Two Catholic women ordained as priests
Published: Nov. 12, 2007 at 8:41 AM
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ST. LOUIS, Nov. 12 (UPI) -- A couple of firsts: Two women were ordained as Roman Catholic priests Sunday in St. Louis -- and the ordination was in a synagogue.The ceremony for Rose Marie Dunn Hudson, 67, and Elsie Hainz McGrath, 69, was held at Central Reform Congregation with 600 people looking on, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.The Roman Catholic church doesn't allow women to become priests and St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke sent the women a letter condemning their plans and informing them they would automatically be excommunicated if they went ahead.Burke also criticized the Central Reform Congregation, threatening to cease all participation in interfaith events with the congregation, the newspaper said."For us in St. Louis today, the (Gateway) Arch is a symbol for the gateway to justice and equality for women," Patricia Fresen, the ordaining bishop with Roman Catholic Womenpriests, told the Post-Dispatch.The women said they plan to hold services in a Unitarian church, as part of an international organization called Roman Catholic Womenpriests.McGrath is a great-grandmother, who edited at a Catholic publishing house and served as a campus minister at St. Louis University, a Catholic institution. Hudson, who said she wanted to be a priest since she was 14, is a grandmother who taught in St. Louis schools for more than 40 years.
Sue Cifelli on 23 Sep 08"You are there, my God. I love You." It will take you no more time than that and all that you do will be much better done having such a help. And what help it is! Little by little, you will acquire the habit and you will finally be always aware of this sweet companion within yourself, this God of our hearts... Let us pray for each other that we may both keep this dear Guest of our souls loving company." If husband and wife were equally convinced of the living splendor their souls actually present, how the marital act, so holy to begin with, would become for them an act of divine faith, an act penetrated by the highest supernatural spirit. I want to meditate often on my baptism, and the mystery of the divine life in me. I want to become accustomed to treat myself as a living tabernacle of my Lord, to regard the companion of my life as the thrice holy shrine of the Divinity, for I know this to be a reality. The just live by faith. I want to live by faith. MARRIAGE AND THE MYSTICAL BODY CHRIST came to restore the divine life lost to us by sin. But how? He did not save us only by some act external to Himself as one might lay down a sum of money to ransom a slave but by incorporating us in Himself, by making all of us with Him a single organism. "I am the Vine, you are the branches." Christ is the Head, we the members and together we are the whole body, Christ. The aggregate of all the members, all the branches united constitutes the Church joined by an unbreakable bond to Christ, its Leader and Head. And Christian marriage will be . . . and will only be . . . but the symbol of this union of Christ with His Church, of the Church with its Head Saint. Paul at the end of his Epistle to the Christians at Ephesus gives no other rule of love and of security in their union to the married than the counsel to copy this union in their life. He says to wives. "Let women be subject to their husbands as to the Lord: because the husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of
