Church insurgent keeps up hope for ordaining female priests

Ida Raming knows many view her efforts as tilting at windmills.But the German theologian, whose clandestine and unrecognizedordination to the Roman Catholic priesthood last summer led theVatican to excommunicate her, said Monday she believes her church oneday will allow women priests.

"The full acknowledgement of women in this church is our aim,"Raming said, sipping a latte at a coffeehouse across from Chicago'sHoly Name Cathedral. "It is our church."

Raming, 70, on a five-week speaking tour of the United States, isto preside at a Eucharistic liturgy tonight in the Chapel of TheUnknown at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, a UnitedMethodist graduate school in Evanston.

Last June, Raming, five other women from Austria and Germany andAmerican Dagmar Braun Celeste secretly went through an ordinationrite on a boat on the Danube between Germany and Austria.

One of the two men presiding, former Roman Catholic Bishop RomuloAntonio Braschi, had been excommunicated by the Vatican in 1998 forattempts to ordain women. The other, Rafael Regelsberger of Austria,was ordained a bishop by Braschi and not recognized as one by theVatican, which rejected the seven women's ordination claim.

After asking the seven women to repent and disavow their claim--they refused--the church excluded them last August, saying therenegade ordination ceremony violated "the fundamental structure ofthe Church as it was wanted by its founder." Church teaching holdsthat, because Jesus chose men as apostles, only males can serve aspriests.

"We broke a law," Raming said. "This is true. But the law is a lawwhich has no right to exist. It has to be overcome . . . and, ifchurch officials do not take actions to do so, then we have to doit."

For 41 years, Raming, who holds a doctorate in theology and wroteher doctoral dissertation about women in the priesthood, has arguedthat church doctrine limiting the priesthood to men is wrong. Canonlaw 1024, which governs priestly ordinations, says, "Only a baptizedman validly receives sacred ordinations." Raming argues that violatesa biblical concept about the equality of all people before God.

The movement to ordain women Catholic priests has been aroundsince the early 1960s, though it appears to remain a minority view.

Still, Raming is hopeful. She points out that the Episcopal churchdidn't have women priests until the so-called "Philadelphia Eleven,"a group of women, was "irregularly" ordained in 1974. That churchlifted its ban on women priests two years later, and, in 1992, itsparent, the Church of England, also began regularly ordaining women.