The Women Who Want to Be Priests

Soline Humbert was a seventeen-year-old studying history and politics at Trinity College in Dublin when she first felt a calling to enter the priesthood. She did not welcome it. A cradle Catholic who was born and raised in France, Humbert knew that in the Roman Catholic Church only men could be priests -- it was an indisputable rule anchored in official teachings and traditions. This was in the early nineteen-seventies, and in other religions, and in society at large, women's roles were being recast under the influence of second-wave feminism. Most of the major Protestant denominations had already either recognized the ordination of women or were moving toward it. Reform Judaism had just ordained its first female rabbi. But the Catholic Church, so ingrained with symbols, held fast to the notion that a priest must bear a physical resemblance to Christ in order to stand in persona Christi.