Rebel bishop ordains first Irish Catholic female priest

THERE WAS a quiet revolution in religious life yesterday when Ireland's first Catholic woman priest was ordained at a ceremony in rural Co Louth.

A more unlikely revolutionary would be hard to find. After becoming "Mother Frances", Frances Meigh, a 67-year-old British-born divorced mother with three adult children, returned to a hermit's cottage nearby in the village of Omeath, where her life will centre on prayer and painting icons.

Mother Frances, a former Anglican whose marriage was first annulled by the church, took vows in 1994 to become a nun, though there was a dispute with clergy in Middlesbrough, Cleveland, over the circumstances.

Now she will emerge for a few hours daily to St Andrew's, the former Protestant church in Omeath reopened in April by Bishop Pat Buckley, Ireland's rebel Catholic liberal cleric.

Bishop Buckley maintains the Meigh ordination is "perfectly in accord with Catholic doctrine" based on scripture and tradition, citing St Paul's recognition of Deaconess Phoebe at Caesarea and the wider acceptance of women deacons in the early Christian church.

A message of support for the first woman priest arrived from Tony Benn, the Labour MP. A number of Catholic clergy supporting admission of women to the priesthood attended the ceremony.

Mainstream Irish bishops presented a face of regal indifference, though many were believed to be seething. Their silence may also signal a lack of unanimity in their opposition to the ordination.

Official church spokesmen are privately strongly critical of Bishop Buckley, strongly disapproving of his welcome to divorcees and mixed religion couples seeking the formal church wedding ceremonies denied them under Vatican canon law.

His appointment in June as a bishop by a fellow dissident, Bishop Michael Cox, was pronounced "valid but unlawful" by the official church, which excommunicated him. He insists he remains a Catholic, though outside formal church structures.

But after the clerical sex abuse scandals and the embarrassment over the Bishop of Galway, Eamonn Casey, who had a son in a secret affair with an American woman, the bishops have remained unusually quiet over the latest breach of discipline.

The impact of this rebellion is complicated by the historically fragmented nature of the faith with its diverse spread of priestly teaching and nursing orders pledging allegiance to Rome, although they have sharply varying degrees of international conformity to compulsory celibacy, and now, to an exclusively male priesthood.