My name is Rev. Elaina Jo LeGault, and I am an Episcopal priest currently living in San Francisco with my wife Jessica. 

            I was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana, where, growing up, the Catholic faith was very important to my family. From a young age, I was involved in the church choir, reading at Mass, and being part of my parish youth group. I loved the Sacraments, learning about the saints, and learning about my faith. When I was twelve, my family took me to an ordination to see our parish’s deacon be ordained. When the deacons prostrated themselves on the ground, I had an overwhelming feeling that I was called to join them—not just at that moment but throughout my whole life. I felt the presence of God and knew that I was called to be a priest. At that time, I had never heard anyone talk about the ordination of women, and I don’t think I even knew that there were other Christian denominations with women as ordained priests. Yet, something stirred deep inside of me. It was a feeling and a longing that did not subside. 

            When I shared my experience with the adults in my life, I was told that women cannot be priests. Despite this early rejection of my call, I continued to explore leadership opportunities in the Catholic tradition. In high school and college, I became incredibly involved in campus ministry. I led retreats and faith-sharing groups and fell in love with liturgy. In college, I discovered that there were many more ways to be Catholic than the version I had grown up with. I met other students and members of the local Catholic Worker community who believed in the radical Jesus of the Gospels who challenged authority. I immersed myself in the idea of “a faith that does justice” and began focusing on learning about liberation theology. This deeply impacted my spirituality and my call to continue deepening my participation in the Catholic Church. 

            After college, I spent two years in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps Northwest in Ashland, Montana, working with the Northern Cheyenne and Crow Nations. I was greatly impacted by the spirituality of the Crow and Cheyenne people, especially through what I learned from my adoptive Cheyenne Grandma. As a Cheyenne elder and a Catholic woman of faith, she was often called on to preach at Sunday Mass and lead traditional Cheyenne prayers and rituals. She often spoke to me about being a ceremonial woman. Being a ceremonial woman, she would tell me, is not just about leading prayer but about coming to love God and all of God’s creation. One day, while I was in her office, she told me, “You are called to be a ceremonial woman.” She spoke about how I was called to follow the call from the Creator to share compassion with the world. Although I had always felt a call to ordained ministry, she challenged me to own that vocation and not be afraid to take on leadership roles: to preside over liturgies, rituals, and prayer.

            Following my time in Montana, I spent a year as a pastoral ministry associate at a college campus ministry in Michigan. I was blessed to be in a space where I preached from the pulpit for the first time and received training as a spiritual director. I grew into my call to be a priest as I ministered to students and parishioners, and I felt my prophetic identity come alive in homilies and online reflections. As I came to the end of my time in Michigan, I found myself desiring to pursue my call to the priesthood as far as I could by getting an M.Div.

            When I started my M.Div. program at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, I found new opportunities to explore my call, especially through a group of faculty and students who supported the ordination of women in the Catholic tradition. I found myself caught between prayer experiences that filled me with deep consolation and hope and moments of desolation where I felt rejected by the institutional Catholic Church. In my academic studies, I began to encounter queer and feminist writings that helped me deconstruct the theology I was taught for most of my life. In addition to knowing about the radical Jesus of social justice, I began to see the stories of women and queer folks who had been living lives of faith. 

            My time in grad school was one of self-discovery where, for the first time, I truly accepted my queerness and found myself in a place where I had queer friends. I took a class rooted in queer theology that invited me to queer those parts of the Catholic tradition that are both dear to my heart and those with which I vehemently disagree. Through feminist teachers, I also encountered new perspectives on women in scripture and encountered women from Christian history, like Julian of Norwich and Hildegard von Bingen, who inspired me to continue discerning God’s call in my life.

            Although I had some wonderful experiences at JST, it was also a place where I faced intense sexism, clericalism, and homophobia, all of which led me to discern leaving the institutional Catholic Church. For a long time, people asked me, “Why do you stay in the Catholic Church?” Some asked me because of my call to ordained ministry, while others asked because of my queerness. My “go-to” response used to be: “Jesus asks me to.” While on retreat during my third year, I was walking a labyrinth when I had a profound prayer experience. I felt that Jesus was walking with me, and then we stopped and he turned to me and said, “I will go with you.” I discerned that he meant  it was time for me to leave the institutional Catholic Church.

            After graduating, my new spiritual home became Dignity San Francisco, an LGBTQ+ Catholic community operating outside the institutional Catholic Church. Dignity San Francisco was looking for a new female preacher to be on their monthly rotation, and after a trial run, I regularly preached there for six years. At Dignity, I saw what church could be, and I experienced the same respect as the male priests and deacons. 

            Through a discernment program in the summer of 2020, I heard God calling me to join the Episcopal Church. My call to the priesthood found new life, hope, and possibility in the Episcopal Church. The parish I joined welcomed me with open arms and right away invited me into leadership roles. They celebrated my call and my gifts and encouraged me in the process of first being received into the Episcopal Church and then, a year and a half later, starting the ordination process.

            The road wasn’t always easy, but throughout my formation, I found continual affirmation of my call through prayer and various communities that supported me along the way. My journey towards Episcopal ordination included regular meetings with a local discernment committee, taking classes on Anglican theology and Episcopal worship, surviving a summer of clinical pastoral education in New York City, and two years of field education. 

            I was ordained as a transitional deacon in December 2025 and ordained to the priesthood on June 6, 2026. During both ordinations, I was overcome with God’s love. To be surrounded by the people who love me the most while saying yes to God’s call to ordained ministry was a transformative experience. I felt as though I was filled to the brim with God’s love, and in the months since being ordained, I have felt full of the grace to pour that love out onto others. 

            Although I’m no longer in relationship with the institutional Catholic Church, my theology and spiritual life are still deeply rooted in the Catholic tradition that will always be a part of me. After being ordained a priest, I can’t imagine any other life. It is heartbreaking and enraging that women cannot be ordained in the Catholic Church. My prayer is that one day, the Catholic Church will welcome women as deacons and priests. I have hope that this will happen because with God all things are possible. 

            My advice for women called to be priests in the Catholic Church is not to give up. Even when it is hard to hope, hold on to hope. God loves you and is calling you by name.