Many of them will question her motives. The most favored suspicion will be that she is powerhungry (an interesting implied assessment of male priestly ambitions). Or perhaps they will think she is sincere but certainly not in good faith, since her very presence in a divinity program flies in the face of papal pronouncements. Finally, she will stumble up against Canon 1024 in the Revised Code of Canon Law: "Only a baptized man can validly receive ordination" (1). So, like many of her secular sisters, she will find that at the end of an earnest commitment to an honoured profession she will ultimately be denied employment.

Women's entrance to the priesthood has been difficult indeed. The cultic nature of Catholic Christian worship, mainly lost in the Reformed traditions, is closely associated with the priestly traditions of Jewish Temple worship. In this context, woman and priest are mutually exclusive terms (2). The Episcopal Church in the United States was the first to break ranks when on July 29, 1974 eleven women were ordained to the priesthood without the approval of the national church (3). Since that time, the Anglican Church of Canada has been ordaining a few women and the English Church has approved their ordination in principle. Unfortunately, Anglican women priests are not accepted by many of their colleagues, and this lack of acceptance can sometimes be overt and punitive.

While the U.S. Episcopal and Anglican churches have begun the process of integrating women into ordained priesthood, the Roman Catholic church has issued a series of papal pronouncements which, while professing women's equality with men, have nevertheless found women by nature, theology, and tradition to be barred in principle from becoming deacons or priests. The 1976 Declaration Concerning the Question of the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood, for example, outlined arguments against women priests which Pope Paul VI had been using throughout his pontificate. These are "(1) the example of Christ choosing apostles only from among men; (2) the constant practice of the church; (3) the constant teaching of the magisterium that women are excluded from the priesthood 'in accordance with God's plan for His Church'" (4).

That same document advances an argument which the present Pope, John Paul II, finds highly persuasive. In his Apostolic Letter Mulieris Dignitatem (On the Dignity and Vocation of Women on the Occasion of the Marian Year) released in September 1988, he cited the argument that in the Eucharist the connection between Christ as the Bridegroom and the Church as the Bride is only "clear and unambiguous" when the priest "is a man" (5). Presumably, only a man can "image" Christ when the action is surrounded by symbols and rites of spiritual and sacramental power. The Vatican has no problem likening Mother Theresa's actions for the poor of Calcutta to Christ's mission to the poor. But then her kind of work is in accordance with the special dignity and vocation of women whose function is primarily mothering.

Roman Catholic women who are expected to listen to the Vatican's flawed teaching regarding women's role can sympathize with Dorothy Sayers' comments in Are Women Human?:

Probably no man has ever troubled to imagine how strange his life would appear to himself if it were unrelentingly assessed in terms of his maleness; if everything he wore, said, or did had to be justified by reference to female approval; if he were compelled to regard himself, day in day out, not as a member of society, but merely (salvâ-reverentiâ) as a virile member of society. If the centre of his dress-consciousness were the cod-piece, his education directed to making him a spirited lover and meek pater-familias; his interests held to be natural only in so far as they were sexual. If from school and lecture-room, Press and pulpit, he heard [sic] the persistent outpouring of a shrill and scolding voice, bidding him remember his biological function. (6)

Faced with this formidable array of obstacles, but buoyed by the realization that, after all, Anglican/ Episcopal women were crashing the priestly gates, I approached the Atlantic School of Theology (AST) in 1980 and asked for admission to the Master of Divinity Program, ordinarily a program leading to ordination.

In the entrance interview, I was asked my reasons for entering a Divinity program and was assured by the Roman Catholic priest on the committee that he suspected some women who came into the program had ordination on their minds, but I was one of the first to "stick my head above the trenches" and declare it. Despite my overt intentions, the interview passed easily because the committee already knew me as an adult educator from a neighbouring university. Paying the bill for my education was also easy-I had a professional salary to carry me through the six years I spent at AST. At the same time, however, others of my Roman Catholic sisters were barely scraping by.

Financial support was not the only lack. In my first year, I discovered that our Wednesday night Eucharistic gatherings seemed directed at the four or five male seminarians and not the whole group. The sermon would remind the men of what had happened at their formation meeting in the morning, to which we women had not been party. It took some vocalizing of our feelings of being marginalized before the Formation Director realized what he was doing. As time went on, I found that efforts were made to have the community Mass really be for the community. However, when retreats were provided or spiritual directors assigned, we women had to go hunting. We weren't invited to gatherings of male seminarians-for the obvious reason that they would be priests but we would always be only pretenders.