It’s official — ordination brings excommunication

Well, the Vatican has made it explicit and official: ordaining women automatically excommunicates those who do the ordaining, as well as the women being ordained. The first batch of women who were ordained — my mother-in-law amongst them — were excommunicated formally under the seal of the Vatican. Since then, however, many of the women being ordained received no such notice and I suppose there was some sense that the Vatican did not want to call attention to these illicit ordinations. Clearly that is no longer the case.