Will you support America's Women in the Life of the Church initiative?

I was ordained into the American Lutheran Church in 1975, as the 7th woman Pastor. It was so new that the Letter of Call had to black out all him/he references and change them to female gender. I immediately entered the Navy Chaplain Corps as the 4th woman Chaplain. I served with US Marines as the first woman Chaplain serving with Marines (--and then there was the day when, after a funeral for a young Marine, an older former Marine came up and called me Padre...oh well. It was a compliment), and the first to go to sea. I am now a retired Pastor with the ELCA. I would be happy to contribute in any way which would be useful to America's new project. One of the greatest blessings I have received was to get to know, Chaplain, later Cardinal, John O'Connor, whom I counted as a great friend over the decades.. The military Chaplain Corps was unique ministry, and I learned a great deal. Roman Catholic Chaplains were usually friends--like me, they were celibate, and we had grown up with a similar educational structure, unknown to the vast majority of evangelical Chaplains. We had a lot more in common than I knew back as a kid in the pre-Vatican II era, when my Catholic friends disappeared into a church which had a strange ritual that I never connected with my own. But this coming year the ELCA, and the WORLD Lutheran Federation, and the Roman Catholic Church, will be marking the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation. What an adventure I've been on! Pr Chris

It is not about supporting women. It is about allowing Christ to liberate the Church from a sacramental theology contaminated by patriarchal gender theory. This is a petition to Pope Francis, entirely based on the Catechism of the Catholic Church and St John Paul II's Theology of the Body: Appeal to Pope Francis ~ English http://pelicanweb.org/CCC.TOB.120.html#english Apelación al Papa Francisco ~ Español http://pelicanweb.org/CCC.TOB.120.html#spanish