'Being a woman priest is what I feel I am called to do' (Irish maidens)

Soline Humbert outside the Church of St Thérése, Mount Merrion, Dublin. Cardinal Daly refused to accept from her a 10,000-name petition calling for women priests. Photograph : Matt Kavanagh

The Vatican’s directive confirming its policy of excommunication for those involved in the ordination of women has been greeted with defiance by dissidents in the US and dismay by Irish campaigners

‘SHOCKING.” “A travesty.” “A slap in the face.” “The action of a paranoid, scared, running-for-cover Vatican.” Those are just some of the phrases used by Bishop Bridget Mary Meehan to describe the latest directive from Rome on the ordination of women.

The Vatican’s Normae de Gravioribus Delictis , published two weeks ago, concerns sanctions in canon law for clerical child sex abuse, concelebration of the Eucharist with Protestant ministers, heresy, apostasy, schism – and the ordination of women. It reaffirmed the sanction of excommunication for anyone involved with the ordination of women in the Catholic Church.

Bishop Bridget Mary Meehan is a leader of an ever-growing band of dissidents from this policy. She is “happy to be excommunicated. If they keep going like this there’ll soon be more ‘out’ than ‘in’. We’re at the heart of the church, renewing it. We’re not going to put up with second-class membership any more. We are an empowered community of Catholics. Mysticism and social justice are in my DNA as an Irish Catholic. I love the faith, but this corrupt church has to be reformed. Where are the excommunicated paedophiles or bishops who covered up the abuse of children?”

Meehan is from Crosskerry, near Rathdowney, Co Laois, which the family left for the US in 1956. Crosskerry is one of those still centres of the universe.

“It hasn’t changed since we left,” she recalled. She visits regularly. “So many, many relatives. Every three or four years.”

She will speak at the Humbert Summer School in Castlebar on Friday, August 20th.

Publication of Normae de Gravioribus Delictis has been “a watershed moment” for the Roman Catholic Women Priests (RCWP) group, to which she belongs. It has attracted huge media attention to the RCWP in the US.

Meehan is based in Florida, where, she says, “the publicity is unbelievable”. Members of the movement in Europe have said to her that if the group can make headway in the US, the Vatican will take heed.

Rome just has to “get over the sexism and misogyny”, says Meehan. “To say women are not worthy is so over the top. It is very hateful to women. Very, very hostile to women.”

It has got to the stage, she claims, where people are now seeking out the RCWP as “the Catholic Church has become too toxic now”. Besides, “there were women deacons, priests, and bishops for the first 1,200 years of Christianity, in the Celtic Church too. There is a letter from Rome condemning women priests in the Irish church back then.”

Meehan was ordained bishop last year, having become a priest in 2006, and serves communities in Virginia and Florida.

The first women Catholic priests, the so-called “Danube Seven”, were ordained on that river in Germany in 2002. Five were German, one was Austrian and one was American. The following year saw the ordination of two women Catholic bishops, one German, one Austrian.

As explained on the RCWP website, the ordinations “are valid because of our unbroken line of apostolic succession within the Roman Catholic Church. The principal consecrating Roman Catholic male bishop who ordained our first women bishops is a bishop with a line of unbroken apostolic succession within the Roman Catholic Church in full communion with the Pope.”

The Vatican does not agree. On May 29th 2008 its Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith (CDF) stated that the women priests and the bishops who ordained them would be excommunicated latae sententiae (automatically).

The website of Ireland’s Brothers and Sisters in Christ (Basic) movement for Catholic women priests in Ireland has not been updated since October 2007. According to Soline Humbert, this is because Basic, which was set up in 1993, has become something of an underground movement. Anticipating the May 2008 action of the CDF, articles and names were removed from the website to prevent people losing their jobs as theologians, chaplains, and so on.

“Fear is an awful thing, another form of institutional abuse,” she says. “People who believe one thing are being forced to do another. At heart it is a dysfunctional church, where people cannot speak about what they believe in conscience.”

This is all such a long way from the Basic seminar in 1995, when participants included the future President, Mary McAleese, and the retired professor of moral theology at St Patrick’s College Maynooth, Fr Enda McDonagh.

Soline Humbert believes she has a vocation for the priesthood and has celebrated the Eucharist in her home every day this past 14 years. “I am not the only one,” she says. “I know several. Some religious sisters do it as well. My first chalice and paten were given to me by a religious sister and another by a community of religious sisters.”

Originally from Versailles, Humbert fell in love with Ireland on a visit in the late 1960s. She attended Trinity College Dublin in the early 1970s and married here. She has two sons. One bishop said to her that “perhaps one of your sons will have your vocation to the priesthood”. She was not impressed. She has not had much luck with bishops.

Then Catholic primate Cardinal Cahal Daly refused even to accept from her a petition calling for women priests. It had 10,000 names. He wrote to her saying he could not do so, as the Pope had spoken on the matter. She wrote a letter to this newspaper so that the signatories could be informed. She quoted from the cardinal’s letter. He wrote to her again, expressing his dismay that she would quote from their private correspondence and saying she could not be trusted.

For Humbert, “it was a moment of insight into the abuse of power. He did not want it known that he had refused to accept the petition”. She tried to get a meeting with the cardinal, without success.

She sent him a Valentine’s card one February. It asked: “What about a date?” The tactic worked. She was invited to Armagh. “It was the toughest meeting. The man was steel,” she says.

She met Cardinal Desmond Connell when he was Archbishop of Dublin. He told her: “A woman wasn’t on the cross and so couldn’t represent Christ. There was not much meeting of minds.”

Cardinal Seán Brady simply refused to discuss the issue with her at all. “He said no, he couldn’t. Rome has spoken,” Humbert says. “He came down like a guillotine.”

Similarly with the late Cardinal Basil Hume, Archbishop of Westminster. He was visiting Dublin and was shaking her hand as she began talking about women priests. “He withdrew his hand. He left me absolutely . . . as if I had leprosy,” she says.

She had a meeting with the current Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, about six years ago. “He did listen. He warned me, in conscience, that I was risking excommunication. It is not something I want.”

Humbert feels a strong sense of vocation. “In conscience, it is what I feel so strongly I am called to do,” she says. “I do love the church. I have received a lot from it and suffered a lot because of it. It is my church.”

Fr Eamonn McCarthy has also suffered because of his belief that there should be women priests. Currently a curate at Dunlavin, Co Wicklow, he was without a job until 2004.

For four years he was in “a stand-off” with the then Archbishop, Cardinal Connell.

“I pointed out to him that there was quite a range of women with a decent calling to the priesthood. They were not mad. I said I would like it made known to Rome,” he says. He doubts whether it was.

He was out of a job until Cardinal Connell retired and Archbishop Martin took over, when “a posting was made available”. He is unlikely ever to be a parish priest or an office holder in the church. Such people must take an oath to uphold the faith, which includes an acceptance that women should not be priests. McCarthy would refuse to take that oath. There are “a fair few” priests who share his views on women’s ordination but, like him, “they just get on with it”.

From Acts of the Apostasy:

So I'm reading yet another story of how the Womynpreest movement is gaining momentum, and how 'right' they are and how 'evil' the Church is...yada yada yada. With them, it's all about how they feel, rather than about following the will of God and submitting to the Truth. To some extent, I can empathize, because at times I act on however I might feel at the time instead of doing the Right Thing. But eventually I realize the sinfulness of my actions, and seek forgiveness. I think most of us do. That's what is meant by responding continually to the call of repentance. We sin, we repent, we're forgiven, and by God's grace, we make progress in the spiritual life.

Some folks just stop at the "we sin" part.

I feel sorry for these women - and men, too! - who support them. Don't they realize what might await them, if they persist in their pride and vanity?
.
.
.
.
One day, in the afterlife....

RCWP "Bishop" Mary Martha Lazarus died and arrived at the Gates of Heaven. Standing there waiting for her was St Peter. Mary Martha approached him and extended her hand in greeting.

"Wow! I made it!" she said, reaching for Peter's hand to shake it. Peter offered his own, rather reluctantly, and winced a bit at her...aggressive grip.

"Yes, you are standing upon the threshold of Heaven. The narthex of Eternity."

"The nar-what?" she asked.

"Narthex - you know, the 'front porch', or 'portico', or entrance hall?"

"Oh, you mean 'gathering space'! I gotcha."

"Didn't you ever study Church architecture?"

Mary Martha shook her head. "Didn't feel like it. So what happens next? Do we talk about my life now, all the great stuff I did for my Church?"

"In a manner of speaking," Peter said. "Just a few things to cover. Please, follow me to the bench there next to the Gate."

"When do I get to see Jesus?" she asked.

"In a few minutes, as soon as we complete your review from the Book of Life."

The two walked, with Mary Martha slightly ahead, towards the silver and white gold Gates. Standing just to the right of the Gates was a mahogany and cedar structure that resembled a judicial bench, twelve feet tall and equally long. Mary Martha proceeded to climb the short flight of steps behind the bench.

"Ahem," Peter said, clearing his throat. "If you don't mind, that's my place. You stand in front of the bench.

Mary Martha stopped halfway up the steps, looked down at where Peter indicated for her to stand, then up at the spot where the saint intended to stand. "I don't feel like it," she said.

"What?"

"If I stand down there, then you would be looking down at me. I've worked too hard to earn the right to be equal, and not treated as a second-class member of my Church. Besides, we're both bishops. I think it's better we stand side-by-side, behind the bench, don't you agree?"

Mary Martha continued ascending the steps, and Peter followed her, his mouth set in a tight line, his brow furrowed.

Once behind the bench, St Peter reached into a drawer and pulled out a brown-leather bound book, its pages edged with gold, embossed with symbols and Latin, all in silver. He gently placed it on the bookstand atop the bench and opened it at once to Mary Martha's page.

"It is written here that you celebrated daily Mass in your home for the last 14 years of your life. Why didn't you attend Mass in a Church?"

"Oh, I didn't feel like it. I felt closer to Christ in the intimate setting of my home, with some of my closest friends. That was the way you and the first Christians celebrated the Eucharist, after all."

"Hmmm. It is also written that you failed to obey your bishop on numerous occasions, to cease and desist performing 'ordinations' of other women."

"That's true. I didn't feel that the bishop was standing on firm theological grounds - after all, I felt that I was validly ordained by a male bishop as part of the apostolic tradition of the institutional Church."

"And the ex-communication? You never had that resolved."

"I never felt that I was ex-communicated," she explained.

St. Peter slammed the book closed. "Look it - it's just 'I didn't feel like" or "I felt like" with you lot, isn't it. No appeal to reality, no consideration of the Truth! Your whole life, it's 'whatever Mary Martha wants, Mary Martha gets'. Did it ever occur to you that your salvation was dependent on something much more solid than your feelings?!?"

Mary Martha stood there, quite speechless for several moments. St. Peter's eyes flashed, his jaw clenched. Finally she spoke, her voice steady and measured.

"I'm feeling oppressed by your judgmentalism."

With a deep heaving breath, in an effort to control his anger, St Peter stabbed at a large red button set in the bench's face. In the floor in front of the bench, an opening appeared, belching black smoke and red flames, and immediately thereafter, Satan appeared, in all his grotesque hideousness.

Mary Martha turned to St Peter, her face a blubbering mass of panicked pleading. "But...but I don't understand! I did so much! I loved my Church! And...and you said I'd meet Jesus! I want to talk to Him, to try and explain! Why aren't you waiting for Him?"

St Peter opened his mouth to reply, but Satan interrupted. "Surely, you of all people ought to understand? He doesn't feel like it!"

With a flash of light and a crash of thunder, both Satan and "Bishop" Mary Martha disappeared, and the opening to the Pit of Perdition sealed shut. As the echoes of the damning boom died away, the Gates opened and Jesus walked through. He gave a sideways glance up at St Peter.

"Let me guess," He said. "Another womynpreest?"
.
.
.
.
I, for one, am grateful Jesus feels like being merciful when we repent. Aren't you?

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.