Two Sundays a month at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Vineyard Haven, Rev. Mary Michael Leahy takes the pulpit to offer a Roman Catholic mass, complete with home-baked communion bread.
The rite is familiar, with just two exceptions: God is not male, and neither is the priest.
Reverend Leahy, who goes by Rev. Mary Michael, is part of an international movement for ordained Roman Catholic women priests that has been gaining momentum since the early 2000s despite steadfast opposition and excommunications from church leadership in Rome.
“We’re now over 300 in the world in a matter of 24, 25 years, which is a great accomplishment,” she told the Gazette this week.
Reverend Leahy began her ministry on the Vineyard in September and named it Mary Magdalene Community, honoring the Roman Catholic saint and historical figure known in the Bible as Christ’s foremost woman follower.
“Sometimes I get a lot of people at my services, sometimes I don’t get any at all, and that’s okay,” said Reverend Leahy, who was raised in a large Irish-American, Roman Catholic family in Marshfield and attended the Jesuit university Boston College for her bachelor’s and master’s of divinity degrees.
Her call to priesthood came long before she discovered there was a pathway to women’s ordination, she said. Even as an undergraduate, she had a deep interest in spirituality and theology.
“I always wanted to be a priest, [but] I didn’t know how that was going to happen,” Reverend Leahy said.
After graduating from BC, she joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, becoming a case worker among the elderly poor in Seattle. The years were formative for her, she said, but when she moved back to the East Coast after volunteering, she built a private-sector career as an executive with an expanding home care company.
By then, she said, established Roman Catholicism had begun to chafe against her own spiritual calling.
“I kind of dropped out of the church when I realized, well, I can’t be a priest,” said Reverend Leahy.
But she never lost her faith and continued to attend worship services with a variety of denominations.
“I wanted to explore other religions … to see how, if there is a god for people in general, who is that god and how can it be for everybody?” Reverend Leahy said.
She was still working as an executive when she met her husband, Manley Kiley, Jr., the single father of two young children; the couple later had a daughter, who is now 26.
In 2011, while living in Duxbury, Reverend Leahy contracted Lyme disease from a hidden tick bite that led to a late diagnosis and a series of debilitating illnesses.
“I had everything that went along with [Lyme], like meningitis, encephalitis, Bell’s palsy,” she recalled.
“It was a very intense illness, and I had to rest a lot. And it was the first time in probably 20 years that I got a chance to just slow down and rest,” Reverend Leahy said.
The two-year process of sickness and recovery also provided the opportunity to think about her life beyond the day-to-day, she said.
“During that time I had this epiphany of ‘Okay, I’ve done all these things in my life, but what I really want to do is get my master’s of divinity, and I want to go back to theology and spirituality,’” Reverend Leahy said.
After regaining her health, Reverend Leahy began taking classes at BC and the family moved to Chestnut Hill near the university. She also volunteered for the homeless in downtown Boston with St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, and worked on a homelessness prevention initiative with then-mayor of Boston Marty Walsh.
“I was assigned to gathering and supporting all the people who were homeless, who were going to be on [the mayor’s] committee, and getting them to meetings and doing follow up and all that kind of stuff,” Reverend Leahy said.
“I really felt I met Jesus there in those situations, working with those people, and it fed me, [although] at times it could be very heartbreaking,” she said.
While she worked with Episcopalians at St. Paul’s and explored other Christian denominations, Reverend Leahy never lost her Roman Catholic vocation.
“I still felt called to the priesthood,” she said, despite an explicit prohibition from the Vatican in Rome.
The official Roman Catholic position, established by Pope John Paul II in 1994, is that the church has no authority to ordain women because Jesus Christ did not appoint any women as his apostles.
In 2002, however, rogue bishops in Europe ordained seven women priests. Although the Vatican moved swiftly to excommunicate everyone concerned, two of the women were made bishops the following year with the ability to ordain priests themselves.
Today, the Roman Catholic Women Priests organization lists clergy in the Americas and Africa, with the largest number working in the United States.
Reverend Leahy learned about the movement in 2015 through the Women’s Ordination Conference, a feminist Roman Catholic organization founded in 1975 to advocate for women priests.
“It was pretty much from then on that I was committed to that path,” she said.
After earning her master’s of divinity degree from BC in 2017, Reverend Leahy said, she made time to contemplate her next step.
“I took a couple years of discernment. I did some other kinds of work with spiritual direction and centering prayer, and I was still always in touch with Roman Catholic women priests,” she said.
“Finally, I just decided to do it.”
While women priests are not required to take the traditional Roman Catholic vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, Reverend Leahy said, the requirements for ordination are stringent.
In addition to a master’s degree in divinity, she said, prospective priests must have acquired years of pastoral experience and provide multiple references from people who know them in a ministerial role.
They also have to submit a spiritual autobiography, to be reviewed by an ordination committee, and undergo both psychological evaluations and a criminal background check, Reverend Leahy said.
She was first ordained a deacon in 2020 and, in late 2021, realized her long-held dream of becoming a priest.
“It was just a beautiful experience, crossing that bridge into a different kind of life and … finally matching up with what had been inside me my whole life,” Reverend Leahy said.
For her first three years of priesthood, she led a small community in Cambridge called the Mary Magdalene Spirituality Center, located near Porter Square. She likely would have continued that ministry, Reverend Leahy said, if her health had allowed.
“I had an illness that required me to have a couple surgeries a couple years ago, and my husband retired at that time too,” she said.
The couple have moved full-time to what had been their vacation home in Vineyard Haven and now is their only residence, Reverend Leahy said.
“He really wanted to be here, and I always had in the back of my head that I was supposed to live on Martha’s Vineyard one day. That was an important thing in my life,” she said.
Her Island story began with a visit to the beach at Aquinnah when she was 30, Reverend Leahy said.
“This spiritual energy seemed to just come charging up out of the sand, and it literally knocked me over,” she recalled.
“For a long time after that, I was trying to process [it]. What was that all about? What did that mean? And … I settled on the fact that I was meant to live on the Island at some point as my home,” Reverend Leahy said.
The interfaith Island Clergy Association has welcomed her, she said. Although she hasn’t met the local Roman Catholic priests, she has been invited to preach at some of the Protestant churches. She also performs weddings and funerals, Reverend Leahy said.
At the Unitarian Universalist Church, Reverend Leahy celebrates mass at 5 p.m. on the second and fourth Sunday of each month. She welcomes contact from Islanders in person or through her email, newseeds28@gmail.com.
“If anybody wants to talk about this phenomenon that is happening and that I’m a part of, I’m more than open to answering questions [at] meetings or coffee or whatever they would like to do,” she said.
“They can ask whatever they want, or argue about it, for or against. I’m really happy about doing that, too,” Reverend Leahy said.