Vatican to impose no sanctions over nuns in Dublin

In a decision which could have far-reaching consequences for discussion of the women's ordination issue in the Catholic Church the Vatican has said it will not impose sanctions on two nuns who attended a conference on the matter in Dublin recently.

The first ever international Women's Ordination Worldwide (WOW) conference took place at the O'Reilly Hall, UCD, from June 29th to July 1st.

In 1994 Pope John Paul declared the Church had no authority to ordain women as priests and that this was a binding article of faith for all Catholics. A further Vatican document in 1998 said those who persisted in discussing the matter were, in effect, excommunicating themselves. The WOW conference keynote speaker, Ms Aruna Gnanadason of the World Council of Churches (WCC), was forced to withdraw last May due to Vatican pressure.

The conference co-ordinator Sister Myra Poole, a London-based Notre Dame de Namur nun, was summoned with her Rome superior to a meeting with the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life in the Vatican at the end of May.

Three letters to her superior followed from the congregation. These led her to believe she would be dismissed from the order "if she set foot in Dublin", as one source put it. She attended the latter part of the conference.

Another speaker at the conference, American Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, said she was doing so with the support of her 135 member community at Erie, Pennsylvania, and despite a Vatican letter advising otherwise. She told the conference the Benedictines had been around 1,500 years. "We're not going to let a little letter from Rome upset us."

The Vatican's spokesman, Dr Joaquin Navarro-Valls, has been quoted as confirming that both nuns had been asked by Rome not to attend the conference. "The Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life thought it would be inopportune for the two religious to participate in the women's ordination conference because of the possibility of outside manipulation. The congregation did not consider taking disciplinary measures," he said.