‘Danube 7’ ordained
by Georgia E. Fuller

The Rev. Dr. Gisela Forster (right) and the Rev. Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger (left) thank participants after their ordination to the Roman Catholic priesthood.

Seven German and Austrian women received priestly ordination into the Roman Catholic apostolic succession on June 29, the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, in a liturgy celebrated in both German and Spanish by Bishop Romulo A. Braschi of Argentina. Braschi, who acknowledged that he could not act for the Bishop of Rome, said he was ordaining these women, already made deacons in a secret ceremony on Palm Sunday, "for the whole church."

Roman Church officials first dismissed these ordinations, which occurred on a cruise ship in the middle of the Danube River with 175 witnesses, as a "sectarian spectacle," according to the National Catholic Reporter (July 2). The women were excommunicated when they refused to say that the ceremony was invalid and repent by July 22, the Feast Day for St. Mary Magdalene. The seven, Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger and Sr. Adelinde Theresia Roitinger (of Austria), Dr. Giesla Forster, Dr. Iris Müller, Dr. Ida Raming and Pia Brunner (of Germany) and Angela White (a woman with Austrian-American citizenship) say they intend to contest the excommunication and continue the struggle.

The priesting of the "Danube 7" was the first public conferral of holy orders on Roman Catholic women in modern times. Ludmila Javorova, ordained secretly in 1970 by Bishop Felix Davidek, Rome’s appointed leader of the underground church in Czechoslovakia, was the first of six women priests and six women deacons who served the faithful under Communism. Since the end of the Cold War, the Vatican has denied their orders and declared the deceased Davidek insane. (For this story, see Out of the Depths by Miriam Therese Winter.)

The ordaining bishop, Braschi, began his ministry as a Roman priest and follower of liberation theology. He broke with the Argentine hierarchy over its support of military regimes and later married. Braschi was consecrated a bishop by Gerónimo José Podesta, Roman Catholic Bishop Emeritus of Avellaneda, on January 30, 1999, according to a notarized document.