ST. LOUIS — The entire day had been building to this moment. First there was the procession, then the readings and songs and the sponsors who explained why they felt she was ready for what was to come.
She prostrated before the altar inside the old church, her chest heaving with emotion as the Litany of the Saints was said. She sat in a folding chair, tears trickling down her cheeks, while each person in the pews came forward to place their hands on her head in a quiet blessing.
And as the noon hour arrived and Anna Girresch — Annie to those who know her — held out her hands to be anointed with oil, it felt like all 70-plus people in attendance collectively held their breaths as the ritual neared its culmination.
It came seconds later, when a bishop raised Annie’s right hand toward the ceiling and, “with great joy,” introduced her as a newly ordained Catholic priest.
The congregation — Annie’s parents and sisters, nephews and friends and 12 other women whose ranks she joined that last Saturday in June — stood and cheered for a full minute.
No one seemed bothered that they had just been willing participants in a ceremony the Roman Catholic Church deems a grave sin, or that Annie had just incurred one of its most severe punishments: automatic and immediate excommunication.
“I’m just filled with the spirit right now and so blessed that she’s going to go forth and share God with all the people that she touches,” her father, Wil Girresch, said between thanking people who stopped to congratulate him.
“This is what the church needs to be,” added his wife, Ellen Girresch. “Accepting. Supporting.”
Annie is the latest in a line of women, some 300 in all, scattered across the United States and in at least nine other countries, who in the last two decades have defied the Catholic Church to be ordained as deacons, priests and bishops.
These women — cradle Catholics and converts, former nuns, teachers, hospice chaplains, counselors, spouses, mothers, grandmothers — say their defiance is the fulfillment of a vocation, no different than the call answered by their male counterparts. Most have advanced degrees in theology or divinity that prepared them, they say, to serve.
Already, over Catholicism’s roughly 2,000-year history, women have become saints who founded missions and religious orders. They have taught theology in schools and prepared young men for the priesthood. They’ve run hospitals and universities. In Chicago, the archdiocese’s chief operating officer is a woman. So, too, is the CEO of Catholic Charities.
But the church has always barred women from becoming priests and bishops, a rule it traces to Jesus’ choice of apostles. In 1983, the Vatican codified its position with canon law 1024, which reads: “A baptized male alone receives sacred ordination validly.”
Women choosing to break that law have been called exiles, a rogue schismatic group akin to the recently excommunicated Society of St. Pius X, even a cult. But the priests do not see it that way.
“We don’t stand at midnight in the moonlight swinging dead cats around,” said Mary Keldermans, a Springfield native who was ordained a priest in 2014 and a bishop in 2021. “People think we made up our church. It’s not true. We’re Catholic.”
Keldermans and others acknowledge it is unlikely that Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV, whom they generally like, will shift the church’s position.
Still, as they watch the faith struggle with shrinking congregations, shuttered schools and the damage done by abusive male clergy, most are hopeful their efforts will eventually open the door to women in the priesthood — and in doing so, transform an institution they see as having excluded too many for too long.
“I think what will happen is there will be so many of us,” said Eileen Mathy of Urbana, ordained in 2023, “that at one point the church will say, ‘What were we so afraid of?’”
In the meantime, female priests have built communities that worship in living rooms, rented storefronts, churches borrowed from other Christian faiths or on Zoom. Their services often draw people who also feel marginalized or rejected by an institution whose positions on topics like sexual orientation or divorce they can no longer abide.
“I see (women priests) as a bridge, creating a place for people who cannot find themselves or pray in a traditional male clerical church,” said Jean Marchant, a Massachusetts native who was ordained a priest in 2005 and a bishop in 2019. “We’re creating a home for them, a place for them to pray together and live their lives out of that faithfulness.”
It’s easy to question why these women don’t decide instead to convert to a faith that allows female pastors.
Indeed, they have paid a steep price in pursuit of the priesthood. Beyond adding their names to an excommunication list that includes St. Joan of Arc, Martin Luther and Fidel Castro, some have resigned from or been forced to leave jobs or volunteer positions in their dioceses. Some have incurred criticism from loved ones and threats from strangers. One Chicago priest dying from cancer was denied a funeral mass at her longtime parish.
But the women say the priesthood is not a choice they made. It’s a calling. They were pulled to it, often reluctantly, led by an unseen hand down a path they realized they had been seeking much of their lives.
“You know, when you fight something you know you’re supposed to do, it’s painful,” said Susan Vaickauski, who was ordained in 2016 and pastors a congregation in Northbrook. “It’s the unknown. ‘How’s it going to work? Who’s going to be affected? How are they going to be affected?’ But when God calls you, no is not an alternative, because God is going to keep after you until you say yes.”
The call
On days when they weren’t outside helping care for the dairy cows and pigs and chickens, or preparing vegetables to be canned and stored in the cellar, Katherine Elsner and her seven siblings played Mass.
Their chapel was typically the living room inside their one-story farmhouse in Greensburg, Indiana, 50 miles southeast of that state’s capital. A small table served as the altar, Necco Wafers as the Communion host. Elsner, while not the eldest of the kids, always assumed the role of priest.
Other female priests tell similar stories of childhoods spent deeply connected to Catholicism.
For Angela Nevitt Meyer, ordained in 2021, that meant hours spent in her bedroom imagining conversations with Jesus’ mother, Mary, or reading about the lives of saints instead of playing with her younger brother and the other kids in their neighborhood outside Peoria.
Girresch was in the music ministry at her parish in suburban St. Louis. Vaickauski demonstrated such devoutness at her Catholic grade school in Lafayette, Indiana, that a nun selected her in seventh and eighth grade to help prepare for each morning’s Mass.
With that faith, though, came moments when they questioned why the church they loved seemed to treat them differently.
Long before she was ordained in 2021, Elsner joined a convent in Springfield run by Dominican sisters — in part, she said, because it was “a way for me to be somebody in the church.”
She spent three decades as a teacher and principal at Catholic schools in Illinois, then another 16 as her order’s treasurer. Though life as a Dominican had been rewarding, she wanted more independence.
Ten years into her time as treasurer she left the convent, though she remained in the position another six years as a laywoman.
Prior to becoming treasurer, while studying finance at the University of Notre Dame, she devoured books by female theologians and started to ask herself why women couldn’t be deacons and priests in the Catholic Church.
“It didn’t make sense,” she said. “Why were women excluded? Nobody really asked that question out loud too much, and especially in my community, which tended to be more conservative than some other orders. I knew I couldn’t ask that question out loud.”
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Now she was free to do that. One day in 2016, she and a friend saw an advertisement in a Springfield newspaper for the Catholic church pastored by Mary Keldermans.
Her friend turned to her and said, “Let’s go see what this woman priest is like.”
From that first visit, Elsner became a regular at Keldermans’ church. The two women talked often, and their conversations eventually drifted to the priesthood.
The prospect frightened Elsner, at first. “I was doing something against the church that I had been faithful to for 70 years,” she said. And yet, she added, “I just knew it was something I needed to do, for myself as well as an example for any other women who are afraid.”
The Danube Seven
Before Anna Girresch, before Katherine Elsner and Jean Marchant and Susan Vaickauski and the rest, there were the Danube Seven.
One June morning in 2002, on a day when Catholics celebrate the feasts of Sts. Peter and Paul, around 250 people boarded the MS Passau, a boat built to carry passengers on scenic day cruises along the Danube River between Germany and Austria.
They came to see seven women become priests. By the time they disembarked that day, a movement had taken shape.
The theological and historical debate over women in the priesthood is nuanced and complex. On one side is a Vatican that says, in part, that it has no authority to ordain women because Jesus chose only men to be his apostles and because men, alone, can represent his image.
Proponents of female priests argue that the earliest Christians prayed and broke bread in homes where women, as hosts, would have presided over those gatherings.
Adding fuel to the debate is the discovery of ancient artifacts — texts, frescoes, tombstone inscriptions — that seem, to some, to depict women as priests in the early Catholic Church.
“People who look at the early church argue it’s not surprising that we see women in these prominent roles because many women in antiquities were civic leaders,” said Haley Bowen, an assistant professor in Northwestern University’s history department. “Countering that we have a number of Gospel texts and other schools within the early church that are very much opposed to women’s participation in priestly functions.”
The Vatican sought to settle the matter in 1976, when it issued a declaration, approved by Pope Paul VI, stating in part “that the Church, in fidelity to the example of the Lord, does not consider herself authorized to admit women to priestly ordination. … It is a position which will perhaps cause pain but whose positive value will become apparent in the long run, since it can be of help in deepening understanding of the respective roles of men and of women.”
Still, exceptions have been made. Perhaps most notably, in 1970, amid the persecution of Catholics in Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia, the underground church there needed priests. Bishop Felix Davidek responded by secretly ordaining married men and some women, including Ludmila Javorová.
Javorová kept her secret from the broader public for much of the next two decades, through the fall of her country’s Communist government. Finally, the Vatican ordered her to end her ministry in 1996. She died last month at 94.
Thirty-two years after her ordination, the seven women ordained aboard the MS Passau included four from Germany, two from Austria and one from the United States, a former first lady of Ohio, no less. They chose the boat to avoid disruptions from protesters or church officials.
Romulo Antonio Braschi, a male Catholic bishop, and a second man he had ordained as a bishop, performed the ordinations.
A third bishop had been invited but did not show up. Conflicting accounts from those in attendance say he was either held up by traffic or held against his will by male priests, friends of his, who locked him in his room to prevent him from attending.
A little over a month later, the Vatican issued a decree of excommunication to the women, who became known as “the Danube Seven.” It stated that Braschi had previously been excommunicated “as a schismatic” and closed with the hope that the women he ordained “may discover the path of conversion in order to return to the unity of the faith and to communion with the Church, which they have wounded by their actions.”
The decree was signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who, three years later, would become Pope Benedict XVI.
Despite the church’s efforts, male Catholic bishops whose identities have not been publicly revealed later ordained two of the women as bishops with the aim of preserving the line of succession from Jesus’ apostles to present-day bishops. These female bishops, in turn, ordained more women as deacons, priests and bishops. Eventually, separate organizations were formed: Roman Catholic Womenpriests and, later, the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests.
Today, the Catholic church does not seem to want to talk about female priests.
Where it once handed out excommunication letters, now “bishops ignore us, which is a different form of abuse,” Mathy said.
A spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Chicago said neither Cardinal Blase Cupich nor anyone else in the archdiocese was available for an interview for this story. A Diocese of Springfield spokesperson declined an interview request with Bishop Thomas Paprocki. The Diocese of Peoria did not respond to emailed interview requests.
The church calls the punishment for women who become priests a latae sententiae excommunication, meaning automatic. It has said they are excommunicating themselves.
Some, like Mathy, say they simply do not accept the punishment.
“If I am excommunicating myself, I have to participate in that decision,” she said. “And I’m refusing to do so.”
To Vaickauski, the word excommunication means “zilch.” Kathy Rolenc, a Midlothian native ordained in 2016, called it “a long word I can’t even spell.”
Still, Rolenc used a pseudonym — the movement calls it being in “catacomb” — when she started toward the priesthood. She did it to protect her work as a volunteer youth minister at her Oak Lawn parish, though in the end, she said, she was forced to leave once her ordination became public.
‘Incredibly sad’
Outside the wooden doors at St. Gertrude Catholic Church in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood, there is a banner that reads: “All are welcome.”
In death, Janine Denomme was not.
She came to Chicago by way of Detroit, taught high school and college students, led youth programs at the Center on Halsted, met and fell in love with Nancy Katz. The couple lived steps from St. Gertrude, where Denomme sat on the parish council and presided over some non-Mass liturgies.
She, like so many of her peers, had been the kid who sat with rapt focus during church services and played Mass at home (a piece of Chex cereal and an ice cream parfait glass were the props for Eucharist).
In the fall of 2007, after seeing a bishop with Roman Catholic Womenpriests speak at a conference, she applied to be ordained in the movement. Her application describes the struggle she felt in taking that step.
“Perhaps because it has been so ingrained in me by the institutional church that it’s just not possible to be ordained,” she wrote, “I have been unwilling to touch that part of myself. Every once in a while I get a taste of the anger and sorrow inside of me — symptoms of being told that I am not priest ‘material.’ So I have kept it buried, and pursued other avocations in hopes of filling that calling and desire.”
Finding the organization, she wrote, was like “a door opened. I do not know where it leads but I am willing to have faith and walk through.”
Denomme was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer in the spring of 2009. During her April 10, 2010 ordination, held at a Lutheran church, Katz recalled that Denomme spent most of the ceremony lying on the floor on a bed of choir robes and pillows.
She died a month later, on May 17. She was 45.
Shortly before her death, from her hospital bed, Denomme told Katz and other loved ones that she wished to have her funeral Mass at St. Gertrude.
“My heart sank,” Katz said, “because I knew this was going to be a problem.”
Still, inquiries were made. A friend and pastoral assistant at St. Gertrude was tasked with delivering the church’s answer. Because of the ordination, he told Katz, Denomme had been excommunicated, and the decision from somewhere on high was that her funeral Mass could not take place at the church.
The newspaper Chicago Catholic quoted the archdiocese as saying: “Those who have separated themselves from the church are not permitted to participate in the full life of the church including the Eucharist or any other liturgical ceremony. Those who willingly separate themselves from the church are denied a church funeral unless they gave some sign of repentance before death.”
Sixteen years later, sitting at her dining table among some of the items from Denomme’s ordination — a candle, a chalice, a Communion plate — the pain of that moment still shows on Katz’s face.
“It was incredibly sad,” she said, “and incredibly infuriating.”
A crowd of 500 or so — “Gert’s in exile,” as Katz described it — packed into Evanston’s First United Methodist Church for Denomme’s funeral. One notable absence was the pastor at St. Gertrude. Katz does not know his reasons, but she can understand why he wasn’t there.
In addition to punishing women who seek the priesthood, the Catholic Church has also sanctioned male clergy who support those ordinations.
The Vatican excommunicated the Rev. Roy Bourgeois after he participated in a woman’s 2008 ordination, the National Catholic Reporter wrote. Four years later, the story states, it removed him from his religious order, which released a statement saying that his “disobedience and preaching against the teaching of the Catholic Church about women’s ordination led to his excommunication, dismissal and laicization.”
Also in 2012, the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and the Jesuit order suspended the Rev. Bill Brennan from his duties after he participated in a liturgy with a woman ordained through the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests, according to a National Catholic Reporter story.
Before his death in 2014, Brennan recorded a video from his hospital bed, later aired by WISN-TV. In it, he said, in part: “I wish to be remembered as one who’s basically pleading for equality of women in administrative and spiritual functions of (the) holy Catholic Church.”
Community
Bernadette Jones pulled her pickup truck into a deserted south Springfield parking lot and stopped at one end of a low-slung office building clad in brick and siding. There, next to an artist’s studio and an upholstery shop, was the church she had come to see.
She snapped a picture of the church’s name, Holy Family Inclusive Catholic Community, on the sign near the door and sent it to her daughter.
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I’m thinking about going there, she texted.
I’m coming with you, her daughter responded.
Jones was born and raised a Catholic, but she said she became fed up with the pastor at the church in her central Illinois town and his jokes and comments about women, which she found disrespectful. She prayed for something different. She thought about leaving the church. Then, a friend told her about Holy Family in Springfield, which prompted her reconnaissance mission.
That was three years ago. Jones has been a fixture ever since.
“It’s just heartfelt, warm and welcoming,” Jones, 70, said during a post-Mass potluck on a Saturday in August. “I never leave here angry.”
Mary Keldermans is Holy Family’s pastor. A Springfield native and married mother of six, she was ordained a priest on May 3, 2014. Twelve days later, she received an excommunication decree from the bishop of Springfield. She keeps the letter in a cabinet above her refrigerator.
She started Holy Family in June that same year. The congregation, all six of them, met for Saturday services every other week at a United Church of Christ building in nearby Jacksonville. As the community grew, it moved to a rented storefront in south Springfield and then, after outgrowing that space, to its current home.
Some 30 people came to the Saturday service in August; another four watched on Zoom. Keldermans, dressed in a simple white alb and striped stole, led what looked like a traditional Catholic Mass, with some tweaks.
There were Scripture readings and a choir. A homily. Eucharist. Two church members reinterpreted the Gospel story of Jesus walking on water as a sketch involving a modern conversation between Jesus and Peter. Later, Keldermans and fellow clergy member Katherine Elsner anointed a congregant who was having surgery later that month and then gave her a prayer blanket blessed by the community.
Services ended with what amounted to a live reading of the church bulletin. Keldermans thanked everyone who participated and extended birthday wishes to one community member’s grandson. Another woman announced she had extra reading glasses if anyone needed them.
At the potluck that followed, Don Gietl, a member of the choir, and his wife, Loy, said they joined Holy Family shortly after reading about Keldermans’ ordination. Both could have been considered lapsed Catholics, disillusioned with the church’s position on homosexuality and its insistence that divorcees get an annulment before remarriage.
“I feel more religious now than I ever have in my life,” Don Gietl said. “I don’t care about the rules and the regulations. I feel like I’ve been to church when we come here.”
About 100 miles east of Springfield in Urbana, Beloved Inclusive Catholic Community resembles the house churches of early Christianity. The community, led by Mathy, began in 2021 with a group of people who left their parish in search of something that aligned with their social justice views.
They landed on an idea: Why be forced to accept whatever priest the bishop assigned them? Why not find their own?
Mathy reached out to a few male priests she knew who supported victims of clergy abuse. None accepted her invitation. She then found Keldermans and Roman Catholic Womenpriests on the internet. The group’s first Mass, led by Keldermans and other priests in the movement, brought maybe 60 people to a rented room above a bank.
Since the fall of 2023, the Beloved community has met in a two-bedroom home on Urbana’s east side. A narrow chapel extends across the front of the house in what was once the living room and a bedroom, with four short wooden pews lined up along one wall and a couch and two side chairs at the end opposite the altar. The second bedroom stores supplies for Mass — candles and Communion cups and the like — and canned goods for the church’s food pantry. Out back, members grow potatoes, peppers, tomatoes and green beans for donation.
As in Springfield, Mathy’s service has many of the familiar trappings of a traditional Catholic Mass, though the music comes from a laptop connected to a speaker.
“For a lot of us, we are looking far more to resemble second century Catholic churches than we are to resemble 20th century Catholic churches,” said Beth Rogers, 58, one of the community’s founding members. “The small house communities that supported one another, and the wider community, as they can, rather than the big overarching hierarchy.”
‘Part of the story’
After the June ordination, after the hugs and the photos and the lunch in the church’s basement, Anna Girresch and her fellow priests gathered at Bishop Martha Mary Sherman’s sister’s house in suburban St. Louis for one more celebration.
They ate snacks and mixed cocktails for those who wanted them. They talked about the ceremony and caught up on one another’s lives.
There was Katherine Elsner sitting with Nancy Meyer, a bishop emerita from Indiana who earlier had joked, as the priests readied to enter the church, that they should “just look somewhat like you know what you’re doing.”
There was Angela Nevitt Meyer resting her head on the shoulder of Cincinnati Bishop Paula Hoeffer, while Susan Vaickauski chatted with Hoeffer’s husband, a laicized priest.
There was Girresch, telling Sherman: “Your homily was so good!”
And Sherman, with a deadpan reply: “You sound surprised.”
If the ordination served as testament to their movement’s longevity, it was also a reminder of its uncertain future.
Twenty-four years after the Danube Seven, the two organizations they gave rise to are struggling to recruit the next generation of female priests.
At 35, Girresch is among the youngest in the movement.
“If you asked me a year ago, I’d say yes I’m very worried because the amount of people aging versus the amount of people we’re bringing in under 60 was really disheartening,” said the president of Roman Catholic Womenpriests, Donna Burke.
The organization has taken recent steps to refocus its efforts on attracting younger women to the priesthood, said Burke, who was ordained in 2017. But doing so still comes with challenges.
Consider that young men who enter seminary often exit to the ready-baked life of a parish priest with a church of their own, an income, a place to live and health insurance.
None of that is given to women in the priesthood. Their churches, if they have them, are almost exclusively funded by themselves and their congregants. Just the expense of meeting the educational requirements of ordination can be a deterrent.
“Often it’s women later in life who have the means to do it,” said Bridget Mary Meehan, an ordained bishop since 2009. “That’s the problem.”
In other words, the biggest threats on the horizon might not be the Vatican or their local dioceses as much as time and money.
The women face these challenges amid shifting winds of optimism and despair.
A 2024 Pew Research Center poll found a majority of Catholics in the United States and five South American countries support women in the priesthood. This June, Pope Leo appointed an Italian nun to lead a top Vatican office on human rights, the Associated Press reported. But that same month, a National Catholic Reporter story stated that the Vatican had rejected a request from German bishops to allow laymen and laywomen to preach the homily during Mass.
Several female priests who grew up during the Second Vatican Council had been certain that sea change would include women in the clergy and were dismayed it did not. They saw a door crack open when Pope Francis commissioned a study on the possibility of women as deacons, only to watch it slam shut when that papal commission said no.
Most have stopped waiting for the church they grew up in, the church they love, to recognize their vocations as valid. Yet, some have not given up hope. It will happen, they say, even if they won’t be alive to see it.
“Just like Moses didn’t get to the promised land, he did what he was supposed to do,” Vaickauski said. “I’m energized because I got to be a part of the story. What a privilege.”
Olive trees
Mary Ann stood at the pulpit inside Beloved Inclusive Catholic Community in Urbana and scanned the Gospel story she would soon read aloud. The chapel was empty. Mass would not start for another 30 minutes. And though she had stood at a pulpit many times over the years, she saw no harm in being overprepared.
She grew up in Chicago’s west suburbs as “the kid that didn’t fit.”
“I always knew I was a girl,” she said. “I had to be a boy because that’s what they told me I was.”
She used to sneak into the basement and wear her mom’s dresses from a “rag bag” of old clothes, until she heard a creak in the floorboards, and then she’d quickly shed the dress and play with Tonka trucks.
Each time filled her with guilt. She told herself, “I can’t do this anymore.”
After her brother died in a car crash while delivering newspapers, she read a Bible passage about how it was an abomination for a man to wear women’s clothes. She feared God would send her to hell and she’d never see her brother again.
Still, she couldn’t stop.
One day, when she was 16, she said she retrieved a dress from the rag bag, put it on and sat on her brother’s bedroom floor. She told God she was tired of living with hell hanging over her head. She asked to be sent there now.
She formed a plan in her mind. She’d go to the kitchen, take a knife and end her life.
That’s when she heard a voice. She remembered it was audible, as if someone was in the house with her.
The voice said: “No judgment.”
She was alone, she said, and she knew in the moment the voice belonged to God. A deep feeling of love washed over her, and the voice came again. It told her it would be there to help until she understood that what she hated was what made her beautiful.
“If God has time to spend with someone like me, to catch me at the right moment, there must be a God,” she said. “Ever since then, it’s been a close walk.”
Mary Ann, who declined to give her last name for her safety, eventually became a Baptist minister, following in her father’s footsteps. She later pastored a now-closed United Church of Christ congregation in Kankakee as well as opening a therapy practice.
At 60, after her transition, she tried to find placement at another UCC church but said none would have her. That’s when she started attending a Catholic church in Bourbonnais.
The priest there eventually asked why she never came up for Eucharist. First she told him she was Protestant. Later, she shared the rest of her story. To her surprise, he welcomed her and told her about the church’s program for adults looking to convert.
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Mary Ann became Catholic. About a year and half ago, after meeting Mathy at Beloved in Urbana, she became a candidate for ordination into the priesthood with the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests. She said she should be ordained in the next two years.
Mary Ann, who just turned 73, said she does not expect to see the day when the Catholic church accepts women into the clergy. But like her peers, she remains undeterred.
Some 30 years ago, on a trip to Jerusalem, she visited the Mount of Olives, where the Bible says Jesus prayed before his crucifixion and later ascended to heaven.
Olive trees, some centuries old, still grow there. A local man told her what she later understood to be an apt metaphor for the path she and other women have taken. He said: You don’t plant olive trees for yourself. You plant them for your grandchildren.