A group campaigning for women to be admitted to the Roman Catholic priesthood held a ceremony in a Protestant church in Boston yesterday in which three women were declared Catholic priests and a fourth a deacon. The Archdiocese of Boston immediately denounced the action and declared that the women had automatically excommunicated themselves by taking part in the unauthorized ordination, reports the Boston Globe.
A spokesman for a conservative lay organization blasted the ordinations as a "sacrilegious parody" of Holy Orders whose "publicity value must be measured against the manifest fraudulence and irredeemable hopelessness of their cause.” Said a female Protestant minister: “Prejudice in liturgical clothing is still prejudice.’’ (More Archdiocese of Boston stories.)