Fighting back against growing support for the ordination of women as priests, the Roman Catholic church has announced it will henceforth automatically excommunicate the priests and the presiding bishops.
The Vatican issued its most explicit decree so far against the ordination of women priests on Thursday, punishing them and the bishops who try to ordain them with automatic excommunication. The decree was written by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and published in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, giving it immediate effect. A Vatican spokesman said the decree made the Church’s existing ban on women priests more explicit by clarifying that excommunication would follow all such ordinations.
The Church’s policy on this matter could hardly be more clear and is quite literally as old as the Church itself. One wonders, given the vast number of alternatives out there — including Episcopal churches and other near-clones of the Roman Church that allow the ordination of women — why those who so vehemently oppose the policy don’t vote with their feet. For that matter, it’s difficult to understand how one can simultaneously believe an infallible Pope is the Vicar of Christ and wish to openly defy him.
