Roy Bourgeois

Roy Bourgeois (born January 27, 1938, in Lutcher, Louisiana) is an American activist, a former Catholic priest, and the founder of the human rights group School of the Americas Watch (SOA Watch).

After military service, he entered the Maryknoll Society in 1966; then entered the seminary of the Catholic missionary society of Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, Glen Ellyn, (Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America), and was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1972.

1972–1975 Fr. Bourgeois began the work of his priesthood in La Paz, Bolivia aiding the poor.

In 1975 he was accused of, and was arrested for, attempting to overthrow Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer, a 1958 graduate of the School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, in Columbus, Georgia.

Bourgeois was eventually deported from Bolivia and returned to the United States.

1980 Fr. Bourgeois moved to a Catholic Worker house in Chicago where he continued his work with the poor.

He became an outspoken critic of US foreign policy in Latin America after four American churchwomen were (three of them nuns, and two of them personal friends of Bourgeois) were brutally raped and murdered by a death squad consisting of soldiers from the Salvadoran National Guard, some of whom had been trained at the SOA/WHINSEC.

The massacre was performed by the Atlácatl Battalion, an elite unit of the Salvadoran Army, and a rapid-response, counter-insurgency battalion created in 1980 at SOA/WHINSEC.

1989 Fr. Bourgeois's criticism of US foreign policy in Latin America intensified on November 16, 1989, when six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and the housekeeper's daughter were massacred on the campus of Universidad Centroamericana "José Simeón Cañas" (UCA) in San Salvador, El Salvador.

Armed men in uniform burst into their shared residence and indiscriminately gunned-down everyone within.

1990 Fr. Bourgeois founded the School of the Americas Watch (SOA Watch), a not-for-profit organization that seeks to close the SOA (since 2000 known as WHINSEC) and to change U.S. foreign policy in Latin America by educating the public, lobbying Congress and participating in creative, nonviolent resistance such as demonstrations and nonviolent protest.

The SOA/WHINSEC has long maintained that it does not teach tactics that can be used on civilians but, rather, simply sharpens the military skills of soldiers from participating countries.

Its website says it "provides professional education and training for civilian, military and law enforcement students."

SOA Watch claims its work caused the Pentagon to respond to the growing anti-SOA movement with a PR campaign to give the SOA a new image.

He is the 1994 recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award and the 2011 recipient of the American Peace Award and also has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

On May 22, 1994, Pope John Paul II released an apostolic letter, addressed to the Bishops of the Catholic Church, entitled "On Reserving Priestly Ordination to Men Alone (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis)," which closes as follows:

"Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal Tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the Magisterium in its more recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless considered still open to debate, or the Church's judgment that women are not to be admitted to ordination is considered to have a merely disciplinary force.

Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful."

"Arguments against this clear and authoritative teaching," wrote Keith Fournier on Catholic Online, "sometimes come from people who do not understand that the priesthood is not a job and have succumbed to the 'rights' mentality of the current age. Other times they come from people who have no understanding of the sacramental nature of the Church. Both groups may include among them Catholics who, as in too many other areas of doctrine, have not been properly catechized."

1998 Fr. Bourgeois testified before a Spanish judge seeking the extradition of Chile's ex-dictator General Augusto Pinochet.

"In an attempt to disassociate the school with its horrific past," the SOA Watch website claims, "the SOA was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in January of 2001."

2008 In August 2008, in keeping with his belief that women should be ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood, Fr. Bourgeois was a celebrant in, and delivered the homily at the ordination ceremony of Janice Sevre-Duszynska, a member of Womenpriests, at a Unitarian Universalist church in Lexington, Kentucky.

The Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a decree in May 2008 formally declaring that a woman who attempts to be ordained a Catholic priest, and the persons attempting to ordain her, are automatically excommunicated.

Three months later Fr. Bourgeois was a celebrant in, and delivered the homily during the ordination of Janice Sevre-Duszynska under the auspices of the group Roman Catholic Womenpriests, which rejects the Church's teaching on the all-male priesthood.

The ceremony was not recognized by the Vatican; and its May 2008 declaration meant that Bourgeois was excommunicated latae sententiae.

Bourgeois received a letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which explained what the letter called his "errors" along with "a genuine concern for his salvation."

It gave him 30 days from October 21, 2008, to recant his "belief and public statements that support the ordination of women in our Church, or (he) will be excommunicated."

Bourgeois refused; and so was excommunicated latae sententiae on November 24, 2008.

For the next nearly four years Bourgeois continued to both act and be recognized as a priest, while he and Dominican Fr. Tom Doyle, a canon lawyer acting on Bourgeois' behalf, asked for discussions and negotiatations on the matter with the Maryknoll Society and, through it, the Holy See.

At no time, during any of it, did Bourgeois recant his position on women's ordination to the priesthood.

2011 Bourgeois was briefly detained by police at the Vatican on October 17, when he tried to deliver a petition to the Holy See with a number of women priests, who were dressed in their liturgical garments.

Ordained to the priesthood in 1972 in the Roman Catholic Church's Maryknoll society of apostolic life's Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers (The Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America), Bourgeois was canonically dismissed forty years later, on October 4, 2012, from both the Maryknolls and the priesthood, because of his participation on August 9, 2008, in what was, according to the Roman Catholic Church, considered an invalid ordination of a woman and "a simulated Mass" in Lexington, Kentucky.

Bourgeois was born in Lutcher, Louisiana.

He grew up in a Catholic working-class family, and attended the University of Southwestern Louisiana and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in geology.

After graduation, Bourgeois entered the United States Navy and served as an officer for four years.

He spent two years at sea, one year at a station in Europe, and two tours of duty during one year in Vietnam, during the first of which he was injured and received the Purple Heart.

2012 Bourgeois was part of a panel discussion at the New York premiere of the documentary Pink Smoke Over the Vatican.

The film features activists for women's ordination in the Catholic Church, and included clips of an interview with him.

Bourgeois has spent over four years in federal prisons for nonviolent protests, including entering Fort Benning.

He and more than 240 peace activists have been tried and jailed for peacefully demonstrating at the gates of the SOA/WHINSEC.