Janine Denomme has felt a calling from a higher power, and she isn’t going to let anything, even advanced cancer, stop her from answering it.
On Saturday, Denomme, 45, will be ordained a Roman Catholic priest by a group of excommunicated female bishops and priests who want the church to open its clergy ranks to women and married people. Denomme will become the third such woman in the Chicago area.
“I know without any doubt that I am a priest, with or without this ordination,” she said. “No matter what the official Catholic church teaching is, they simply cannot dictate whom the Holy Spirit calls.”
Not even the prospect of death has made her waver. In April 2009, a screening test revealed Stage 4 cancer in her colon, and doctors found it had spread to her liver.
“I feel like my diagnosis has made it all the more clear that this is what I am supposed to do,” Denomme said.
She said she has been told that 30 percent of those diagnosed with the cancer live five years.
“They’re just trying to manage it and give me as much time as possible,” she said.
Denomme hopes to use the time she has left to fulfill her need to make a difference in people’s lives. She has chronicled her struggle with cancer in a blog on caringbridge.org, and before her illness forced her to take leave last summer, she was the youth program director for the Center on Halsted, a nonprofit that serves lesbians, gays and transsexuals.
“Janine brings life to other people,” said Bishop Joan Clark Houk of Roman Catholic Womenpriests, who will be ordaining Denomme.
Her path to priesthood began in Detroit, where she grew up two blocks from church in an active Catholic household and attended the parish’s grade school. While the other children goofed around during mass, she was paying attention and enjoying it.
“I was kind of a weird kid, I guess,” she said.
After graduating from the University of Detroit Mercy, Denomme moved to Chicago with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and worked with homeless women. The church “pulled the veil” from her eyes to social injustice.
But Denomme, a lesbian, encountered what she thought were injustices within the church: the lack of opportunities for women and its stance on homosexuality. She tried preaching and ministry in other denominations but kept coming back to her religious roots.
“There’s something about the ritual that’s culturally in my blood,” she said. “I cannot not be a Catholic.”
After being ordained a deacon last summer, she has been excommunicated from the church, though she said she hasn’t received an official notice.
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Susan G. Burritt, media relations director for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, wrote in an e-mail that only those recognized by the Catholic Church can be Catholic priests.
“Anyone who simulates the sacrament of Holy Orders is automatically excommunicated by reason of Canon 1378,” Burritt wrote. “When an excommunication occurs, the hope remains that the offending party will soon make peace with the Church.”
Denomme said the spiritual pain of being cut off from her church made her hesitate before going through with her ordination. She also has had to deal with the pain of her illness.
She received chemotherapy for eight months until it was no longer effective, and since December she has been in the hospital six times to treat infections and fevers. Doctors have had recent success in shrinking and decaying her tumors with a new treatment of feeding microscopic radioactive spheres through an artery to the liver, but some days she still is crippled with pain and fatigue.
She hopes Saturday is a good day, so she can enjoy the ordination. She will be there regardless of how she feels.
“When you receive a vocation from God, the vocation isn’t contingent on her good health,” said KC Conway, a friend and member of the Catholic parish Denomme attends.
Thirty of Denomme’s relatives will be at her ordination, including her mother, three brothers and 97-year-old grandfather, who is picking up the $800 tab for her vestments.
For Denomme to arrive at this day, it’s been a long struggle, mentally, spiritually and physically. She has made her tough choice, and she said she believes Catholicism will eventually have to do so, too.
“I think the reality is the church will change or it will die,” she said.
The ordination will be at 1 p.m. Saturday at Ebenezer Lutheran Church, 1650 W. Foster Ave., Chicago.