Risking heresy to serve as priests

Robed in floor-length white linen and purple stoles, two Roman Catholic women will kneel this afternoon in a spare Roxborough sanctuary, in a liturgy both ancient and audacious.

Their bishop will lay hands on their heads, recite the ordination rite of the Roman Catholic Church, and invite the two to rise - one as a deacon, the other as a priest - and celebrate Mass before an expected assemblage of 200.

But even before their knees leave the floor, the two will be automatically excommunicated from the church they say they seek to serve, their ordinations invalid in the eyes of the Vatican, their Mass heretical.

The impending ceremony - the first of its kind in Philadelphia - elicited a one-page denunciation from Philadelphia's archbishop. "I am concerned pastorally for the souls of those involved" in "this pseudo-Ordination," Cardinal Justin Rigali said in a statement released Friday. It "denigrates the truth entrusted to the Church by Christ Himself."

In the Roman Catholic Church worldwide, few topics are more charged than women's ordination - a premise considered so utterly false by most of the all-male hierarchy that in the mid-1990s, Pope John Paul II ordered the church's one billion adherents to stop debating it, permanently.

The Rest-

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