Catholic World News News Feature

"Ordained" woman teaches at Catholic university July 30, 2005

One of the women who was "ordained" as a priest during a bizarre ceremony on a boat in the St. Lawrence River teaches at a Catholic college in California, the Cardinal Newman Society has disclosed.

Jane Via, who claims to have been ordained as a Catholic priest in the July 25 ceremony, teaches Scripture studies at the University of San Diego, the Virginia-based group revealed. One year ago, Via claimed to have been ordained as a deacon in a similar ceremony conducted on the Danube River between Germany and Austria.

The "ordinations" conducted by feminist groups are both illicit and invalid. The two women who led the June 2004 ceremonies have been excommunicated for their involvement in a parody of a sacrament.

Jane Via-- who had been previously identified by the pseudonym "Jillian Farley"-- is a part-time instructor at the University of San Diego; she also serves as a deputy assistant district attorney in San Diego County. An outspoken feminist, Via was barred from speaking at Catholic institutions in the San Diego diocese in 1985, after she signed a New York Times advertisement challenging Catholic teaching on abortion. She remains employed, however, by the University of San Diego.

“It is scandalous that a Catholic university would knowingly employ a public dissenter to teach religion,” said Patrick J. Reilly, the president of the Cardinal Newman Society. The Virginia group is dedicated to the renewal of Catholic identity in American Catholic colleges and universities. Reilly continued: "It would be deceitful for the same university to claim a Catholic mission while employing a religious studies professor who falsely claims ordination as a deacon of the Catholic Church."

However, the Cardinal Newman Society also pointed out that Via is not the only woman teaching at a Catholic institution who rejects the Church's teaching that woman cannot be ordained. At a recent meeting of the Women's Ordination Conference, the group noted, speakers included Deborah Halter, and instructor in religious studies at Loyola University in Chicago; Teresia Hinga, a professor of religious studies at DePaul University in Chicago; and Sister Martha Ann Kirk, a professor of religious studies at the University of the Incarnate Word in Texas.