With the priesthood under intense scrutiny, a metro Detroit Catholic group has taken public its long-standing quest for women's ordination.
How public? Pay close attention during your next commute.
Starting this week, two billboards along westbound I-94 trumpet the message "Ordain Women" with the image of a silhouetted woman in a priest's stole holding a chalice and eucharistic bread toward heaven.
One billboard is at Middlebelt Road near Detroit Metro Airport. The other, near Gratiot in Detroit, is to be publicly blessed at 5:30 p.m. today by those who paid for it: the local chapter of Call to Action, a nationalgroup that advocates change in the Catholic church.
Call to Action members prayed and protested for a more open priesthood long before this year's sex abuse scandal rocked the church. But growing questions about the viability of an all-male, celibate clergy -- posed even by top church leaders -- are breathing new life into the cause.
"The complacency of Catholics in many areas has been shaken, and they are looking for ways to restore their hope and faith in the church," said Marge Orlando, 62, coordinator of Metro Detroit Call to Action. "We believe this is a positive way of letting the church hierarchy know that people are wanting something different."
Inspired by similar campaigns in other cities, the billboards are the first step in a yearlong publicity plan. Since March 11, Call to Action has raised $9,000 of the $30,000 needed to pay for billboards in all seven Michigan dioceses for at least a month each.
The ads include an e-mail address for people to send queries about the issue. Call to Action members want others to know, for example, that priestly celibacy was decreed hundreds of years after the church formed. And that recent polls show the majority of U.S. Catholics advocate a non-celibate priesthood.
"This is a consciousness-raising effort and a teaching tool to get people talking about a significant issue that needs to be talked about," said Carol Crowley, a clinical psychologist and chaplain at Providence Hospital in Southfield.
Crowley, 48, was the first woman to enter the former St. John Provincial Seminary in Plymouth. She graduated with a master of divinity degree in 1980. As a female chaplain, she offers comfort and prayer to patients and families, but is barred from performing sacramental ministry.
Pope John Paul II has said ordination of women and married men is closed for discussion, and he did not address it at last week's Vatican meeting with U.S. cardinals. But locally and in other parts of the world, the debate will not rest.
In February, St. John Center for Youth and Family in Plymouth hosted a discussion of women's ordination, and in March more than 40 men and women gathered in Detroit to pray for the cause. Next on the Call to Action agenda is a peaceful protest at the May 18 ordination of five men by the Archdiocese of Detroit.
Kathy Chateau, 45, who was asked by the St. John staff to leave the February discussion because she distributed Call to Action flyers, said she does not expect women to be ordained in her lifetime, but she has hopes for her 16-year-old daughter.
"That immediate hope is not there, and that's why we do it," she said. "If we don't lay the groundwork now, then it won't happen in her lifetime either."