Women risk excommunication for Dublin service

OVER 30 Catholics will risk excommunication tonight by attending the first Eucharistic service performed by two women in Dublin.

The ceremonial breaking of the bread, known as an agate celebration, will be held to mark the International Day for the Ordination of Women to the Roman Catholic Church.

The ceremony dates back to the early Church when Christians gathered for a meal with the Eucharist.

As Soline Vatinel and Joan Tracey gather tonight to preside over a Eucharistic celebration in All Hallows College, they know they risk the Church's wrath.

The Vatican has banned women priests. Cardinal Ratzinger decreed anyone who thinks it is possible to ordain women priests and will be excommunicated.

"I am no longer afraid of being excommunicated and I will continue to celebrate the Eucharist because I want to live my vocation to the priesthood," Soline Vatinel said.

The 30 other members of BASIC Brothers and Sisters in Christ the group campaigning for women priests here, also risk excommunication by attending the service.

They have lobbied on March 25 every year for the past 10 years for the ordination of women.

Both Ms Vatinel and Ms Tracey insist there is nothing in the scripture to stop women being ordained priests. "There are pictures in the catacombs in Rome of women presiding over the Eucharist in the early church it is only the human prejudice of the Catholic Church that has now decreed that only celibate men can be priests," Ms Vatinel said.

The mother-of-two believes Irish Catholics are afraid to voice their support for women priests and many women who work as chaplains in hospitals and prisons are afraid of publicly supporting them because they will lose their posts.

BASIC spokeswoman Catherine Gibson said they are prepared to put their heads over the parapet and risk excommunication.

"It is time for the Church leadership to wake up and get in touch with public opinion we handed in 20,000 signatures to former Cardinal Cathal Daly supporting women priests," Ms Gibson said.

Seven women ordained priests by the Bishop of Argentina last June on a boat in the Danube have already been excommunicated along with the bishop.

A Catholic Church spokesman said last night that Pope John Paul II told all bishops in an apostolic letter in 1994 that the "Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women".

Asked if the BASIC members risked excommunication by attending the Eucharistic celebration, the Church spokesman said: "This is not a matter for this office."

But he said All Hallows College understood that BASIC were having a non-denominational agate, or celebratory meal, in one of their rooms tonight.