and card-carrying Roman Catholic” lower middle-class European immigrant family. Baptized four days later, Sept. 14, 1947, at St. Anthony of Padua in northeast Baltimore, she attended the parish grade school with four brothers and sisters and graduated from the all-girls Seton High School on Charles Street at a time when students were “still wearing nurses uniforms,” she recalls with a laugh.
When she accepted a vocation with the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Peekskill, NY, it surprised her family. Not because she was becoming a nun, but because she was leaving Baltimore and moving to New York.
“As you much as you can, at 17 years old, hear a call from God, I did,” Carpeneto says. “The Sisters of the Good Shepherd worked primarily with women, victims of domestic abuse, and ‘delinquent’ girls. They were out in the world, and that was very attractive to me. Even as a teenager, I really liked social service work.”
But after two years, Carpeneto, then sister Gloria Ray, questioned if the ordered life was a good fit. “It was the way convents were organized at the time, the structure. I wasn’t happy with the system. It really pushed me back home.” By no means did she ever question her faith.
Her first job upon return was in the Chancery office of the Archdiocese of Baltimore and Lawrence Cardinal Shehan. In the evenings, she finished the undergraduate work she’d begun at New York’s Fordham University at another Jesuit institution, Loyola College.
“I didn’t question Church doctrine then, not the role of women in the church or anything,” she says. “Not like today when we talk about the ‘stained glass ceiling.’”
Indeed, she could not have imagined, 40 years after departing the convent, she’d hear a new religious calling, leading to ordination as a priest—as well as ex-communication by the Vatican.
Last summer, the petite, gray-haired, 61-year-old grandmother took part in a ceremony in Boston with two other women and claimed holy Orders as a Catholic priest. Several hundred supporters attended the July ordination, which the Archdiocese of Boston immediately denounced.
Despite facing ex-communication, Roman Catholic Womenspriests have ordained 35 female priests, seven deacons and one bishop in the U.S. since 2002. In Canada and Europe, where the movement began, they have ordained another 20 bishops, priests, and deacons, all in accordance with historic apostolic tradition, they maintain.
Together with Annapolis resident Andrea Johnson, who claimed Catholic priesthood in 2007 in a similar ceremony, Carpeneto leads Mass—outside the auspices of Archdiocese of Baltimore—on the third Sunday of every month at a Protestant church in Catonsville. Typically, 30 to 40 people, including men, women and families, attend services, and Carpeneto estimated 100 supporters receive their e-mail updates.
Some people have asked her why she and the other women didn’t just leave the official Roman Catholic Church and, for example, join the Episcopalian Church or another mainline Protestant denomination that ordains women to fulfill her calling.
“The simple answer of why I didn’t choose to leave the Catholic Church is that I’ve been a Roman Catholic since I was four days old. It’s not just my religion, it’s my culture, like Judaism is for Jewish people,” Carpeneto says. “All of us [in the women’s ordination movement] love the Roman Catholic Church and our choice is to reform from within rather than walk away.
“We’ve all said this is our family.”
Baltimore Harbor
Canton Pier
January 16, 2010
4. To Haiti
In a battered, industrial corner of the Baltimore harbor, at the end of a gravel road filled with pallets, cast iron pipes, steel cables, electrical cords and cargo boxes, four-dozen people huddle in the cold, still dark, early morning hours to wish the U.S. Naval hospital ship Comfort well as it prepares to set steam for Haiti.
Meanwhile, Steve White sits at dock’s edge with a walkie-talkie, directing his tugboat crew as they lower two 35-ton diesel generators on deck. The sun has come up and the Comfort is almost ready. Fifteen welders and electricians are the last off ship. They’ve worked 36 hours without sleep.
The 894-foot ship with red crosses on its sides will carry 560 medical personnel, four x-ray machines, a CAT scan, and as much as 5,000 units of blood to the earthquake-ravaged country, where they will treat hundreds of the most severely injured.
Trying to stay warm in a gray, hooded U.S. Navy sweatshirt, Lauren Wishart of Severna Park, looks out as another tug pushes the Comfort to open water. Her son, Lt. Aaron Wishart, is aboard.
“He’s stationed in Norfolk and I saw him yesterday,” she says. “He told me he’d be down there a minimum of two months. I’m doing what a mother has to do, seeing him off.”
A crane lifts away the gang blank. Lineholders pull thick, 120-foot ropes off the bow and stern bollards. “If you’ve got a pair of gloves—feel free to lend a hand,” Jim Tighe, from Dundalk, jokes with an onlooker.
Rosalie Smith, 65, and Audrey Smith, 68, best friends from North Baltimore, attended an NAACP meeting last night where a hat was passed to collect donations for victims of the earthquake.
“You feel so helpless,” says Audrey Smith. “But we wanted to come down. It tugs at your heartstrings. I wish we could go with them and cook and serve meals to the troops.”
South Baltimore
West Randall Street
June 30, 2010
5. Friend of the Court
Jerry Lawler met Ricky, then 13, shortly after he’d been removed from his latest foster home and placed in another residential institution. “His foster care mother basically said, ‘I can’t deal with him anymore,’” Lawler says.
A volunteer with the Baltimore nonprofit CASA, acronym for Court Appointed Special Advocates, Lawler was assigned to Ricky by the Baltimore City Family and Juvenile Court. He was supposed to get to know Ricky, floundering seven years after being taken from his mother because of neglect, and serve as another set of eyes and ears in his life. He would represent Ricky’s interests in court hearings, the educational system, and the medical and social service communities.
A clinical psychologist by profession and father of two grown children, Lawler was nonetheless nervous before their first meeting.
“I think all the volunteers wonder, ‘What if I can’t relate to my kid? What if they don’t want to see me? What if they yell at me or get pissed off at me?’”
Ricky didn’t yell or get angry. He barely spoke.
“He was guarded. Withdrawn. No swagger. Just ‘I’m not going to tell you anything,’” Lawler recalls. “I’d ask how he was doing and he’d say. ‘Okay.’ I’d ask if he wanted to go to McDonald’s, ‘Okay.’ Want to go to the Inner Harbor? ‘Fine.’
“It was six months before we’d be driving somewhere that he’d tell me what he’d done the previous night. Another six months before he’d tell me anything he was feeling,” Lawler continues. “This was a kid who’d learned not to trust people because they’d let him down so much.”
Foster kids often move from placement to placement with few belongings, even photos of
