Boston archdiocesan employee was ordained in one of those womanpriest ceremonies last year…

A department head at the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston has resigned her post after revealing that she had secretly participated in a ceremony last year in which she says she was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest.

Jean Marie Marchant, who for the last four years has been director of healthcare ministry for the archdiocese, offered her resignation to Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley in a letter last week in which she said that a year ago, using a pseudonym, she had been among nine women who had participated in an ordination ceremony on the St. Lawrence Seaway in Canada. That group, whose ordination ceremony is considered invalid by the church hierarchy, also included another woman from Massachusetts, Marie David, a Harwich innkeeper who now leads a weekly liturgy on Cape Cod.

See, I think even "is considered invalid by the church hierarchy" is pushing it. It presents it as if it’s a matter of opinion that the hierarchy happen to have. How about "whose ordination ceremony was not a valid Roman Catholic ordination ceremony."

Anyway..

O’Malley, who has repeatedly said that women cannot be ordained as priests because Jesus did not have female apostles, immediately accepted Marchant’s resignation. Although in 2003 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI, announced the excommunication of seven women ordained as part of the same movement, the Archdiocese of Boston has not sanctioned Marchant and has chosen less confrontational language in its conversations with her, an e-mail alert to priests, and a statement to the Globe.

“In her resignation, Ms. Marchant acknowledged that her having participated in an ordination ceremony with Roman Catholic Womenpriests is irreconcilable with the position she held with the Archdiocese of Boston," O’Malley’s spokesman, Terrence C. Donilon, said in a statement. “We greatly appreciate Ms. Marchant’s many years of service in healthcare ministry. The archdiocese greatly values the ministry of lay and religious women. Their contributions are vital to the life and mission of the church."

snip

The Pittsburgh Diocese has posted a statement on its website about next week’s ordination, declaring the ceremony an “invalid ritual" and warning that “those attempting to confer Holy Orders have, by their own actions, removed themselves from the church."

Donilon, O’Malley’s spokesman, said yesterday that “the cardinal has imposed no penalty on Jean Marchant, because, according to church law, she separated herself from the church by her own action."

This excommunication business is tricky, and there are different "types" – waiting for our canon lawyers to help us out here. But you have to wonder why someone like Bill Hausen of the Pittsburgh diocese was formally excommunicated when he split off and formed his own church and these women are not. They are, indeed, forming their own churches as well.