c. 2006 Religion News Service

DECATUR, Ala. _ Ashley Reynolds, 28, speaks softly, smiles easily, prays often, and crochets beautiful scarves for the homeless.

She’s a peaceful woman of faith, an earnest seminary student and a fervent member of an ancient Catholic order of voluntarily sequestered laypeople who dedicate their lives to study and prayer.

Reynolds, in fact, seems harmless _ until you glimpse the back of her bumper-stickered car. “Ordain women,” one of her more prominent stickers reads, “or stop dressing like them.”

Meet one of the new faces of what some are calling the Catholic Reformation.

Reynolds attended the July 31 “ordination” of eight women as priests and four as deacons on a boat on the Ohio River near Pittsburgh. One of her friends was among the deacons ordained in the service attended by about 400 people.

Simply by attending, she placed herself outside the bounds of the Catholic Church, according to several Catholic bishops.

Her priest at the Church of the Annunciation in Decatur asked her not to go. She hasn’t returned to that church since the service and may not attend there again, she said, adding that she does not want to put her priest or her fellow worshippers in an awkward position. Her priest could not be reached for comment.

Since the service, at least three of the new women priests have received letters from their bishops informing them that their actions have excommunicated them from the Catholic Church. When Reynolds heard of that, she sent letters to her own Birmingham diocese and to the three bishops who’d written the women to ask to be included in any disciplinary action the church offered.

“It’s the `Kick-me-out-too Campaign,”’ Reynolds said with a smile. “I think I’m the only one in the campaign.” She has received no answer to her letters.

The women who were ordained join a tiny, but growing, number of women who have been “ordained” by bishops who trace their authority back over time to the hands of Jesus on St. Peter’s head.

Vatican officials deem the women’s ordinations illegal and invalid according to church law, saying the church doesn’t have the authority to ordain women because Jesus chose only men as the 12 disciples.

Supporters say the women are responding to a personal call to ministry that the church cannot dispute. They say women priests will bring to the patriarchal structure of the church a new era of egalitarian collaboration rather than hierarchy.

Reynolds sees the women priests and their supporters as calling the church back to its origins and away from the errors of tradition.

“We’re trying to be the church before Constantine took over (in the fourth century),” Reynolds said. “We’re just people trying to live like Jesus. All the forgotten people are the people Jesus came to help.”

When the Catholic Church became the official religion of the Roman Empire under Emperor Constantine, many varieties of Christian practice were declared heresies. Church historians now point to repeated statements from early popes and bishops that women should not be priests to prove that women had, in fact, been leading the church along with men from the beginning.

“You don’t forbid something that isn’t happening,” said Sharon Danner, the business manager for Women’s Ordination Conference, headquartered in Fairfax, Va. The 30-year-old group agitates for the ordination of women in the Catholic Church.

Some polls of Catholic laity have shown that 70 percent of Catholics support the ordination of women. “If you ordain them, Catholics will come,” Reynolds said.

One impetus for that support could be the severe shortage of priests, which has led to increasing numbers of women functioning as parish administrators and youth directors. In some parishes, priests come by periodically to bless extra bread and wine that eucharistic ministers, some of whom are women, can then distribute each week.

“The Catholic Church has two sets of rules, God-rules and people-rules,” Reynolds said, referring to the church’s statements on the place of Scripture and tradition in defining church creed.

God-rules include the divinity of Jesus, the creatorship of God _ the sort of beliefs covered by the traditional Apostles’ Creed. The people-rules, the rules built on tradition, include the exclusion of women from the priesthood, Reynolds said.

Reynolds was raised in a fundamentalist Protestant home. She joined the Catholic Church three Easters ago. She’s answered people often about why she doesn’t just leave a denomination that excludes women as priests when so many others now welcome them, including the Episcopal Church.

A look of thoughtful sadness passes over Reynolds’ face. “Because the God-rules and the sacraments are that good that I would not leave, despite all the somewhat frustrating people-rules,” Reynolds said. “Because the church can make the invisible visible.”

Then she smiles again.

“It’s like the velveteen rabbit,” she said, referring to the classic children’s story. “It’s really shabby, but the reason it becomes real is because someone out there loved it enough to make it real.

“That’s how I feel.”

(Kay Campbell writes for The Huntsville Times in Huntsville, Ala.)

KRE/PH END CAMPBELL

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