Vows Repudiated : Bishop Blocks Transsexual’s Nuns’ Order

As an 8-year-old boy in Pontiac, Mich., Michael Clark wanted to become a nun.

This week Clark, who changed his name to Joanna following a sex change operation in 1975, took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in a service officiated by an Episcopal priest in a San Clemente church.

Taking the name Sister Mary Elizabeth, Clark inaugurated her own order, the Community of St. Elizabeth.

But on Thursday, Acting Episcopal Bishop Oliver B. Garver Jr. repudiated the event.

“I do know and can say without any fear of contradiction that what has happened is neither the formation of a religious order or a religious community with any standing within the Episcopal Church,” Garver said. Neither did the diocese affirm her status as a nun.

And the priest who presided at the ceremony, the Rev. Robert Boyer, pastor of St. Clement’s By-the-Sea Episcopal Church, conceded, “I really had not thought through the full implications of what I was doing.” Boyer officiated Wednesday when Clark, a U.S. Navy veteran who has fathered a son, now 27 years of age, took self-chosen vows and her new name.

Plans to Pursue Calling

Boyer said he blessed her habit, homemade by a friend, and silver cross to “affirm her desire to establish a religious community.”

Clark, 49, said Thursday that she will pursue her latest calling as a novice in her own order--even without the official blessing of the Episcopal Church. Clark said she had been sending unanswered letters to the diocese seeking official approval for her order since last fall.

But Los Angeles Bishop Garver, whose six-county diocese includes the San Clemente parish, said: “I haven’t got a clue. I kid you not. It was something that was not referred to me for decision or attention, and I’d love to know more about it.”

Archdeacon Terry Lynberg said he requested a written report from Boyer. At issue is not Clark’s gender status, but whether Boyer overstepped his authority as a parish priest in attempting to inaugurate a new monastic community in the Episcopal Church, he said.

Vocational Tests Pointed Way

In an interview Thursday, Clark said that as a young man he was active in the Baptist Church and was a Sunday School teacher and evangelist. But at 22 Clark left the church because of “the hatred” being projected by church members during the civil rights movement in Memphis, where Clark was stationed as a serviceman.

Vocational tests taken by Clark after her sex change surgery revealed that she should become a Catholic nun or a Catholic social worker, she said.

Eight different orders, two Episcopal and six Catholic, rejected Clark, she said. While most gave no reason, she assumed it was because she is a transsexual, she said.

“The church deals with sexuality in a strained way. Along comes a person like me and a red flag goes up,” she said.

“Maybe they rejected me because they saw I had a higher calling to go on to establish an order on my own.”

She joined the Episcopal Church two years ago and asked Boyer to affirm her plan to become a nun. In the time since, she said, she lived with an order of Episcopal Franciscan sisters in San Francisco and worked with hungry children and homeless people in San Clemente through church programs.

Boyer said: “It took a year and a half to really see the integrity of this person and the sincerity of her desire.”

At first, he said, he was concerned about her transsexuality. “The body/mind/spirit link is still a real mystery for us all. . . . Unfortunately, the problem with our American culture is we think of things usually in genital terms, not in terms of the whole person.”

After watching her concern and dedication for the needy, he said, “I was willing to go forward and support her regardless of the consequences. I saw her love and faith in action.”

Clark, who lives and works in a book-lined room in her parents’ mobile home in San Juan Capistrano, said she and two friends ordered materials on Episcopal rules and orders from England and drafted her own constitution and rules for a new order and her own vows. She said her order is based on the Franciscans and will minister to the homeless and other “outcasts” of society.

“My feeling is that when Christ came to minister to us and died for us, his second commandment was to love our neighbors as ourselves. There was no exclusionary list attached to that,” she said.

Bishop’s Approval Needed

While the Episcopal Church has several orders of nuns and brothers, the procedure for establishing them is clearly spelled out in canon law, Garver said. Among other requirements, setting up any such organization requires the approval of one or more bishops.

“From what little checking we’ve been able to do, we haven’t been able to find any other bishop who can acknowledge having been in contact with this lady, or with the priest,” he said.

Garver said he had yet not spoken directly with Boyer and does not plan to until after the election for a new bishop, which is scheduled to take place today.

“(But) I think he realizes that the event that took place in his parish is one with ramifications beyond his parish which didn’t occur to him,” Garver said. “That would be the charitable way to say it.”

As for the would-be nun, Garver said, “She may be a quite sincere Christian person. I don’t want to disparage her faith, I don’t know her, but this particular event in her life, in her pilgrimage, seems to have been presented to be more than under the canons (church law) it can be.”

Clark said that if her new order is not eventually sanctioned, she and two lay members will forge ahead with their plans to minister to society’s needy anyway.

As Michael Clark, she spent 12 years in the Navy, reaching the rank of chief petty officer. Clark’s duties included training other Navy airmen in radar and sonar operations. Clark’s son was born in the first of two marriages before the sex change. Clark has not seen her son in 11 years.

Clark re-enlisted in the Army Reserve as a woman but was dishonorably discharged when the surgery was discovered. In 1982, she won $25,000 and an honorable discharge in a lawsuit settlement with the Army.

As Joanna Clark, she became an advocate for the gender-confused and once tried to adopt a transsexual state prison inmate she claimed was being held in the wrong prison. A judge denied her petition.

Clark’s parents said they were taken completely by surprise by their son’s decision to undergo a sex change operation. “As far as we were concerned, she was a normal boy,” said her mother Roberta. But they have since accepted it. Joanna will be a good sister, she said. “She’s out to help people.”

“We were proud of her as a chief petty officer,” said her father Edwin Clark. “It’s been an interesting life for us.”

Times staff writer Mathis Chazanov contributed to this story.