I say good on them! More power to women priests....
Nine women challenge Roman Catholic Church ban on female priests
at 21:10 on July 25, 2005, EST.
GANANOQUE, Ont. (CP) - Nine women risked excommunication Monday by challenging the Roman Catholic Church's ban on female priests with an unofficial ordination ceremony.
The ceremony took place on a tour boat late Monday afternoon as it floated on the St. Lawrence River in the Thousand Islands region near the U.S.-Canada border at Kingston, Ont.
Four of the nine - including Canadian Michelle Birch-Connery, 65 - were ordained as priests and five as deacons in the hymn-filled ceremony. The smiling women filed into a hall on the boat behind a rugged log cross entwined in wire.
In the past, the Vatican has frowned on such ceremonies. In 2002, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, excommunicated seven women who had been ordained in a ceremony in Europe.
American Dana Reynolds, one of the women ordained, said she plans to move forward with her work despite what the church does.
"My concerns are that I follow through with my calling, that I am ordained and that I am able to continue my own personal ministry," the Carmel, Calif., resident said.
She said the women do such things as offer spiritual counselling and work in hospices.
"We are worker priests," she said. "We will not be able to have parishes and that sort of thing because the church clearly forbids that, but we are doing our work in the world for humanity so we'll move forward with our work."
The ordination was carried out by three of the women who were ordained in the European ceremony and later excommunicated and by the director of the group's Roman Catholic women priests ordination program.
Reynolds was not deterred by excommunication, saying it is only a punishment that is given by the church.
"It cannot take away the fact that in my soul I am Roman Catholic and will always be Roman Catholic and that is between me and my God. So the Vatican can offer excommunication as a punishment that I might be denied the sacrament in the church. The sacraments belong to everyone, I believe."
The ordination ceremony followed a weekend conference in Ottawa of a U.S. group known as the Women's Ordination Conference.
Monday's ordination ceremony is believed to be the first of its kind in North America. Some 40 women have been ordained, however, around the world over several years under similar circumstances.
Reynolds said the women want to work within the church to renew it.
She said the canon law forbidding women priests is unjust.
"And when there is an unjust law, it needs to be broken, and we're doing this according to our prophetic obedience because we feel called by God.
"Each of us has our own individual callings, but selectively we are called to make this statement that women are full human beings and therefore entitled to the priesthood as well as men."
Theologian Pauline Jacob said the rules governing this type of ceremony was scrupulously respected. The priest candidates wanted to avoid being disqualified by a simple procedural error, she said in an interview.
The women who have been ordained over the last three years have been more than 50 years old and participated in church functions for decades.
"In some people's eyes, the ordination might seem like a provocation," said Jacob, who is writing a doctoral thesis at the University of Montreal on the religious vocation of women.
"But it's not their goal. It's the result of a long progression."
Before the ceremony, Archbishop Anthony Meagher of the Kingston Diocese, said the "attempted" ordination is a "non-event" because the Roman Catholic Church has no authority to ordain women.
While the role of women is important in the church, he said it stands by the statement of the late Pope John Paul II, who said Christ had every opportunity to ordain women but did not.
"This is Jesus's heritage," he said, adding that, while John Paul said women should be in decision-making positions in the church, "he always stopped short of ordinations."
"We could question it, but we can't change it," said Meagher.
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