However, a couple of women ordained Catholic priests in our area say the Pope's revision of papal law is irrelevant to what is really happening in the alternative church.

Eileen McCafferty DiFranco was ordained in 2006.

"I'm an ordained Catholic priest. My ordination is valid, but it is illicit and I 'excommunicated myself.' What I like to say is, ordained women excommunicate themselves much like back in the olden days [when] women used to get themselves pregnant without benefit of man," she said.

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The signatories include many household names in France, mostly from the so-called left.

They include a mayor, a former member of the lower house of parliament, a social entrepreneur and a noted economist and member of the French National Assembly.

Others have expressed support of Soupa on social media, though they have not yet signed the petition. They include the Secretary of State for Equality between Men and Women and a well known entrepreneur.

A number of Catholics are also adding their names to the petition signatories.

One who is an En Marche! Party parliamentarian, says he's "not a regularly practicing" Catholic, but strongly supports the ordination of women. He says he didn't hesitate to sign the petition and does not see it as a secularist infringement.

"I joined this initiative because I believe the Church must re-examine the place it gives to women within the Church, as well as in society," he says.

"I believe that the Church needs to be more in tune with the people again". In his view, many other Catholics believe the same thing.

Others among Soupa's supporters are Catholics involved in Church movements and advocacy groups.

First and foremost is the Conference of Baptized French-speaking Catholics (CCBF). Soupa co-founded this Conference, which is critical of the institutional Church.

One hundred and fifty CCBF members have sent the papal nuncio to France a letter supporting Soupa's candidacy.

One member involved in the pastoral care of divorced and remarried Catholics, points to the "gap" between women's place in society and in the Church - a situation she finds "increasingly unbearable".

She is representative of Catholics who are trying to "move" the institution toward reform and is relentless in criticising clericalism and promoting the role of the laity.

Soupa's initiative has struck a chord even with those who are not practicing Catholics.

It is also coming from practising Catholics like the editor-in-chief of Tere Sainte Magazine and La Croix columnist Marie-Armelle Beaulieu.

She was initially stood by the theologian after Soupa was viciously attacked.

Soupa has been "committed to the service of Christ for 40 years" and regrets that "Tradition" is being used wrongly and indiscriminately, Beaulieu says.

Although she does not support women's ordination or define herself as a feminist, Beaulieu promotes 'otherness'.

She's also shaken by the scandals marring the Church and notes God created both man and woman.

"We can't go on like this. I don't want to revolutionize everything, but the Church must address the world in which it lives."

Cécile Duflot, former government minister and leader of France's Green Party also supports Soupa.

"She's made people want to sign the petition, as baptized, when they never would have done so, and she's found the words to touch people who thought their time with the Church was over," Duflot says.

Source

• La Croix
• Image: TV5Monde

Meehan who is originally from Rathdowney in County Laois and is now based in Florida, has the position of bishop within the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests.

She holds weekly services with parishioners at a Christian church in the city of Sarasota and says she responded to an invitation from a faith community of "reform-minded Catholics" to celebrate the Eucharist at a community centre in Rialto.

Her organisation has ordained around 230 female members around the world, and she wants the orthodox Catholic Church to accept women as well as gay and transgender individuals into the clergy.

"I'm going to celebrate an inclusive Roman Catholic liturgy just like everybody has in their churches in Ireland.

"I'm going to celebrate that with a local community here of renewed, reform-minded Catholics who are interested in justice and equality for women in the church," she said at the weekend.

Meehan said her services are attended by a diverse congregation rather than just like-minded women, but added that there was no attempt made to persuade Catholic authorities to allow the celebration be held in a consecrated church.

Her movement has been officially excommunicated by the Catholic Church since its inception in 2002, when it was claimed a male bishop privately ordained a number of female bishops on the Danube river, and is generally prohibited from holding services on church property.

Women's Ordination Worldwide (WOW), a coalition of international groups supporting women's ordination, hosted the meeting and march in Rome to urge church leaders to re-open a dialogue on the question of ordaining women.

Source:

• Irish Times
• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: National Catholic Reporter

I say nothing about the question of what is known as "the validity of Anglican orders", except that I can't see why any Anglican takes offence when we say that by Catholic criteria they are invalid, when it is quite clear that apart from a few Anglo-Catholics, who think they are sacrificing priests in the same sense as Catholic priests do, what the Church of England as a whole thinks a "priest" is and does is utterly different from what the Catholic Church believes about Holy Orders: in other words, we are both using the same word to describe utterly different things.

Nothing, surely, illustrates that better than the debate about "women bishops" which took place yesterday. The discussion wasn't about the sacrament of holy orders at all: did anyone even mention such a thing, even in passing? It was all about women's rights. In other words, this was the governing body of a wholly secularised Church talking about a wholly secular issue.

As Jemima Thackray put it in the Telegraph, "as I listened to the debate unfold, hearing progressives pitched against conservatives … I found myself being too often oddly impressed by the cases made by the anti-women bishops lobby, despite the fact that nothing would've pleased me more than to see women enter the episcopate. One argument kept ringing true: the claim that the pro-women campaigners were too quick to try and make the church like the world.

"Uncomfortably, I had to agree. Too many of those in favour of women bishops just sounded too… well… worldly. My reasons for thinking this differed wildly from the evangelicals who think that the church needs to be set apart, not conforming to a society which no longer sees man as the head of the woman. My main concern was that some arguments for women bishops just sounded too much like a contrived government initiative to get women into the boardroom."

Continued: Catholic Herald

Image: The Independent

William Oddie

Dr William Oddie is a leading English Catholic writer and broadcaster. He edited The Catholic Herald from 1998 to 2004 and is the author of The Roman Option and Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy.