Recently Ordained Roman Catholic Women
Continue Struggle for Priesthood
by Luigi Sandri for ENI
Seven women excommunicated by the Vatican after being “illegally” ordained as priests say that they intend to contest the punishment and that they will continue their struggle.
The seven women—four Germans, two Austrians and one U.S. citizen—were ordained as priests on June 29 in Austria at a ceremony on board a boat on the River Danube by an Argentine bishop from a church not recognized by the Vatican. The ordination was a challenge to the Roman Catholic Church which does not ordain women.
Pope John Paul II stated “definitively” in 1994 that only men could be ordained bishops and priests by the church. The seven women were excommunicated by the Vatican after failing to heed a warning from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger that they should “repent.” Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is widely seen as the Vatican’s guardian of theological orthodoxy.
Announcing the excommunication on July 5, Ratzinger said they had failed to “give any sign of repentance for the grave offense they have committed.” In a statement released after Ratzinger’s announcement, the women said: “It is true that we have infringed the code of canon law that forbids the ordination of women but the article of the code [that prohibits such ordination] is an offense against the equality between women and men that has been proclaimed by God.”
The Italian daily newspaper, Le Stampa, described the sentence as further evidence of “the refusal of the Roman Curia, and the pope in particular, to face up to an issue that is becoming increasingly relevant within the church, especially in northern Europe and North America.” Romulo Antonio Braschi, a former Catholic and bishop of the Catholic-Apostolic Charismatic Church of Christ the King, who conducted the ordination, had already been excommunicated once by the Vatican for “schismatic” activities.
In a warning on July10 telling the women to repent or face excommunication, Ratzinger stated that “the church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women.” For this reason, he said, “the above mentioned ‘priestly ordination’ constitutes the simulation of a sacrament and is thus invalid and null, as well as constituting a grave offense against the divine constitution of the Church.”
Ratzinger added that “because the ordaining bishop belongs to a schismatic community, it is also a serious attack on the unity of the Church. Such an action is an affront to the dignity of women, whose specific role in the Church and society is distinctive and irreplaceable.”