Mosque celebrates away from home

Contra Costa Times (California)
September 14, 2007 Friday

By Rebecca Rosen Lum

ANTIOCH, Calif. -- Amid a row of women bowing in diaphanous, brightly colored gowns, Sughran Ahmed prayed -- prostrate in silence, rising with the imam's sung "Allah Akbar," God is great. Suddenly, her 3-year-old son, Muhammad Ali, broke free from his caretaker, ran to his mother and threw his arms around her neck. She smiled at him tenderly.

It is an affectionate congregation, said Chairman Abdul Rahman of the Islamic Center of the East Bay, which was recently displaced by an Aug. 12 arson fire.

"I wish these positive feelings would rub off on the community," he said with a sigh.

The figs, fruits and communion that break the fast at the end of the day tasted especially sweet this year.

About 100 worshipers gathered at sundown Thursday for the first iftar, or fast-breaking meal, of this Ramadan. The seller of an Antioch restaurant, empty in escrow, offered it as a temporary prayer hall Sunday, tripping off a mad dash to get insurance and permits in time for the celebration.

Walnut Creek restaurateur Misbah Khelid donated the food.

"Why not?" he said. "It's a time of need."

The 30 days of reflection and fasting take place in the ninth month of the Muslim calendar, beginning at sunset after the first sighting of the new moon -- or, in these times of technological advancement, when calculations pinpoint the appearance of the new moon.

For much of mosque President Mohammed Chaudry's childhood, Ramadan fell during the summer months. But by the time he had become an adult, the fasting days had grown shorter. Now they are long again.

Because Islam follows the lunar calendar, each year Ramadan falls 10 days earlier. Every third year, it moves back a month.

"It's a justice system by God," he said. If not for the lunar calendar, "people in the West would be condemned to a fast for 11 hours."

The Quran directs the faithful to abstain from food, drink and other worldly pleasures, starting as early in the morning as one "can plainly distinguish a white thread from a black thread by the daylight" until darkness falls. The fast ends with a three-day festival called Id-al-Fitr.

For 1 billion faithful worldwide, Ramadan provides a time for considering one's character, strengthening bonds between loved ones and developing empathy for the hungry

A virtuous Ramadan record can be undone by lying, slandering, denouncing people behind their back, uttering a false oath, or indulging in greed or covetousness.

But the most drastic offense is giving in to anger, Chaudry said.

"The whole exercise is null and void if you give yourself to anger -- even if somebody provokes you," he said.

Those who would use Islam as a basis for terrorism or acts of aggression "are earning their way straight to hell," he said, his voice cracking with emotion.

Chaudry was visiting the Vatican with his wife when a call came from his son telling him their Antioch mosque had been gutted by fire.

"I fell into a deep depression," he said. "For 10 years, I had devoted my life to creating a place where people could come and pray."

The mosque has resolved not to fold in fear.

But fewer people have been showing up each week for services at a Pittsburg mosque that has taken in the displaced congregation, Rahmen said.

Leaders will not know until the insurance claim is settled whether they should rebuild in place or find a new site.

"I would rather be back at the mosque," said Fauzia Rahman. Her sisters and cousins agreed.

"They wrote on the walls," said Verda Siddiqui, 10, looking bewildered.

Women chatting over their meal agreed that outsiders must have set the fire that destroyed their mosque.

"We lived there for three years," said Neelo Shaikh. "It's a really nice neighborhood."

Chaudry received a call from Antioch police at 7 a.m. the first day of fasting saying a vandal had kicked in the remaining functioning door on the mosque. Three weeks ago, he found graffiti scrawled on the back of the building.

But "support has been overwhelming," he said. The Contra Costa Interfaith Council plans a solidarity march Sept. 23.

"They have been very sympathetic, very generous and very kind," he said. "A big majority is sharing our grief."

Ramadan

Thirty days -- beginning at sunrise and ending at sundown -- of reflection and fasting arrive in the ninth month of the Muslim calendar. In addition to five customary daily prayers, the Islamic faithful add the lengthy Tarawih, or night prayer, until, by the end of Ramadan, they have recited the entire Quran. On the 27th evening, they celebrate Laylat-al-Qadr in honor of the night the angel Gabriel revealed the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad.

Unitarians launch ad campaign

September 19, 2007 Wednesday

By Rebecca Rosen Lum

Garrison Keillor has long joked that Unitarian missionaries founded Lake Wobegon after a failed attempt to convert American Indians through interpretive dance.

Now, Unitarians are seeking converts and hoping radio spots on Keillor's iconoclastic Prairie Home Companion will draw the same earthy, progressive, crowd the show does.

Seventeen Bay Area Unitarian Universalist congregations have launched a $300,000 marketing campaign financed by 600 member donors. Its theme: "Imagine A Religion."

TV, radio and print spots designed by gUUrilla marketing began airing this week on Comedy Central, The Daily Show and A Prairie Home Companion

About 500 signs are going up in BART stations. Mainstream publications and specialty magazines serving Spanish-speaking or gay and lesbian readers will carry ads.

The campaign also features sequential billboards, based on the old Burma-Shave ads, meant for passing motorists to read.

"Imagine a religion that embraces many different beliefs ... including yours," reads a magazine ad that pictures a middle-aged gay male couple, a young African-American man, a mother holding a young child and a mixed-race family.

"For us, this campaign reflects a change of heart," said the Rev. William Sinkford, president of the national association. "We've been willing to be the best kept secret in religion. This represents a coming out effort."

The denomination has its roots in the Christian Protestantism of Transylvania and Poland but is not Christian per se. Rather, it draws from numerous religions and belief systems in a common "search for truth and meaning." It respects the sacred texts of all religions, but believes that none hold an absolute truth.

Unitarians "pitch a big theological tent," Sinkford said. "We want to make Unitarian Universalism available for those who yearn for a liberal religious home."

The ad blitz, which dovetails with the national Unitarian Universalist Association's growth drive, is the most recent attempt by religious progressives to make themselves heard in the public discourse over faith dominated by religious conservatives for some 25 years.

"The problem with that is the discourse is incomplete," Sinkford said.

The Unitarian-Universalistic faith prizes conscience and reason, has little use for dogma and a traditional distaste for proselytizing.

But previous ad campaigns showed a little evangelizing could go a long way.

Similar drives in Kansas City, Houston and Southern California netted new members. A Houston, Texas congregation grew by 10 percent -- 40 people -- after a 2005 advertising blitz.

"Unitarians aren't very much for trying to convert people," said the Rev. Bill Hamilton-Holway of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley. "But so often, people come, and they say, 'This is me, this is perfect for me, but I never knew you were here.'"

The crafters of the campaign say many Americans are unaware of the fundamental role Unitarians have played in shaping the nation's character.

Julia Ward Howe ("Battle Hymn of the Republic") was a Unitarian, as were presidents John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and William Howard Taft. Celebrated Unitarian legal scholars include Oliver Wendell Holmes, Daniel Webster and Clarence Darrow. Unitarian civil rights activists James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo were both slain during Freedom Summer.

Membership declined during the 1970s and has picked up since but modestly.

"We are absolutely interested in younger people," said gUUrilla marketing's Sue Polgar.

Once they arrive, "We hear, 'Where have you been all my life?'" said Cilla Raughley, director of the Central Pacific District.

The church appeals to parents of young children who resist training them in a creed, said Linda Laskowski, trustee from the Berkeley church.

"We don't teach a religion," she said. "We teach religion."

Book details grim abuses suffered by cult's children

The Augusta Chronicle (Georgia)
December 29, 2007 Saturday
ALL EDITION

By Rebecca Rosen Lum, Contra Costa Times

David Berg was a small-time circuit preacher whose flocks ran thin until the late 1960s, when the sexual revolution and the Jesus movement bloomed at once.

He wove the two into a double helix, drawing from the remnants of hippie life - people with nothing to lose, nowhere to go, and no Christian background to serve as a compass while in the thrall of a man who purported to live by Scripture.

His Teens for Christ became the Children of God, with enclaves in California and Texas expanding into a evangelical empire across continents, yielding profit and power for the "end-time prophet" and his inner circle.

But writer Don Lattin is only slightly interested in what makes a self-anointed prophet run. Mr. Lattin, whose book Jesus Freaks (HarperOne, $24.95, 236 pages) was released earlier in December, cares more about what happens to children born into authoritarian groups - the offspring of those who voluntarily cast their lot with people such as Mr. Berg.

Subtitled A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge, the book follows the brief, tormented life of Ricky Rodriguez, Mr. Berg's designated prophet prince.

As the longtime religion writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, Mr. Lattin plumbed what happens to children in cults, including the Church of Scientology, the Moonies, the Hare Krishnas and the Children of God (which would later be renamed The Family, or Family International).

In each, "The kids didn't have the chance to grow up and be themselves," Mr. Lattin said in an interview just before the book's release. "There were hours and hours a day of indoctrination. In that way, the Children of God was the worst."

The accumulated years of indoctrination exploded for Mr. Rodriguez in a murder-suicide in 2005 that shook Mr. Lattin and compelled him to write the book.

"I was so taken aback by what drove Ricky, raised by The Family, to kill someone else and take his own life," Mr. Lattin said. "He was the ultimate example of what can happen to kids when they're raised in an atmosphere of severe indoctrination. It's a really dark story, a sensational story, I tried to get in the mind-sets of these people."

The Children of God melded apocalyptic Christian evangelism with mind-boggling sexual mores. Mr. Lattin stunned readers when he first detailed the unorthodox practices of the Children of God in 2001.

Mr. Berg dispatched young, attractive female followers to lure male converts through sex in a practice he called "flirty fishing." He discouraged them from using birth control.

Mr. Rodriguez, the first child conceived through "flirty fishing," was the natural son of Mr. Berg's common-law wife, Karen Zerby, also called "Maria," and a waiter she picked up in the Canary Islands. Mr. Rodriguez was called "Davidito."

"Davidito and Maria are going to be the Endtime witnesses," Mr. Berg wrote in 1978. "They are going to have such power they can call down fire from heaven and devour their enemies."

In fact, Mr. Rodriguez did devour his enemies: He left the cult, but tormented by a life of abuse, could not make a life for himself. Driven by rage, he vilified his mother in a videotaped rant, stabbed one of his former nannies to death and shot himself in 2005.

More than 13,000 children were born to followers between 1971 and 2001; "women with six, eight, 10, 13 kids were not uncommon," Mr. Lattin said.

Mothers and caretakers pulled children from their beds at night to engage in sex acts with Mr. Berg in a regular "sharing schedule" (some kids referred to it as the "scaring schedule"). A poor performance yielded brutal punishment.

"They were made to believe their eternal salvation depended on this," Mr. Lattin said.

The group once enjoyed plenty of good press.

In the waning days of the Summer of Love, parents would say, "at least they're Christians," Mr. Lattin said.

Mr. Berg died in 1994, and Ms. Zerby took control of the organization.

Grown survivors of the group have developed a deep suspicion of outsiders and adults, Mr. Lattin said. But gradually, they sensed their stories were safe with this blues guitar-playing writer, part-time professor and married stepfather of two girls, and they let it all out.

"I've never seen so many problems among kids," he said, munching Thai food at a Berkeley haunt.

"The Children of God was a machine to spread the ideas of David Berg," he said. "The children were born to do the same thing. That was the real evil. Then, when they rebelled, as teens do, they would send them off to these re-education camps."

King's work permeates issues of race

April 4, 2008 Friday

By Rebecca Rosen Lum

Forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., another preacher has ignited a national discussion about race.

This time, the preacher is Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who recently retired from the 8,000-member Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Many whites heard Wright's cries of "God damn America" -- in a 2003 sermon -- as combative and incendiary, but for African-Americans, the language sprang from the gospels and the sermon from a tradition of pulpit political oratory.

"The use of the word 'damn' in the Bible, in the Old Testament, is a sacred usage," said Dwight Hopkins, a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School and a member of Trinity.

"Yahweh damns ancient Israel for moving away from the greatness it could be, through various prophets like Jeremiah, to bring the nation back to the righteous path -- to be the city on the hill," he said.

Americans confused the expression with the profanity "God damn it," he said.

"People don't know the flow of the black sermon," Hopkins said. The speech followed the classic pattern of black church oratory, which stuns with references to injustice and then soars in an uplifting ending.

"To think it would end in anger is an insult to those people," he said.

Obama condemned Wright's words, saying they do not reflect the strides the nation has made in overcoming a past that includes slavery, lynching and segregation. Wright had long been Obama's pastor.

But in a speech that has tallied tens of thousands of hits on YouTube and evoked praise around the nation, Obama also celebrated Wright's sermonizing, which helped him see "the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekial's field of dry bones."

Wright is a contemporary voice of black liberation theology, which took root in the mid-1960s as a reaction against a historical message to look to the next life for salvation. The movement surfaced in 1966, when the 51-member National Committee of Negro Churchmen took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling on the ministry to wage war against racism in Biblical terms.

"A prophet's job is to bring God's judgment within a particular context and that's as old as the religion itself," said the Rev. Dante Quick, who spoke at a candlelight vigil Thursday night honoring King at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.

"When one reads Revelations, you are reading the words of a man in prison condemning the Roman empire," Quick said. "Many readers of the Bible narrative can point to Jesus as a political victim."

Biblical texts "include rather heated rhetoric that excoriates the dominant powers," said Vincent Wimbush, a professor of religion and director of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures at Claremont Graduate University.

"There is a very long tradition of that. One style is a direct, prophetic, politically aware style," he said.

Clergy in many primarily white congregations have pointed out they also excoriate racism and other social evils from the pulpit.

And black liberation theology founder James Cone wrote in his seminal "Black Theology & Black Power" that the black in black theology encompasses all who are in concert with the oppressed.

"To be black means that your heart, your soul, your mind, and your body are where the dispossessed are," he writes.

If King is revered today for his eloquent calls for equality and his courage, he endured scorn in his day, and not just from Southern white racists.

When he was assassinated April 4, 1968, King had moved beyond a call for black equality and begun challenging the nation's economic and political institutions. He lost the support of many by condemning the Vietnam War and advocating passionately for workers and the poor, Quick said.

The Rev. Cone embraced King and Malcolm X to forge black liberation theology. He said Malcolm X challenged him about his blackness, King about his Christianity.

Hopkins said the two leaders moved toward each other philosophically as their lives neared their ends.

Malcolm X, a Black Muslim minister and spokesman for the Nation of Islam, was shot down Feb. 21, 1965, during a speech in Manhattan.

The primary surprise for Wimbush is that 40 years after King's death, "we are still segregated along the lines of the 18th century in these Christian churches. "We ought to be asking, what accounts for such ignorance?" he said.

The Pacific School of Religion will take up that discussion throughout April -- Advancing Racial Justice Month -- McKinney said.

"There is a willingness across the board for people to resume the conversation that has been too difficult for too long," he said. "People have feared that (engaging in it) would only lead to conflict. From a theological perspective, conflict precedes reconciliation."

For many black theologians, the gap remains wide.

Wright has been berated for sowing dissension, but the white establishment has done it with impunity, Quick said.

Online

Hear four black leaders speak:

Malcolm X: www.brothermalcolm.net/mxwords/whathesaid24.html

Martin Luther King Jr.: www.mlkonline.net/video-martin-luther-king-last-speech.html

Sen. Barack Obama: www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN_Su8ywLwk

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright: ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2008/03/21/the-full-story-behind-rev-jeremiah-wrights-911-sermon/

'Emerging church' seeks the justice Jesus sought

Contra Costa Times
June 5, 2008 Thursday

By Rebecca Rosen Lum

In an apartment a few steps below street level in San Francisco's Mission District, several people -- most in their 20s -- sat in a horseshoe of couches to consider the meaning of service.

In black high-tops, Crocs, hoodies and jeans, they looked much like the hipsters who wait in line Sunday mornings for a table at Boogaloo's a few blocks away on Valencia Street.

This group of Christians gathers each week to grapple with seven intangibles: service, simplicity, creativity, obedience, prayer, community, and love. A young man in a cap reads Colossians I aloud while some look down, others into the distance. Midway into the evening, all take to the streets, battling an icy wind to pick up trash, scrub graffiti and post signs in shop windows exhorting people to honor their neighborhood with cleanliness.

The group is part of the decade-old emerging church movement, an eclectic wave of change propelled by the Internet and peopled globally mainly by the young.

Their Jesus is a radical. They have little use for the institutional church, with its buildings, budgets and boards. They meet in homes. Their aim is to live like Jesus, compelled to service among the poor. They eschew congregations for communities. Their faith is not a doctrine but a conversation -- fluid and evolving.

"Experiment is a word we use a lot," said Adam Klein, who helps lead the loosely organized San Francisco community that calls itself reIMAGINE. "Nobody has lived in 2008 before and lived the way of Jesus, so you have to figure out what it means to you."

Their expression of faith harkens back to the early days of Christianity, he said.

"Part of Paul's job was to encourage people to continue on but without the dogma. When Constantine came around and nationalized the church it became a place where power and control were brokered."

Estimates place the number of emerging church communities at several hundred and growing. The Internet has figured hugely into the movement's growth, "not only in connecting, linking, promoting, recording and communicating, but also in the new media mind-set that it is creating," said Andrew Jones, a New Zealand emergent who blogs from Czechoslovakia under the name tallskinnykiwi.

"The net affects the way we think and relate and store knowledge. It is creating a new set of values and a new hierarchy of leaders. We haven't seen the half of it yet."

They know they are not the first believers compelled by faith to give to the needy. Their difference is that traditional Christian charity may involve compassion but not always a commitment to justice, said Brian McLaren, one of the early emergent thinkers and the author of several books, including "Adventures in Missing the Point," which he wrote with Tony Campolo.

"Eventually, we have to deal with the people causing injustice," McLaren said.

That kind of comment has stirred dismay among some conservative Christians, who say McLaren is a political progressive. He has countered that he is not politically progressive if that means living a secular life with government meeting all human needs.

The emergent church emphasizes Christ's message of social justice, seeks the kind of spirituality that flows from that and creates a community that supports that spirituality, he said.

Some emergents embrace ancient ritual, including the Eucharist, and they evangelize, although in social action they may not necessarily talk about their faith at all.

"St. Francis of Assisi said it best: Go preach the gospel and if necessary use words," said Darin Petersen of Oakland, who travels frequently to Philadelphia for community projects. "The best evangelism is living a contagious life."

"The problem with (traditional) evangelizing is that it is delivering answers to people who are not seeking them," he said. "We need to be a peculiar people. Jesus gives the order of what that looks like and what that means."

In an early project, Petersen and 30 others invited homeless people to a cash give-away on Wall Street after receiving a legal settlement.

"It was a beautiful expression of sharing this abundance," he said. "We walked away thinking, what would a daily rhythm of this be like?" After studying the Jewish tradition of using tithes to help care for widows and orphans in the community, they developed a global community of people who share one-tenth of their earnings with those in need. "Jesus was political," said Klein, whose community helped pay for his recent trip to Africa to build mobile medical clinics. "If it was all about the life after, he wouldn't have been killed the way he was."

Some reIMAGINE participants just bought a duplex on an East Oakland street that has been rocked by sideshows and three murders over the past few weeks. They want their new Shalom community to love, serve, and engage the troubled neighborhood, said Nate Milheim.

"What I've been excited about is taking Jesus more seriously as a teacher as well as a savior," Milheim, 30, who is cleaning up the house with his wife, their two daughters and a couple who will share it. "Let's learn from this master, Jesus, this revolutionary, radical guy. I want to explore what it would be to live like him."

"I realize we have a lot to learn," he said. "If the things happen that I dream of happening, it will take a while."

Pew survey: Americans religiously tolerant

Contra Costa Times (California)
June 22, 2008 Sunday

Rebecca Rosen Lum
Contra Costa Times

Most religious Americans believe there is more than one road to God, and more than one divine destination, a new report shows.

The report, released today by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, undercuts the image of religious Americans as a monolithic group with a predictable ideology and party affiliation. It also shows that most believers do not claim to have the sole route to salvation.

"Not only is there more than one true way, there is more than one true way to interpret their religion," said Pew research fellow Gregory Smith. "The degree to which that held true across the majority of religions, even among evangelical Protestants, that was quite striking."

A majority in only two religions, Mormons, at 57 percent, and Jehovah's Witnesses, at 80 percent, believe their faith is the single path to eternal life. The two groups also believe there is only one way to interpret the tenets of their faiths.

Muslims were among the most devout of all the religious groups queried. Eighty-two percent pray at least weekly, and 86 percent view the Quran as the word of God. But most honor other faiths, and, in the United States, 60 percent see more than one way to construe the teachings of Islam. The data on American Muslim faith practices and attitudes came from the Pew Center's exhaustive 2007 study.

A solid majority of evangelicals, too, agree that other types of believers can attain salvation.

"You might get different answers to these questions if you polled (religious) leaders," said the Rev. Brian Stein-Webber, director of the Contra Costa Interfaith Council. "There has always been a disconnect. This is a very populist survey."

Interfaith campaigns and a cultural emphasis on tolerance is bearing fruit, suggested the president of UC Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union.

"It is the result of living side by side with people of other faiths," said James Donahue. "We see they are good people, they work hard, they have integrity -- why shouldn't they get eternal salvation, too?"

The report is the second part of a landmark survey released in February. Part one documented theological fluidity among Americans: Nearly 30 percent have left the faiths of their childhood -- sometimes adopting a new religion, sometimes none at all.

Based on interviews conducted in English and Spanish with more than 35,000 adults, part two examines beliefs and practices, and attitudes about the environment, homosexuality, abortion, foreign affairs and the role of government.

Overall, Americans' faith holds strong: 88 percent are absolutely or fairly certain about their belief in God or "a universal spirit." The survey also included these findings:

• Most believers expressed dissatisfaction with the country's direction.

• Majorities of every faith group favored stricter environmental laws and regulations.

• Majorities of all faith groups but Mormons said the government should do more to help needy Americans, regardless of the cost.

• The best way to ensure peace is through good diplomacy, not military might, said majorities of Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Orthodox, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and the unaffiliated.

A majority of Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, the unaffiliated and other faiths say society should accept homosexuality, a belief rejected by evangelical Protestants, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons and Muslims.

"It's here we see a deep religious divide," Smith said. "Religious groups tend to line up on this issue. These are quite sharp religious distinctions."

Catholics are evenly divided on whether the church should express its views on social and political matters, and close to evenly divided on whether abortion should be illegal in all cases.

"People talk about the Catholic vote," Smith said. "To some extent, this gets to the very core of their diversity."

The survey documented a similarity of attitudes among Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and members of historically black and evangelical faiths.

Overwhelmingly, Mormons (91 percent), Jehovah's Witnesses (82 percent), and members of evangelical (79 percent) and historically black churches (71percent) see God as a person with whom they relate. A majority firmly believe in the existence of angels and demons. Their members attend services consistently, and most say they would resist adjusting their faith to modern times.

Although the prevailing wisdom may link evangelicals to Republican conservatism, 34 percent of evangelicals claim to be Democratic or leaning that way.

"The thing to keep in mind is what this illustrates," Smith said. "We talk about religion in monolithic terms. There really is a great deal of internal diversity."

WOMEN ORDAINED, DEFYING VATICAN

September 17, 2006 Sunday

By Rebecca Rosen Lum

At 11, Kathleen Stack Kunster felt a strong pull to the priesthood. When the 61-year-old Emeryville, Calif., woman was finally ordained July 31 in a riverboat ceremony in Pennsylvania, she cried for an hour and a half.

``It was extremely powerful -- amazing,'' said Kunster, who has a master's degree in divinity and a doctorate in psychology. ``I've been wrestling with this for a long time. It feels relentless, the knowledge the person is not doing what they're supposed to do, so nothing else fits. It can be painful.''

Since then, Kunster has undergone a transformation of sorts. Everything clicks. A self-described introvert, she finds herself much more approachable.

``It's like I've come into my own,'' she said.

Kunster is part of a ripple of women who have decided to stop waiting for the Vatican to ordain female priests and go it on their own. Twelve women joined the priesthood with her last month.

In ceremonies held around the world, women bishops, themselves ordained by supportive male bishops are anointing women into the priesthood. The male bishops have remained anonymous for fear of retribution by the church.

The women say their training is as rigorous as that for male candidates, and omits only conversations with the diocese, which does not recognize them.

The ceremonies have taken place on waterways -- the Danube, the Ohio River, the St. Lawrence Waterway -- because water carries profound symbolism in the Christian faith and they cannot go through the ritual in a Catholic church.

``I have been called for a very long time and I am not going to wait any longer,'' said Victoria Rue, who, as a child, stood on the steps of her front porch to dispense Necco Wafers in a communion re-enactment with the children of the neighborhood.

Rue, who holds a doctorate in theology, now teaches at San Jose State University and conducts services for the school community with Kunster and Don Cordero, a Jesuit priest who was excommunicated after marrying.

The Catholic Church has not permitted women to be ordained since the 13th century. In a 1994 papal letter, Pope John Paul II reaffirmed the rule. The church ``has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the church's faithful.''

Cardinal Justin Rigali, the archbishop of Philadelphia, has sent to the Vatican the name of at least one woman who has joined the priesthood.

``From the perspective of the Roman Catholic Church, they are not considered to be valid ordinations,'' said the Rev. Mark Weiser, spokesman for the Oakland (Calif.) Diocese. ``It's important for people to know that any sacraments that one of these women perform, we would not recognize.'' Such sacraments include marriage, baptisms or last rites.

But some scholars say they have found evidence that ordained women routinely performed sacraments up until the 1200s. These scholars include former priest John Wijngaards, who has dedicated himself to helping women enter the priesthood.

``Women seem to have been ordained as priests in some regions,'' he said. ``However, it was commonplace during the first nine centuries for women to be ordained deacons, especially in the Eastern part of the church. Since this ordination was a truly sacramental ordination, women were therefore admitted to holy orders.''

With a shortage of priests in the U.S., couldn't the church benefit from women priests?

``I know there is plenty of work and not enough priests to do it,'' Weiser said. But, he said, the shortage has fired up plenty of parishioners with skills to donate their time to the church doing administrative tasks, freeing priests for other duties.

Some may wonder why the women fight so hard to belong to a church that does not want them in its highest ranks.

``That's an excellent question, and a lot of women waiting have become ordained in other faiths,'' largely Episcopal, said Sharon Danner, spokeswoman for the Women's Ordination Conference, a support organization based in Virginia. ``That's a very common thing. Their faith is so important to them. They won't give up hope.''

Rue says her point isn't just to break into the priesthood, but to recraft the church as less hierarchical and more inclusive.

``I do not want to be part of a club that is exclusive,'' she said. ``We are very, very concerned about returning the church to the way it was when Jesus founded it, with all people welcome at the table.''