Dr Edward Peters on "Compounding their crimes"

The pseudo-ordinations that a number of women around the world, and lately in the United States, have attempted are, to borrow Leo XIII's phrase, "absolutely null and utterly void". (See specifically John Paul II, Ordinatio sacerdotalis, n. 4). Last summer (scroll to 6 July 2005) I explained how such affronts to divine and canon law can and will result in excommunication, although, as I argued, not by the automatic process (1983 CIC 1314) that many simply assumed would apply to such cases. Here I need to make a different point.