[REUTERS] In an emotional ceremony filled with tears and applause, a 70-year-old Kentucky woman was ordained a priest on Saturday as part of a dissident group operating outside of official Roman Catholic Church authority.I guess she's a priest, or maybe a priestess. She not a Roman Catholic priest or priestess.
Rosemarie Smead is one of about 150 women around the world who have decided not to wait for the Roman Catholic Church to lift its ban on women priests, but to be ordained and start their own congregations.
Why not just become an Anglican? They dress about the same as real Catholics, don't they? They don't seem to have any rules, or if they do they're willing to change them if somebody bitches. I don't even think you have to learn Latin.
In an interview before the ceremony, Smead said she is not worried about being excommunicated from the Church - the fate of other women ordained outside of Vatican law. "It has no sting for me," said Smead, a petite, gray-haired former Carmelite nun with a ready hug for strangers.
Oh, God. I can't take the puffery.
"It is a Medieval bullying stick the bishops used to keep control over people and to keep the voices of women silent. I am way beyond letting octogenarian men tell us how to live our lives."
... said the septuagenarian woman.
The ordination of women as priests, along with the issues of married priests and birth control, represents one of the big divides between U.S. Catholics and the Vatican hierarchy.
Last I looked, the Vatican hierarchy was in charge, though probably not among Carmelite ex-nuns.
Seventy percent of U.S. Catholics believe that women should be allowed to be priests, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll earlier this year.
I'm guessing that means that seventy percent either favor it or wonder what's for dinner.