A Roman Catholic church ordained a 70-year-old woman a priest in Louisville, Kentucky.
About 150 women from all over the world have been ordained by the Roman Catholic Church even though the church bans them from becoming priests.
Rosemarie Smead is starting her own congregation and is not worried about being excommunicated.
“It is a medieval bullying stick the bishops used to keep control over people and to keep the voices of women silent,” she said. “I am way beyond letting octogenarian men tell us how to live our lives.”
Several octogenarian priests sent her a letter that said simply: “Watch your back!”
Smead, a former Carmelite nun with a bachelor’s in theology and a doctorate in counseling psychology, wept throughout the ceremony.
According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, seventy percent of U.S. Catholics believe women should be allowed to be priests.
In a statement last week, Louisville Archbishop Marlon E. Mertz called the ceremony a “joyful event.”
But, according to Roman Catholic law ordaining a priest carries very serious penal sanctions in Church law. Any anybody that participated in the ordination will, most likely, burn in hell forever.
Pope Francis heard about the ordination and… he blew his lid:
The modern woman priest movement started in Austria in 2002, when seven women were ordained by the Danube River by an independent Catholic bishop. Other women were later ordained as bishops, who went on to ordain more women priests and deacons.
“As a woman priest, Rosemarie is leading, not leaving the Catholic Church, into a new era of inclusivity,” said Bishop Bridget Mary Meehan during her sermon Saturday. “As the Irish writer James Joyce reminded us, the word ‘Catholic’ means ‘Here comes everybody!'”
During the ordination ceremony, Smead wept openly as nearly everyone in the audience came up and laid their hands on her head in blessing.
Some Catholic bashes this Woman Priest by saying that she is not even Catholic. However, by
definition of the Catholic Church itself, A Catholic is one who is Baptized within the Catholic Church. So unless one has access to the Baptismal record of every Catholic church in the USA or the World, one can NEVER say for certainty whether a person is definitely a Catholic or not.
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It is not possible to ordain a woman to the diaconate, priesthood or episcopacy. We'd love to, really, we would. It would solve the vocations crisis over night and there are plenty of holy women who would be suited to such a role, but the Church doesn't have the power to do it. We can only do what Jesus did and women were notable absent from the apostles, of whom priests and bishops are the successors. These women have not been ordained and are not and cannot be priests.
However.
Pope Francis pointed out the other week the importance of the role of women in the Church, he reminded us that the Virgin Mary was above the apostles but that her role was different to them. The priesthood isn't moving up a step on the holiness ladder and isn't a position of power, in fact it's the opposite: swearing absolute obedience to one's ordinary. All of the women priest movements are founded on equalising the power between men and women, a holy and just cause, but to think that it means women should be ordained is to misunderstand what priesthood is about. I know priests who use it as a means of power and they're just not very good at their job.
The truth is that I don't know why Jesus doesn't have women as his priests, but it's like G K Chesterton said, "a Catholic is a person who has plucked up courage to face the incredible and inconceivable idea that something else may be wiser than he is" and I trust that Jesus knew what he was doing. He was unthinkably countercultural in his treatment of women, telling Martha to get out of the kitchen and come and be educated, so it wasn't a case that he was bound by the culture of his time and place and so didn't have women apostles. I'll ask him when I meet him why he didn't, but for the moment, the Church simply obeys and puts her trust in her founder and I'm very content to do the same.