Asked to describe her feelings on her impending ordination, Frances Meigh (67) smiles a smile that can only be described as impishly serene. "One is in the eye of a storm," she says softly in a well-spoken English accent. "When you are in that position you can't see the devastation you are causing".
Sister Frances's spiritual journey began when she converted to Catholicism from Anglicanism at the age of 21. She had felt the first stirrings of a religious vocation. "I told a priest and he told me `run along, you silly girl. Go and get married'," she says.
So she did. She met her husband at art college. They had three children but the marriage ended largely because Sister Frances could not resist what she calls her "strong desire" to lead a spiritual life. The union was annulled and in the eyes of the Catholic Church she has never been married.
In the early 1980s she spent time with Mother Teresa and later Dr Jack Preger helping the destitute in Calcutta. She was greatly influenced by what she saw there.
"The nuns had combs under a stone pillow and that was the amount of their wealth. If you have the right economy inside you, you don't need all this material stuff," she says.
On her return to London she wrote The Jack Preger Story for the Calcutta Rescue charity, after which she took up the hermit lifestyle she has pursued ever since.
For almost 10 years she has lived alone at St Patrick's Church in Whitby, Yorkshire. In 1994 she was consecrated as a hermit under Canon Law 603, taking vows of poverty, chastity and celibacy in the private chapel of the Bishop John Crowley of Middlesborough. She contacted Bishop Buckley after reading about his consecration in a Catholic magazine. "I was stunned with her the minute she arrived. I felt that she was 100 times more spiritual than I'll ever be and a million times more entitled to be a priest," he says.
Even before she met Bishop Buckley, Sister Frances had been investigating how she might be ordained into the priesthood. She has made an application to the European Court of Human Rights to have her case examined.
After her ordination today, she will move into a cottage near Bishop Buckley's church in Omeath, Co Louth.