Event

Pink Smoke Over the Vatican

This powerful new film explores the controversial movement of women seeking to be ordained as priests in the Roman Catholic Church. On June 3, 1908, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the modern name for the Holy Office of the Inquisition, issued a sweeping order of excommunication for "the crime of attempting sacred ordination of a woman." Pink Smoke chronicles the events that led up to this severe punishment and tells the stories of the determined women and men who, through the forbidden and illicit path of female ordination, are working to end the underlying misogyny and outdated feudal governance that is slowly destroying the Roman Catholic Church. Their struggles encompass both the internal battles wrought by going against the Church they love as well as the external battles with the Church hierarchy, centuries-long tradition, and the rampant prejudice that still prevails against women in positions of power. (USA, 2011, 64 min., color, Blu-ray)

Father Roy Bourgeois, a Catholic Priest, is facing excommunication because he has been a leading advocate for women's religious rights and participated in the ordination of a Catholic woman priest. Since the 1980s he has been an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and spent over four years in U.S. federal prisons for non-violent protest against the training of Latin American soldiers at Fort Benning, Georgia. Fr. Roy founded the School of the Americas Watch which opposes the training of hundreds of soldiers from Latin America in combat skills, paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Father Roy was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.