Women’s priestly ordination in the Catholic Tradition with the focus on the subversive praxis of the Roman Catholic Women Priests

Abstract

ABSTRACT Against the background of the recent history of the controversy regarding the Roman Catholic Church’s (RCC) position on women’s priestly ordination, this study focuses on an alternative ecclesiological model embodied by the Roman Catholic Women Priests (RCWP), a movement born in 2002. The article explores this unique form of dissent that strives for difference without seeking to effectuate the actual rupture from the RCC. The movement’s subversive praxis is manifest chiefly in its organisational structure, in ordained women’s ‘pragmatic, pastoral, priesthood ministry’ and in their utterly inclusive approach to sacraments. This approach – the article argues – provides a resource to overcome the doctrinal impasse on the issue of women’s ordination that the RCC appears to have reached in 1983. This holds true even if the movement itself may be occupying merely a transitionary space within the larger landscape of the new forms of priesthood emerging across Christian churches.