In July of 1975 the Priests for Equality Charter of Equality was publicly released as 79 priests summoned the Church to act out the words of justice proclaimed by the Second Vatican Council. It was summer. The news was slow. The group was unusual. The times were optimistic. The media gave PFE strong coverage. In January of 1976 PFE became the first program of the Quixote Center newly launched by Dolores Pomerleau and PFE National Secretary Bill Callahan

We invited priests to endorse the Charter and join with us. Response was swift. By Easter

of  1976 PFE had 1,000 members and by 1979 had 2,300 priest members, including 600 Jesuits. The newly elected Church leadership took notice and began a process of trying to silence the effort.

One of the founding goals of Priests for Equality is to eliminate sexist language. This has been a prime focus for us through our Inclusive Language Project. 

Our vision for the Inclusive Language Project is to bring about a transformation in our present day religious language and the way that we translate and interpret the sacred scriptures through that language. Our goal is not to change scripture, but rather to change the way we think about scripture. We seek to free the language of scripture from the"culture of sexism into which it was translated in a way that the message of equality can be heard. We seek to recover in the ancient texts the stories of both women and men who struggled with their faith, who were faithful to their vision. To this end, we consciously adopt an emancipatory religious rhetoric to recover our hidden history in a way that opens up the texts so that women and men today can listen to the ancient stories and actually experience themselves as included in the history of salvation. We believe that the sacred scriptures are inclusive words of Life. 

The project began in 1988, when Priests for Equality received permission to use inclusive language texts developed by Dignity, San Francisco. We distributed them to our constituency; their feedback spurred us to revise the texts significantly--revisions that reflected their actual use in the very settings they were being used: college campuses, parishes, chapels, houses of formation, convents, religious communities and living rooms. 

Priests for Equality went on to create a two-volume set of daily lectionary readings, and again revised its three-year Sunday lectionaries, to much acclaim. But the demand for an inclusive language version of the complete New Testament began to grow, and we happily undertook the project. In all, The Inclusive New Testament took seven years and the work of many dedicated individuals to complete, and was published in 1994.