Nun challenges Church to ordain women

A CAMPAIGNING nun has challenged the Catholic Church to ordain women, accusing the hierarchy of discrimination and double standards in excluding females from the priesthood.

Sr Louvenagh Heffernan, a Loreto sister for 20 years, said the ban on women priests effectively judged them unworthy of the sacrament of ordination and she insisted this was never what God intended.

Writing in today’s Irish Examiner she said: “If we believe, as I do, that God is just, fair and honest why then by the actions of the leaders of the Catholic Church is God portrayed as unjust, unfair and one who discriminates?”