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Early life and education
Ellen Leonard was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1933 to Hugh and Mary Leonard, as the eldest of two daughters. She traces her connection to the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph to the moment of her birth at St. Michael's Hospital, describing it as "under the eye of Sr. Vincentia," in CSJ-Toronto ministry records cited by biographer Mary Ellen Chown. In addition, one of her aunts was a teacher and a member of Congregation. Her early education was at a local Catholic school run by a different order of religious sisters but she encountered the Sisters of St. Joseph again during her high school education at St. Joseph's College School. She later recalled being "impressed by the kindness, competence and dedication" of the Sisters of St. Joseph and she entered their order directly after high school.

Early work in elementary education
Ellen Leonard joined the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph on September 8, 1951. She completed a six-month postulancy period and then entered the novitiate on March 19, 1952, receiving her religious habit and the name "Sister Loyola." As part of her postulancy, Sister Loyola completed a teaching program (1954-55) offered by Toronto Normal School. She then spent most of the next 18 years (1955-73) as an elementary school teacher, principal, and religious resource teacher in Niagara and the greater Toronto area. While working full time, she also returned to college for evening, weekend and summer study, completing her Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Toronto in 1967.

Ellen Leonard's religious life, her pursuit of higher education, and her professional life were deeply affected by a larger movement within the Roman Catholic church, the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). As she recounted in archival records quoted by Chown, "I exchanged my religious name, Sister Loyola, for my baptismal name, Ellen; I set aside the distinctive habit and veil to join the rest of God's people; I moved from the big motherhouse on Bayview to a small community of six sisters; and I left elementary education for the study of theology."

Transition to theology
The Toronto Metropolitan Separate School Board had encouraged those teaching catechism to update their religious education in the wake of Vatican II. For Ellen Leonard, this updating began with a master's degree in religious studies earned from Manhattan College in New York (1971). As she recounted in a magazine article on Vatican II and the role of women religious, "I was one of those women religious for whom Vatican II was a formative experience. In 1969-70, I spent a year of theological study with women and men from many religious congregations and different ecclesiologies.  That year began the transformation of Sister Loyola into Professor Ellen Leonard, CSJ." When she began subsequent doctoral studies at the University of St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto in 1974, she stopped teaching children and became a teaching assistant in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Toronto, and then joined the Faculty of Theology at St. Michael's as a lecturer during her final year of doctoral studies. She completed her doctorate in 1978 and achieved the rank of assistant professor that same year. She became associate professor in 1982 and a full professor in 1991, and remained a full-time faculty member there until she retired in 1999 and became an emerita professor. She was among the first women in Canada to study systematic theology and then among the first women in Canada to teach on a Faculty of Theology.

Contributions to the understanding of Catholic modernism
Ellen Leonard's dissertation and subsequent first book was on George Tyrrell, a Jesuit priest and key theologian in the modernist movement. Catholic modernism is a controversial orientation through which scholars at the turn of the twentieth century attempted to grapple with advances in science, philosophical ideas about individual autonomy and changing methods of biblical interpretation. Leonard contributed the definition of Roman Catholic Modernism to The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, noting that "Viewed in its historical context, Modernism can be interpreted as a renewal within Catholicism that offered an alternative to the liberal Protestant outlook and in some ways anticipated the Second Vatican Council." She also served on the steering committee of the Roman Catholic Modernism group of the American Academy of Religion.

Chown quotes Leonard as discussing George Tyrrell's ideas on "'the place of the episcopacy within the universal Church, a more active role for the laity, a clear recognition of the limits of ecclesiastical authority, and the acceptance of criticism and dissent within the church." Leonard argued that Tyrrell's response to those issues was pastoral rather than developmental of a systematic theology of reform. Leonard wrote subsequent books on two other figures related to modernism, Maude Petre and Friedrich von Hügel, noting that "While some have considered them to be only marginally Catholic, they considered their lives to be shaped decisively by their Catholicism" and that "their understanding of Catholicism was broad enough and deep enough to sustain their Catholic identity--an identity that was at once both critical and faithful." . This work prompted Leonard  to reflect on "how she might participate in the theological and ecclesial questions of renewal in her own time."

All of the issues important to Tyrrell were again in the forefront after Vatican II. As Leonard points out in her magazine article, the Second Vatican Council (which resulted in sixteen documents) "reveals dramatic changes in worldview. We were instructed to discern the signs of the times. . . .One of the most significant teachings of the Council was its emphasis on the universal call to holiness. Baptism was recognized as the common sacrament." That emphasis on the universal call to holiness required a re-examination of the use of experience as a source for theology. Ellen Leonard provided such a review in a paper she presented to the Catholic Theological Society of America, "Experience as a Source for Theology." She clarified that the task that she was undertaking was a consideration not of whether experience should be used "but how [emphasis added] experience is being used as a source for theology today, with an emphasis on the foundational role of present experience and a recognition of the widening experiential base for theological reflection." That discussion formed the first part of her paper, followed by consideration of her own experience as a Canadian woman and parallel transitions in the Canadian and feminist context. The final section of her paper discussed how her "Canadian and feminist experiences may be used as a source for theology." Leonard later reworked this paper into a 1990 article in Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses.

Ecumensim
In 2009, when Ellen Leonard was asked to reflect on the future of theological education in Canada, she began by considering her past thirty years in theological education. She identified "three particularly significant and formative developments for me: ecumenism, feminism, and ecology." The Second Vatican Council issued a decree on ecumenism, Unitatis redintegratio, which enabled collaboration with Protestant denominations. This led to the development of the Toronto School of Theology (TST), consisting of seven colleges from Catholic, Presbyterian, Anglican, and United Church denominations. Ellen Leonard was pleased to join in this endeavor and grateful to meet other female theology professors and to work with them and their male colleagues in a supportive environment. She also saw changes within her own Roman Catholic-affiliated college as it shifted from being "exclusively concerned with the education of male clerics" to "the admission of women and lay men and the appointment of women faculty. . . .New questions were raised, new concerns expressed by a more diverse student body and faculty." She became a member of the Roman Catholic-United Church National Dialogue, appointed to serve (1975-84) by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. Although the Roman Catholic Church is not a member of the World Council of Churches (WCC), Ellen Leonard was an accredited visitor who attended Assemblies of the WCC in Vancouver, Canada in 1983 and in Canberra, Australia in 1991. In Vancouver, she was especially moved by the voices of women speaking on behalf of their people and children. Her experience in Australia reinforced her conviction that Western feminist theologians need to hear and absorb the voices of a more diverse set feminist theologians.

Feminist and ecological Christologies
Leonard situates the women's movement and the ecological movement within the "signs of the times" that Vatican II called upon the Church to address, and specifies that "for me feminism is a prophetic movement, one that calls for conversion." She addresses some of the ways in which change was needed in her article, "Contemporary Christologies in Response to Feminist and Ecological Challenges." After a literature review of works that identified the androcentric and anthropocentric bias in traditional Christology, she focuses on the work of theologians Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sallie McFague, and Elizabeth Johnson, and focuses on "four aspects: (1) biblical foundation; (2) continuity with the tradition; (3) promotion of the full humanity of women; and (4) openness to the whole of creation." Her recommendation is for a Wisdom Christology. "The image of Sophia provides a fluid symbol, which can embrace all of creation while her incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth reveals to us the concrete way that God chose to be present in our world. That presence continues through the Spirit of the resurrected Christ-Sophia to offer hope of transformation to everyone and everything."

Ellen Leonard has addressed the "difficulty of re-imagining Christology for our age as persons with different experiences reflect on the christological question: 'Who do you say that I am?'" To explore that question, she joined three other women in January of 1981 to invite others across Canada to start an organization whose goal was the ordination of women in the Catholic Church. That invitation led to a conference held July 3 - 5, 1981 and the founding of an organization that was first named Canadian Catholics for Women's Ordination (CCWO). Leonard was a core member of the group for the next seven years as it formalized an organizational structure, began a newsletter, and connected with groups pursuing the same goal in other countries. During that period she also helped to bring discussions of feminist theology to a broader audience than just those enrolled in schools of theology by presenting public lectures and workshops in parishes. She stepped down from CCWO's core leadership group in 1986, and the organization was reshaped into the Catholic Network for Women's Equality (CNWE) in 1988. Ellen Leonard was a keynote speaker at the CNWE conference in 2001, which CNWE marked as the 20th anniversary of the group's founding, and was "enthusiastically honoured as a co-founder" at the 2015 CNWE conference.

Legacy
Ellen Margaret Leonard's legacy consists of multiple elements. She helped to shape St. Michael's College and the Toronto School of Theology by serving in multiple leadership roles--as department and program chairs within St. Michael's (1986-93) and as the chair of the Advanced Degree Council of TST (1991-93). She "nurtured the theologians of tomorrow by directing a significant number of theses at both the doctoral and master's level with a perceptive insight to the value and need for publication of work in progress and a caring and creative critique that keeps work progressing." (O'Hara specifies her oversight of 15 doctoral dissertations, 12 master's theses, and service on approximately 30 doctoral examination committees.) She contributed to the body of theological knowledge by writing three books, numerous peer-reviewed articles, and chapters in edited books. She served her academic field as a peer-reviewer, as an editorial board member, as a board member of professional associations, including the presidency of the Canadian Theological Society (1989-90). and by delivering papers to the American Association of Religion, the Catholic Theological Society of America and Canadian Theological Society. She also embraced her vocation as a professed member of the CSJ, working in a collaborative ministry to support new immigrants. Chown cites several sources to conclude that "Sister Ellen's capacity for generous mentoring and collaboration, rooted in a faith-filled and joyful desire to encourage women in theology, is equally worth of notability."

Selected Works

 * "Tyrrell's Understanding of Catholicism." In Working Group on Roman Catholic Modernism, American Academy of Religion (AAR) Annual Meeting, edited by Ronald Burke and George Gilmore (1979), 3-24. Spring Hill College: Mobile, AL.
 * George Tyrrell and the Catholic Tradition New York: Paulist Press, 1982 ISBN: 0809124246 This book was an outgrowth of her doctoral dissertation (1978).
 * "Experience as a Source for Theology." Catholic Theological Society of America Proceedings.(1988) 43: 44–61.
 * Transformation: The Theology and Spirituality of Maude Petre, Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1991 ISBN: 0819182206
 * "Contemporary Christologies in Response to Feminist and Ecological Challenges" (2000-03-01) Toronto Journal of Theology 16 (1): 15-26
 * "Awakenings: Ecumenism, Feminism, Ecology" (2009-12-04) Toronto Journal of Theology 25 (Supplement 1): 91-100
 * Creative Tension: The Spiritual Legacy of Friedrich von Hügel Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2005 ISBN: 0940866668

Honours

 * In March, 2000, Toronto Journal of Theology published "Crossroads in Christology: A Festschrift for Ellen M. Leonard, CSJ."
 * In 2004, the Women's Seminar in Constructive Theology of the Catholic Theological Society of America gave her the Ann O'Hara Graff award, which "recognizes women who integrate their faith scholarship, and mentorship of and advocacy for women in the 'broadest sense of the church,' and who contribute to the 'renewal of theology.'"
 * In 2005, the YWCA Toronto recognized her with a 2005 Women of Distinction Award in the category of religion and education. In reporting that award, the University of Toronto cited her as one of the first women to teach theology in Canada and as "a champion of women's equality in the church and academic worlds."
 * In 2012, she received the inaugural "Becoming Neighbours Annual Margaret Myatt, CSJ, Recognition Award," for her work with recent immigrants.
 * On November 8, 2014, University of St. Michael's College awarded her an honorary doctorate in sacred letters.
 * In 2015, she was honoured as a co-founder of Catholic Network for Women's Equality (CNWE).