Pink Smoke Over the Vatican

Pink Smoke Over the Vatican is a documentary film about impassioned Roman Catholic women who are defying the Church hierarchy by being illicitly ordained as priests and refusing to remain voiceless in the religion they love.

BIOS
Jules Hart: Award-winning film producer, director and editor Jules Hart is the founder of Eye Goddess Films. Her work has aired on PBS and shown at a number of festival venues including The Action on Film International Film Festival; Vitas: A Film Festival of Contemporary Folklore and Popular Culture; the Hollywood Spiritual Film Festival; The Interfaith Film Festival and the upcoming Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and La Femme Film Festival.

Through her work, Hart has explored such diverse topics as storefront churches, Latina healers, drumming as a spiritual practice, and art as a vehicle for healing. Her most recent and controversial work is Pink Smoke Over the Vatican, an exploration of the women struggling to be ordained as priests in the Roman Catholic Church.

Hart transitioned from a 22-year career in front of the camera as fashion model, to her present role behind the cameras, after creating a film as a homework assignment for a Film and Folklore class at UCLA. It was at that point she realized her own true calling. As a filmmaker, Hart taps into her own feminism and dedication to women’s rights to tell compelling stories about other women’s struggles, challenges and victories.

Jules Hart has lectured at Antioch University, Whittier College and UCLA, her alma mater, on topics such as Film and Folklore, Women in the Arts and Women and Religion. She currently resides in California

Father Roy Bourgeois – After serving as a Naval Officer for four years, (for which he received the Purple Heart), Fr. Roy was ordained a Catholic priest in 1972. In the 1980s he became an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and spent over four years in U.S. federal prisons for nonviolent protest against the training of Latin American soldiers at Fort Benning, Georgia. Fr. Roy founded the School of Americas Watch, an office that does research and informs the general public, Congress and the media about the implications of our training hundreds of soldiers from Latin America in combat skills, all paid for by. U.S. taxpayers. Roy is also a leading advocate for women’s religious rights and participated in the ordination of a Catholic woman priest. He currently travels the country giving talks at universities, churches and other organizations. Fr. Roy was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.

Rev. Jean Marie Marchant, Jean is an ordained priest in the Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement and holds a Masters of Divinity degree from Weston Jesuit School of Theology and a Doctor of Ministry Degree in Pastoral Counseling from the Graduate Theological Foundation. Formerly the Director of Health Care Ministry for the Archdiocese of Boston, a position she resigned following her announcement of her ordination as priest, Jean’s primary ministry for the past 25 years has been as chaplain to dying and grieving adults and children in hospital and hospice programs, and to the staff and chaplains who minister to them. Ordained in 2005 on the St. Lawrence Seaway, Jean and her husband, Ron Hindelang, PhD., STL, co-pastor The Spirit of Life: A Catholic Community of Justice and Joy in Weston, MA (www.SpiritofLife.org ). The mother of two adult daughters and grandmother of five, Jean presently ministers as a hospice chaplain, spiritual director and licensed marriage and family therapist, and is the Preparation Program Coordinator for the Northeast Region of RCWP.

Angela Bonavolgia (Moderator) – Angela is an author and award-winning journalist whose focus is on women, particularly in regard to health, religious and social issues. Her work has appeared in such outlets as Ms. (longtime contributing editor), the NY Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, The Nation, Salon.com, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Newsday, The New York Times, and the National Catholic Reporter. Her article, “The Church’s Tug of War,” about women as an invisible force for reform in the Roman Catholic Church, was a lead article in The Nation in the wake of the clergy sex abuse scandals that broke in the U.S. in 2002. It provided a fresh analysis of the role of women in the progressive Church reform movement at an unprecedented moment in American Church history and became the basis for her most recent book, Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church. (Harper-Collins). www.goodcatholicgirls.com