Somehow I missed this one (it’s hard to keep up), but Rochester had another well known dissident speaker here on March 6 and 7. Jamie T. Phelps, O.P., spoke at Nazareth College as a guest of the William H. Shannon Chair in Catholic Studies. Her background includes Call to Action, Women’s Ordination Conference, dissent from Church teaching on birth control, and being a proponent of liberation theology. Her speaking engagement was promoted in at least several church bulletins.

The following is from Los Pequenos Pepper :

Call to Action Speaker Takes the Pulpit February 2008’s People of God, a
publication of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, carried the information that Sr. Jamie
T. Phelps, O.P , an Adrian Dominican, delivered the January 20, 2008 Sunday noon
homily at St. Joseph on the Rio Grande, a Catholic parish in Albuquerque.
As questionable as the use of the pulpit was ­ canon law restricts homilies to
Catholic clergy, though a bishop may grant permission for a layperson “to
preach…in churches” provided “necessity requires it … or it seems useful in
particular cases” ­ more disturbing was the fact that Phelps is a Call to Action
speaker. Her keynote address opened the 2007 annual Call to Action (CTA)
Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Phelps has been a longtime member of CTA She was one of the signatories of
the 1994 “WE Are the Church” ad that demanded women priests, acceptance of
homosexuality, freedom of conscience to dissent from Church teaching ­
particularly birth control ­ and promotion of liberation theology, among other
things.
Besides holding a “womanist”variation of liberationism, Phelps has been active
in the Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC) ­ an organizational member of
CTA ­ serving on WOC’s Core Commission and Advisory Board as far back as
1979-80.
WOC was established in 1974 “to tie the issue of women’s ordination to
International Women’s Year,” according to organizational literature. Although it
has also had members who wanted to be priests, the thrust of its organizers from the
beginning has been “toward reinterpreting both priesthood and sacraments as
expressions of community power.” At its first general meeting, held in Detroit in
November 1975, 1200 people, about ninety percent of whom were women
religious, heard Rosemary Ruether ask them whether they really wanted ordination
in the present “demonic” Church. Instead, she said, they “must demystify in their
minds the false idea that priests possess sacramental `power’ which the community
does not have.”
WOC’s “greatest success” was in obtaining the agreement of the National
Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) of the United States to engage in dialogue
with them. Formal dialogue sessions were conducted from December 1979 to
December 1981 between representatives of the NCCB and such representatives of
WOC as Rosemary Ruether, Sister Anne Carr, Barbara Zanotti, Sister Marjorie
Tuite, Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, Sister Jamie Phelps, Rita Bowen, and Elisabeth
Schussler Fiorenza.