Nine women defy Vatican with ordination as priests

Nine women risked excommunication by the Vatican following their unauthorized ordination as female Roman Catholic priests and deacons.

The ceremony, which was not sanctioned by the Roman Catholic hierarchy, took place on a boat on the St. Lawrence River near Gananoque in eastern Canada following a conference on women as priests at Carleton University in Ottawa.

The mid-river location was chosen because organizers said it was in-between the United States and Canada, where no official Catholic diocese has jurisdiction.

Four of the women were ordained as priests, while five were ordained as deacons.

Even so, the participants risk the same fate as seven women who were expelled from the church after being "ordained" on the Danube River between Germany and Austria in 2003.

"I only have my faith and my hope," former nun Michele Birch-Conery told AFP earlier this month. The 65-year-old Canadian took the priestly vows in the ceremony.

"I believe it's time to take this step," she said.

Despite the rise of female priests in some Protestant denominations, the Catholic church has steadfastly refused to admit women into the priesthood. Pope Benedict XVI reiterated the ban after being elected in April to replace the late Pope John Paul II.

Fourteen women have undergone unsanctioned ordinations in similar river ceremonies in Europe in recent years and 65 others are planning to do the same.

The Vatican reacted by excommunicating the first seven after they refused to retract their vows.

But two of the women, Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger of Austria and Gisela Forster of Germany, were later secretly ordained as bishops by their male counterparts in the Roman Catholic church, said Birch-Conery.

Mayr-Lumetzberger and Forster helped perform the shipboard ordination rites Monday.

"This doesn't conform to the Catholic faith. Church teachings are clear: only men can be ordained," Father Serge Poitras of the Apostolic Nunciature in Ottawa told AFP.

"People can do what they want. We don't have an army. We won't chase after them," Poitras said.

"All we can do is deplore such challenges to church doctrine and set the record straight," he said.

Over 220 friends and family attended the ceremony and banquet aboard the boat, which usually ferries tourists around the picturesque Thousand Islands on the St. Lawrence River, just north of Lake Ontario.

The Catholic church asked local priests not to comment on the event.