Another group of women claims to now be validly ordained as priests — this time, in one of the most storied centers of American Catholicism, Boston.

From the Globe:

A group advocating for the ordination of women this afternoon held a ceremony in a packed Protestant church in Boston at which it declared three women to be Catholic priests and a fourth woman to be a deacon.

The ceremony, like several others that have taken place around the world over the last six years, was denounced by the Roman Catholic church, and critics said the event was a stunt with no religious significance. The Catholic Church has consistently taught that only men can be ordained as priests, and the Archdiocese of Boston said that the women who participated in today’s ceremony had automatically excommunicated themselves by participating in what it said was an invalid ordination ceremony.

But the women who participated in the event, along with the several hundred people who spent nearly three hours in the sweltering, non-air-conditioned Church of the Covenant, said they rejected the excommunications, and believed that the women had been validly ordained. The women were vested with white chasubles and red stoles and greeted with a standing ovation as they were declared to be priests; they then helped preside over a service at which they declared bread and wine to be consecrated and offered what they said was Communion to anyone who wished to receive it.

The ceremony was organized by Roman Catholic Womenpriests, an organization that is not recognized by the Roman Catholic church. Catholic church officials say the women are not Catholic, their ordinations are not real, and any sacraments they attempt to celebrate, including today’s Eucharist, are invalid.

The Womenpriests organization says their ordinations are legitimate because Catholic bishops in good standing ordained their first members to become female priests and bishops. Therefore, they argue, the women being ordained can claim apostolic succession, or direct descent from Jesus’s apostles.

The organization has not released the name of the bishops it says consecrated the first women bishops, saying they would face sanction by the Vatican, but says it will release the names once the male bishops die.

Critics say today’s ordinations are not valid because women can not be ordained.

C.J. Doyle, of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, called the ceremony “a sacrilegious parody of Holy Orders conducted at a Protestant church by a collection of apostates misappropriating the Catholic name.”

“One must not only be a male to be a Catholic priest, one must be a Catholic,” Doyle said. “The performers in this theater of propaganda are neither. These women ought to have the intellectual honesty to admit that they left the Catholic Church some time ago. Whatever publicity value today’s exercise has, it must be measured against both the manifest fraudulence and the irredeemable hopelessness of their cause.”

You can visit the Globe link for more details and reaction.

Photo: Judy Lee of Florida, Gloria Carpeneto of Maryland, and Gabriella Velardi Ward of New York, during the ceremony in which the Roman Catholic Womenpriests organization said they were ordained as priests. (Photo by Travis Dove for The Boston Globe)