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By Cindy Wooden, Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY -- The Vatican's doctrinal congregation has decreed formally that a woman who attempts to be ordained a Catholic priest and the person attempting to ordain her are automatically excommunicated.

"Both the one who attempts to confer a sacred order on a woman, and the woman who attempts to receive a sacred order, incur an excommunication latae sententiae," or automatically, said a decree from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The brief "General Decree Regarding the Delict of Attempted Sacred Ordination of a Woman" was published on the front page of the May 30 edition of L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper. It said it "comes into force immediately."

During the John Paul II years, Canada often loomed, at least at the level of stereotypes, as a holdout to the wave of "evangelical Catholicism" cresting through the church, meaning a recovery of traditional markers of Catholic faith and practice plus new boldness about proclaiming the faith in public. After the 1997 Synod for America in Rome, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus memorably described the Canadian bishops as belonging to "the National Catholic Reporter wing of the church," by which he meant a liberal, reform-oriented outlook.

While many of the faithful hoped it wouldn’t come to this, including myself, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that it has. I speak of the sharpest language yet in the matter of official Church positioning against the ordination of women to the priesthood.

The exclusionary caste system of the male hierarchical priesthood dates back to the OT Judaic culture of patriarchal electionism of the priestly order in the line of Melchisedek. By birth, I am a Roman Catholic. I was early drawn to the Catholic priesthood and I entered the High School Seminary in preparation to become a priest. Eleven years later, at the age of 24, I opted to discontinue my pursuit of the institutional priesthood.

By PATRICK O'NEILL

CATONSVILLE, Md. -- Their tactics and their message were unsettling, but few can deny that this renegade group of Roman Catholics, who became known as the Catonsville Nine, forever changed the Catholic discussion in this country about war and peace.

The group had decided to ramp up resistance to the Vietnam War when they entered the Catonsville, Md., Selective Service offices on May 17, 1968. They removed 1-A draft files and burned them in the parking lot of the Patapsco Council of the Knights of Columbus Hall, in which the Selective Service leased office space.