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15 Women Who Took Up Priestly Roles Face Excommunication

From an article of the same title in the LA Times by Louis Sahagun:

Fifteen Roman Catholic women in the United States, including some Californians, face excommunication after taking up priestly duties following their "ordination" in recent ceremonies designed to challenge the all-male priesthood... Dozens more women, generally in their 50s and 60s, are preparing to be ordained in the future, said Aisha Taylor, executive director of the Women's Ordination Conference, which became a nonprofit organization in Fairfax, Va., in June after advocating for female priests for 31 years. All of the ceremonies were conducted on chartered boats ”theoretically beyond the jurisdiction of the local diocese” amid the medieval pomp of the traditional rite... Presiding over some of the ordinations were three European women recently consecrated as bishops in secret ceremonies allegedly led by five bishops who remain in good standing with the church. The identities of the male bishops, who wish to remain anonymous to avoid excommunication, were notarized and then placed in a bank vault, the women priests said... Catholic bishops for decades have grappled with the issue of women's ordination, many of them torn between a desire to address the discontent and rising influence of Catholic women in America while remaining faithful to Rome. With recent polls of U.S. Catholics showing that a majority of those surveyed favored women as priests, women have been given greater authority within the church as spiritual directors, distributors of the Eucharist and jail chaplains. The Vatican has steadfastly repeated that women cannot be ordained, given that the sacramental symbolism of gender reflects the relationship between Jesus and his male apostles. The women priests say historical evidence shows that women routinely served as priests in the first few hundred years of the church. The women replicate the traditional role of priests in most ways, except that they have regular jobs and omit the promise of obedience to the bishop and the vow of celibacy. They also forgo the criminal and financial background checks and battery of psychological tests required of traditional priests.

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