STORY - A Journey of Faith : one woman's story

“When Bishop Brian anointed my hands with oil and closed them, there was just something very, very powerful - that these hands have been anointed for blessing and for consecration. Every so often, I look at my hands and I just think of that anointing...”

Loy Thompson wanted to become a priest when she was four years old.

“I knew I had to be a boy, and I thought, ‘I don’t know how this can happen, but it might happen’,” she recalls.

As it turned out, Loy lived out her vocation to be a Josephite nun, a teacher, a wife and a mother. But God wasn’t done just yet.

Sixty-five years later, on 30 November 2009, God’s calling for her to be a priest was finally fulfilled.
“It’s a funny feeling, I feel as though I’ve been a priest all my life. Now I can live very fully and openly God’s purpose for me,” she says.

Loy found her vocation in a place she never would have imagined - in the Anglican Church.

After her childhood yearnings, Loy realised that as a girl, becoming a priest was not an option. “I remember going through a stage where I was angry with God that I was not born a boy.” Loy says. Then, at 12, an article in her mother’s Annals of the Sacred Heart magazine explained how girls could complete their education at a school in Hunters Hill and become a Sister of St Joseph. “I thought, God I’ve got you, you thought you’d tricked me but now I can be of service to others and to the church.”

As a Josephite, Loy learned the gifts of a deep prayer life and found a love of teaching.

“But this niggling kept coming back that convent life was not for me, there is something else God wants.”

She left the convent in her mid-thirties, amidst the rapid change of Vatican II, as lots of things were changing within the Order. While Loy knows she made the right decision, at first she struggled to make sense of it. “People found it difficult to realise that making a decision to leave was not about making a judgement of the congregation,” she says. Blessed Mary MacKillop remains one of her heroes, and Loy maintains strong links with the Sisters of Saint Joseph.

Loy found her way back to teaching, and was the first female teacher at a Christian Brothers School in Burwood. “I always remember the tremendous satisfaction after my first day in the classroom as a very ordinary person and I came out thinking, ‘I can teach and I love it’.”

Loy met her husband Michael Thompson as a classmate in a counselling and spirituality course. They were perfectly matched by a mutual commitment to live out their faith and vocation. Two months after making the decision to adopt children, they were in Peru, meeting the first of their three children.

On retirement from teaching, Loy started looking for a new ministry. But when it came to church ministry, she “hit a blank wall”.

“I was so tied up with wanting this commitment in and through the church, I really couldn’t see what God was wanting - and where was God leading?”

In 2004, she made a decision to attend a Cursillo weekend with Anglican women. Loy brought along a book, thinking it would fill the time if she didn’t like what she was hearing.

At the beginning of the weekend, the director read a reflection - from the same book that Loy had brought. Everything that followed seemed to speak to Loy. She shared fully in a Eucharist celebrated by a female Anglican priest.

“From then, I knew this was home for me, I had a great sense of belonging and a great sense of God’s healing in my life. I discovered that layers of bias and bigotry were being cast aside,” she says.

Loy, and then Michael, began attending the Anglican Church.

The next turning point came when Bishop Brian Farran came to the Newcastle Anglican Diocese and brought with him a vision of church mission and ministry that reflected the mission and ministry of the early church. This included the concept of locally ordained deacons and priests ministering within their own communities. The Parish of Southlakes embraced this vision and Loy’s calling to priesthood was reawakened when, in the discernment process, her name was put forward as someone gifted for ordained ministry.

The process continued at diocesan level with interviews, psychology tests and more discernment.

Then Bishop Brian phoned Loy to say she had been chosen to begin training for priesthood.
“It was a moment of pure joy. It was just an unreserved acknowledgement that this was and is God’s calling in my life.” Rev Loy is now a priest in local ministry serving the parish of Southlakes under the direction of Reverend Glen Pope, the Rector.

Reflecting on her story, Bishop Brian says, “Rev Loy’s story has elements common to all Christian vocation. There is a sense of call....There is the requirement of persistence in vocation. I have always been conscious of the injunction ‘no one who puts their hand to the plough and looks back is worthy of the kingdom of God.’ Nothing much happens in life or in Christian service without persistence. And Loy showed plenty of persistence in a faithful way!”

Rev Loy presides at Eucharist about once a week, runs programs for Families, Youth and Children, guides a Grief Support program, and is responsible for Baptism and Confirmation preparation for young people, and other duties as requested by the parish priest. She recently led her first funeral.

“When I say Mass, it doesn’t feel new, it’s just a kind of timeless experience. I know I haven’t been celebrating Eucharist all my life but nor does it feel awkward. It is simply a matter of entering sacred time and sacred space.”

Another view

Patricia Banister is very clear that God is not calling her to the ordained priesthood. Rather, the Chair of the Council for Australian Catholic Women (CACW) says she has found a very fulfilling lay ministry.

“I have always seen vocation as something other than ordained ministry,” says Patricia, a Rutherford parishioner for the past 44 years. “I see my church ministry role as complementary to the priestly role - not better than or less than.”

Patricia was diocesan director of Caritas for nine years, during which she travelled to South Africa and Zimbabwe. “We went to places where women were making soap just to be able to send their children to school,” she says.

A veteran of Catholic Women’s League Australia (CWLA), Patricia is the current state vice-president. She is a previous Chair of the Diocesan Pastoral Council.

Patricia says the role of the CACW, an advisory body to the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, is to give women a voice and to make the wider church aware of the richness women bring to church ministry.

CACW members have travelled to parishes across Australia to listen to women and their needs. It has hosted a national conference, published a book of women’s stories and recently wrote to the Bishops Conference about the language of the new Roman Missal.

“I think the hierarchy of the church and the clergy are often not affirming towards women,” says Patricia. “Increasingly women are saying, ‘Why am I doing this?’ and ‘Why am I still in this church?’”

Patricia says she believes some women, like Rev Loy, are meant to be priests. “I firmly believe that there are women in our church who feel that they are called to ordained ministry and I feel a tremendous sorrow for their incompleteness.

“I’ve met nuns who are running parishes but they can’t complete that ministry, they can’t say Mass, they can’t preside over the marriage ceremony, but to all intents and purposes they are the parish priest, and I think that’s sad.”

But Patricia does not demand, nor expect, the church to change in her lifetime.

Patricia says some advocates for women’s rights in the church are very demanding. “They want equality but they don’t understand that we must share that equality with men and work collaboratively.

“My dream is that our young women would see that the church is precious, see beyond the personalities of the church, see the richness of our scriptures, see where the church can go,” says Patricia, “and then they must fulfil the dream.”

Bishop Michael Malone, as Chair of the Bishops Commission for Church Ministry, also belongs to the CACW. He says the Council promotes the role of women in the church, something he is passionate about. The Council does not, nor is it permitted to, consider women’s ordination.

In the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle, women are represented at all levels of leadership: pastoral councils, parish teams, the Diocesan Pastoral Council, Finance Council and the Bishop’s executive leadership. “Women’s role in the church is not a passive role, it’s not cleaning brass and arranging flowers, but it’s an active, fully committed involvement,” he says. “You’d have to say, if it wasn’t for women and their involvement, the church would be a far different scene altogether in Australia. It would be far poorer, a lot smaller and it would be deprived of a richness that women are able to give.”

Rev Loy contributed many things as a Catholic woman. In the end, she says, God’s calling for her was far bigger than the lines between Catholics and Anglicans. “Some people’s faith journeys tend to go in a straight line, others take twists and turns.”

Likewise for the journey of the church, she says. “I have a sense of God’s timing in my life and I am just as sure that God is at work in everyone’s life in order to achieve his purposes for them.

Rebecca Beisler

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