We have desperately needed a book on the Roman Catholic Womenpriests, a growing movement with one foot in the Roman church and one foot dragging it toward reform. Womanpriest is that book. Jill Peterfeso draws on rich interviews with RCWP women, as well as ethnographic participation and primary documents, to show how different womenpriests understand the balance between tradition and reform; how they hold positions for women’s ordination and against clericalism at the same time; and how numbers of Catholic communities are already formed and transforming in relationship with priests who are women.---Julie Byrne, Hartman Chair of Catholic Studies, Hofstra University, and author of The Other Catholics: Remaking America’s Largest Religion

...a valuable contribution to a complicated set of issues, a welcome narrative about one segment of the movement that is in the process of transforming one of patriarchy’s last bulwarks.

Her ethnographic account, based on five years of interviews, digital questionnaires, and participant-observation of liturgies, offers the most measured analysis of RCWP to date. Neither sensationalizing the women as heroic renegades nor condemning them as fringe heretics, Peterfeso instead offers readers a nuanced portrait of their lives and worship spaces, letting them speak for themselves.

Author Jill Peterfeso has done an excellent job getting behind the movements that have fostered women for ordinations, the women priests themselves and the communities they lead outside the normal parish structure.---Rev. Alexander Santora, The Jersey Journal

Jill M. Peterfeso is Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department at Guilford College. She is a cultural historian of American religion whose published scholarship focuses on gender and sexuality, resistance to authority, and social justice, specifically in Roman Catholicism and Mormonism.

Introduction
1. Called
2. Rome’s Mixed Messages
3. Conflict and Creativity
4. Ordination
5. Sacraments
6. Ministries on the Margins
7. Bodies in persona Christi
Conclusion

Appendixes
Appendix A. Interview Subjects and Primary Sources
Appendix B. Interview Questions for Womenpriests
Appendix C. Data and Interview Questions for RCWP Communities

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index