Three cheers for Mary Theresa Streck ("'Joyous passage' also seeks change," June 2). She has lived her Roman Catholic faith for decades and is now heeding her call to the priesthood, despite the institutional church's ban on women priests.
At a time when the church is in dire need of priests, one would think that the hierarchy would be looking for ways to increase the priesthood. While many of us in the reform movement have urged the church to go back to its earliest roots and permit the ordination of women and married people, the institutional church (as distinguished from those of us in the pews as well as many priests and nuns) remains locked in to the medieval thinking, which seems to govern so much of its way of doing business.
The Rev. Kenneth Doyle, the chancellor for public information for the Albany diocese, who is quoted in the article, I know to be a good and decent man. But, in all frankness, he must feel like the spokesman for Pravda, the old mouthpiece for the Kremlin, in trotting out the party line that there is "no theological basis" for ordaining women.
I am sure he knows, as we all do, that the ban is simply the "old boys' club" keeping it that way.
Robert K. Corliss
Schenectady