Fifteen Roman Catholic women in the U.S. face excommunication after taking up priestly duties following their “ordination” in recent ceremonies designed to challenge the all-male priesthood.
On Thursday, Jane Via of San Diego, who was ordained in June and planned to say her second Mass on Sunday, met with the local bishop, who laid out the grounds for her expulsion from the church.
Three women in other states have received letters from diocese officials warning that they chose to excommunicate themselves when they participated in an illicit ordination in Pittsburgh on July 31. In San Jose, Calif., diocese officials issued a warning that a woman priest there was not properly ordained.
“I’m scared of being shut out of the church and not even being allowed to be buried in a Catholic cemetery,” said Via, 58, a county prosecutor. “But I’m breaking an unjust law and I will accept the consequences.”
Dozens more women, generally in their 50s and 60s, are in the pipeline for future ordinations, 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 jurisdictional reach of the local diocese – amid the medieval pomp of the traditional rite.
Via was among two women ordained on Lake Constance, Austria, in June. In the first service of its kind in the United States, another eight women, including some Europeans, were ordained in the July 31 ceremony at the confluence of three rivers near Pittsburgh.
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 in order to avoid excommunication, were notarized and then placed in a bank vault, the women priests said.
Whereas the first seven European women to claim the priesthood were swiftly excommunicated by the Vatican four years ago, church officials in the United States have so far only threatened to cut American women off from the sacraments, which would, according to Catholic doctrine, place their souls in peril.
Legally, church officials say they are in violation of Roman Catholic canon 1024, which says only baptized men can receive ordination.
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