A high-profile excommunication

I missed this during the week, but the Vatican has notified Fr. Roy Bourgeois that he is to be excommunicated for participating in the ordination service of a Roman Catholic woman. This is a big deal: Bourgeois is a huge figure in the American peace movement. He's the founder of SOA Watch, an organization committed to shedding light on the military assistance that the United States gives to repressive governments. The Church will be excommunicating a man who has given his entire life to honor the memory of the six Jesuit priests killed by SOA graduates in El Salvador in 1989.

The excommunication is also significant because it is part of a bigger issue: the increasingly vocal mobilization called "Womenpriests". Sojourners ran an article in 2006 about the ordination of 8 Roman Catholic women on a riverboat in Pittsburgh (so as not to be "in" any certain diocese). The Times article says that Janice Sevre-Duszynska, the individual in whose ordination Fr. Roy participated, is the 35th American woman to be ordained in this movement. 

Rose Marie Berger hasn't written anything about Fr. Roy yet, either on her blog or at God's Politics, but we might expect something soon.