it. Jesus said, "Take away the stone." Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, "Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days." Jesus said to her, "Did I not tell you that if you would believe you would see the glory of God?"

And the rest -- unlike Edwina Gateley's version of events -- is history.

In their bid to prove that God disapproves of authority and obedience, feminolaters like Gateley just can't resist treating their audiences to an account of the oppression of uppity women in the early Church -- even if they have to make it up out of whole cloth -- or taking a swipe at the evil mysogynist, St. Paul:

Did you read that passage in First Corinthians - it's one of my favorites: "Women should keep silent in church!' Let me tell you something. The very fact that that needed to be stated indicates that women were not being silent in church! Women were preaching, and teaching, and interpreting. You know what women are like. They get into things. They gather. That's why our church services are 90 percent women: they are the ones who search for the sacred and the spiritual. The men organize it, and are in charge of it, but it is the women who are the seekers. They gathered around Jesus. They gathered small communities. They were the community leaders in the early Church, to the point where the guys said, 'This is getting to be too much," and made a new rule: women would be quiet in church. Our God is gentle - compassionate - free. Our God will have no dealings with exclusion, with power, with barriers. As the Masai tribe in East Africa say, and I love this: God is moist, warm, wet and salty. Ah! That is more meaningful to us than 'God is Almighty, King, Lord, Judge and Father. The nomadic, African, so-called 'ignorant' peoples have a better understanding of God's nature than we who need definitions from a rational, logical perspective. Our God is the God of the little ones, the disenfranchised, and it is there that we will find her, and she will empower us to make a difference.

Nor can they resist expounding on the theme of Christianity as a mere derivative of paganism, whose true goddess worship has been hijacked and suppressed by the knuckle-dragging, woman-hating early Fathers of the Church:

In the beginning there was the Spirit of God. Wisdom. Sophia. Ruah in Hebrew. Co-creator with God in the Hebrew Scriptures. She danced, and was playful, and called the universe into being. The Spirit, working side by side as co-creator with Yahweh. Bringing forth, birthing the earth. Filled with imagination, life, energy. And she was the feminine principle. She was female. In the Hebrew Scriptures, only Moses, Job, David and God are treated in more depth than Sophia, Wisdom. She was such a powerful force in the beginning. But today it seems that Sophia-Feminine-Wisdom is not commonly understood. Our children don't talk about her calling forth new life. Slowly she was edged out of our traditions. Marginalized in favor of the single, male, Yahweh, because Sophia, the Feminine, was too exuberant, too elusive, too ambiguous for our rigid Christian doctrines. She was left to the fringe groups: the school of John, the poet, the artist. She was left to the mystics, who were always a little bit wild. The whole feminine dimension of God's creative power had to be suppressed if we were to put some order and rationale into our Christian doctrine.

Nor can they resist trying to expose the whole concept of sin as an oppressive construct whose sole purpose is to rake in the shekels and keep the boot of the Church on the neck of the Great Unwashed. Here we have Edwina Gateley, historian, enlightening us as to the true origins of the Sacrament of Penance:

People who could not diagnose the [bubonic] plague in those days (like AIDS today) felt that they were sinful - and this was endorsed by the Church. The whole development of confession occurred around the same time. Maybe we must appease a God who is angry. Onto the consciousness of a whole people came the sense of fear and guilt - and original sin along with it. We are sinful; we deserve to be punished. The Catholic Church in particular, I believe, has used the whole punishment business to keep us cowed, to keep us down, when our eyes should be vibrant with God's life and Spirit.

And then there is this, from Gateley's rambling, pseudopoetical "homily" at Call to Action's November 1998 conference:

That evening, in the packed church, I watched as the Associate Pastor stood at the altar and held high the chalice. And as she stood, in alb and stole, her eyes shone with the love of God.

I just can't think why Bishop Olmstead would take steps to protect the souls of his flock, for which he must answer to God, from this!