Toledo Woman Attempts to Heed Call to be Priest/ Group Defies Canon Law of Catholicism BY DAVID YONKE/Toledo Blade

http://m2.toledoblade.com/Religion/2012/04/01/Toledo-woman-attempts-to-heed-call-to-be-priest.html
Beverly Bingle is on a mission impossible.
A "cradle Catholic" who retired from the Toledo Catholic Diocese after serving as a pastoral associate at Blessed Sacrament Parish, Ms. Bingle feels that God is calling her to be a priest — a Roman Catholic priest.
She knows the rules, of course, stated clearly and concisely in Canon Law 1024: "Only a baptized male validly receives sacred ordination."
And she knows church tradition.
http://m2.toledoblade.com/Religion/2012/04/01/Toledo-woman-attempts-to-heed-call-to-be-priest.html
"We were trained from an early age that it's not possible, that men are superior," Ms. Bingle said in an interview. But the deeply spiritual Toledoan with a doctorate in ministry from Ecumenical Theological Seminary in Detroit has been unable to shake the feeling that God wants her to be a priest in the Roman Catholic Church, to which she has belonged for all of her 68 years.
A no-frills type who shuns makeup, Ms. Bingle lives in a scruffy part of North Toledo where she plants a huge garden in her backyard and gives the harvest away to anyone in need...
‘Badges of honor'
Bishop Bridget Mary Meehan of Sarasota, Fla., said she has received several letters of excommunication.
She said she considers them "badges of honor" because Pope Benedict XVI has canonized two excommunicated nuns, Mother Theodore Guerin and Mary MacKillop. "He is making excommunication the fast track to sainthood," Bishop Meehan said in an interview...
Sydney Condray, 72, a Toledo author who has a doctorate in education administration, is weighing whether to seek ordination as a priest.
A widow, Ms. Condray said she feels "a call to a leadership role, and the priesthood is a call to leadership within a community."
...Father Bourgeois remains a Roman Catholic priest in good standing.
Shortly after participating in Ms. Sevre-Duszynska's ordination, "I received a very serious letter from the Vatican stating that I would be excommunicated automatically if I did not recant my support of women's ordination as priests," Father Bourgeois said. "I responded by saying that I cannot recant. Sexism, like racism, is a sin, and no matter how hard we may try to justify discrimination against women it is not the way of God but of men in their quest for power."
He has not heard further from Rome, he said. His Maryknoll superiors, meanwhile, sent him two warning letters last year demanding that he recant, which he has refused to do. The order took a vote earlier this year to dismiss him, Father Bourgeois said, but the motion did not have enough votes to pass.
‘A grave injustice'
For Father Bourgeois, 73, a Roman Catholic priest for 40 years, the ban on women's ordination is "a grave injustice."
"The question I had to ask myself and my fellow priests is an all-important question that they refuse to answer, and it's who are we, as men, to say that our call from God is authentic but your call as women is not. Who are we to reject God's call of women to the priesthood?
"What I discovered after a lot of study and reflection is that the root of our church's teaching is sexism. A grave injustice is being done against women and against God, who I believe without any doubt calls both men and women to the priesthood."
....Bishop Joan Houk of Pittsburgh, who heads the Great Waters Region of Roman Catholic Womenpriests, which includes Ohio, was a Roman pastoral director and pastoral associate in Kentucky, where for 5½ years she ran two Roman Catholic parishes that had no pastors.
"I preached. I did funerals that did not have Eucharistic liturgies. I took my turn doing hospital chaplaincy, but I was not able to use holy oils. I was not able to hear confessions or preside at Eucharist. I did a couple of baptisms, but I could not do weddings."
Bishop Houk, a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a master of divinity degree, said the ministry restrictions placed on her because of her gender became increasingly difficult to bear.
"It was extremely painful," Bishop Houk, 71, said. "I never realized that it would be that painful. … I thought, ‘If I was ordained I could give them the sacraments.'"
In March, 2005, she was inspired to pursue ordination after hearing Bishop Patricia Fresen, a bishop and a native of South Africa, talk about apartheid.
"I had believed that someday the Catholic Church would ordain women," Bishop Houk said. "I had been waiting, and then I saw that things were getting more rigid against any possibility of us getting ordained. And then I heard Patricia say that when you try everything and it doesn't work, then sometimes what you have to do is break the law. It became very clear to me right then that that was something I needed to do. I needed to break the law."
Bishop Meehan, 64, of Sarasota, Fla., was one of the first eight women ordained in the United States, in a July, 2006, ceremony on a boat at the confluence of three rivers in Pittsburgh. She was ordained a bishop three years later...."We don't have to wait for permission anymore, Bishop Meehan said. "We're not putting up with second-class citizenship. We are refusing to sit in the back of the bus. We are taking our rightful role. We are not leaving the church. No, we are leading the church."