Rev. Kori Pacyniak (STH’15) featured in The New Yorker Article “The Women Who Want to be Priests”
This article was originally published online by The New Yorker on June 21, 2021 and in the print edition of the June 28, 2021, issue, with the headline “Women on the Verge.”
Reverend Kori Pacyniak, (STH’15) is the first known transgender and non-binary person to be ordained within the Roman Catholic women priest movement.
Excerpt:
Pacyniak studied religion and Portuguese at Smith College in the early two-thousands, got a master’s in divinity from Harvard, and then went to Boston University, for a master’s in theology and trauma. At all three institutions, they encountered friendly people from the Episcopal Church—the perpetual temptation of liberal Catholics fed up with the Church’s teachings on gender and sexuality. But Pacyniak felt Catholic to their bones. They happily went to chapel with their new friends, but, as Pacyniak put it to me, “I was, like, ‘I’m not going to become an Episcopalian just because they ordain women.’ ” They did not want to be driven away and leave Catholicism to what they saw as antediluvian forces. They thought, “I’m going to stay and fix my church somehow.”