TIME publishes another work of fiction on women "priests"

It is becoming apparent that TIME magazine has some kind of vested interest in women in vestments. Last week, a factually challenged piece by Dawn Reiss chronicled the incredible saga of Alta Jacko, an 81-year-old mother of eight who was also a starting pitcher for the New York Yankees an ordained priest in the Roman Catholic Church. This week, Tim Padgett offers another work of fiction about the Vatican's alleged reaction to the alleged movement to ordain women as "priests."

Like any good priest, Judy Lee knows how to use a Bible story. One of the readings for Roman Catholic Masses on a recent Sunday, from the Book of Wisdom, recounts how the Hebrews defied the pharaoh by worshipping God "in secret." That passage resonates at the house in Fort Myers, Fla., where Lee is conducting Mass for 25 Catholics gathered in front of a coffee-table altar in defiance of the Pope. "Rome says you'll be thrown out of the church for being here," says Lee, "because I'm a woman."

Lee, 67, considers herself a validly ordained Catholic priest. The Vatican disagrees. "The Catholic Church ... has no authority to confer priestly ordination on women" because Jesus had no female Apostles, Lee was told in a letter from the local bishop, the Rev. Frank Dewane — who also informed her that she had been excommunicated for ignoring that doctrine. Lee's reply: "Rome can impose all the rules it wants on women, divorced people, gay people. But it can't stop us."

She and the more than 100 other women who claim to be Catholic priests in the U.S. and abroad can thank the church for one thing: its hysterical response to their movement — in July the Vatican branded female ordination a delictum gravius, or grave crime, the same label it has given pedophilia — has elicited enough attention to lift their profile out of the catacombs. As TV-news trucks waited outside, Nancy Corran, 37, took holy orders on July 31 at the Mary Magdalene Apostle Catholic Community, a five-year-old San Diego splinter parish with 150 members. Rome's latest decree, says Corran, "was outrageous even for the church." Says Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and theology at the University of Notre Dame: "It's a sign the church knows this isn't going away."

That's the hope of Roman Catholic Womenpriests, a group founded eight years ago in Europe. It has since ordained women like Lee and Corran in more than 20 American states and Canada. Womenpriests and other organizations promoting female Catholic clerics, like the Women's Ordination Conference, don't expect to change Vatican doctrine anytime soon. But their growing following signals that Catholics, already incensed by the never ending clerical sexual-abuse crisis, are losing patience with Rome's refusal to let women into the leadership of a church to which more than 20% of Americans belong. "We're the Rosa Parks of the Catholic Church," says Bridget Mary Meehan, a Womenpriests bishop and former nun. "We no longer accept second-class status in our own religion."

Where to begin? Well, first, if the Vatican does not recognize you as "a validly ordained Catholic priest," then you are not "a validly ordained Catholic priest." That should be simple enough for any idiot, even a reporter for TIME magazine, to understand. Second, there is nothing hysterical in the Vatican's "reaction" to this so-called movement. It is simply a restatement of basic church doctrine, the abandonment of which has always constituted a "grave crime." The fact that pedophilia falls under the same category is irrelevant to the discussion. Grave crimes can be moral, as well as doctrinal, in nature. Indeed, there is a profoundly "grave" moral dimension to the abandonment of unalterable church doctrine. But none of this is of any concern to the "Womenpriests" or their propagandists at TIME. All that matters to them is propping up an utterly insignificant fringe "movement" that is, in reality, not even on the Vatican's radar. Punctuating the fantasy is the article's final paragraph which exudes an optimism born of sheer delusion.

Numbers may force Rome's hand. Since 1985, the number of U.S. Catholic priests has plunged almost a third, to fewer than 40,000; more than 3,400 American parishes are without a resident priest, up from 1,051. To replenish the ranks, the church will probably let male priests marry before it ever ordains women. But the female priests say this should be about doing the right thing, not just the numerical thing. That's the chant from their makeshift altars — and with an unintentional assist from Rome, they're finally being heard.

Um, no. The only place they're being heard is in the press room at TIME. The rest of us live in the real world and those of us who have experienced firsthand the failed Protestant experiment in female ordination know that Hell will literally freeze over and nuns will skate on the ice before Rome makes the same mistake.