US: A total of 15 Roman Catholic women in the US 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 the local bishop, who laid out the grounds for her expulsion from the church.
Three women in other states have received letters from diocesan officials warning that they chose to excommunicate themselves when they participated in an illicit ordination in Pittsburgh on July 31st. In San José, 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 Ms Via (58), a county prosecutor. "But I'm breaking an unjust law and I will accept the consequences."
Along with Ms Via and the San José woman are two other California women who are saying Mass. They like to call themselves "valid but contra legem, against the law". 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, based in Fairfax, Virginia.
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.
Ms 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 31st ceremony at the confluence of three rivers near Pittsburgh. A year ago, four more women, including a Canadian, were ordained on the international waters of the St Lawrence seaway between Canada and the United States.
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 notarised 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 US have so far only threatened to cut American women off from the sacraments.
Legally, church officials say they are in violation of Roman Catholic canon 1024, which says only baptised men can receive ordination.
The US Conference of Bishops in Washington has yet to take a formal position on the issue. In an interview, Father Thomas Weinandi, executive director of the conference's secretariat of doctrinal and pastoral practices, said: "A woman cannot possibly be ordained a priest. It can't be done. It won't stick, no matter how hard you try."