Canada: "This ceremony is neither Catholic nor is it an ordination.”

Nine women will be “ordained” priests or deacons, on July 25, on board a ship cruising in the international waters of the Saint Lawrence Gulf, thus eluding the jurisdiction of the Canadian archdiocese of Kingston and of the American diocese of Ogdensburg (New York State). The ceremony will take place at the end of a congress on the priestly “ordination” of women from July 22 to 24, at the University of Carleton in Ottawa. The candidates to the priesthood consider themselves as daughters of the "Danube Movement" in Northern America.

As a matter of fact, on June 2002, on the Danube, between Germany and Austria, the Movement for the ordination of women had organized the "ordination" of seven women by a schismatic bishop, among whom the German Gisela Forster, and the Austrian Marie-Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger. They pretend to be "she-bishops" and consider that they are still in the Roman Catholic Church. They will preside over the ceremony in the Saint Lawrence Gulf.

Mgr. Anthony Meagher, archbishop of Kingston, declared on June 7 that this ceremony would be "neither Catholic nor an ordination.” "There is no doubt that the Church must change and that there must be a greater involvement of women in the leadership and the decision making," he told the American press agency CNS. But "I think that there are more efficient ways to protest" than an invalid ordination.

A similar ceremony will take place in Lyon on July 2, on a barge on which Gisela Forster and Marie-Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger will preside over the priestly "ordination" of the deaconess Geneviève Beney, an inhabitant of the Gard, aged 56. On Thursday, May 26, the archbishop of Nîmes, Mgr Robert Wattebled qualified this event as an "act of grave rupture" with the Catholic Church. "In accordance with the Code of Canon Law, the persons concerned will have to take the consequences.” "It is obvious that no Catholic community can condone in any way whatsoever such an