Vatican told women priests conference co-ordinator not to attend

The co-ordinator of the first international conference on women's ordination in the Catholic Church at the weekend participated despite being banned from attending following Vatican intervention. Sister Myra Poole lit the candle at the opening of yesterday's conference session in the O'Reilly Hall UCD and attended a panel discussion there on Saturday. The Dublin conference, organised by the Women's Ordination Worldwide (WOW) group, was attended by an estimated 345 delegates from 27 countries.

Sister Poole, who is co-ordinator of WOW, told The Irish Times she hoped to issue a statement within two weeks.

A member of the Notre Dame order who lives in London, Sister Poole (68) is a retired school principal. At the end of May she and her superior in Rome were summoned to the Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life and for the Societies of Apostolic Life at the Vatican in connection with the conference.

Earlier in May the keynote speaker for the conference, Ms Aruna Gnanadason of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Geneva, was instructed to withdraw following forceful representations to the WCC by the Vatican. She did not speak but sent her script.

Another conference speaker, Sister Joan Chittister and her Benedictine community at Erie, Pennsylvania, came under similar pressure but she addressed the conference on Saturday.

Following their Vatican meeting, Sister Poole's superiors received three strongly worded letters from the Congregation, extracts from which were shown to her. Last week she was informed she would be dismissed from her order if she "set foot in Dublin", as one source put it.

Although in Dublin, she did not attend the conference on Friday or Saturday morning and was said to be in deep distress. On Saturday afternoon she attended a conference discussion involving an international panel. It is believed she raised most of the estimated £15,000 necessary to bring the six panellists participating from South Africa, Hungary, Brazil, Japan, Uganda, and Mexico.

Yesterday, she did not wish to discuss her situation pending the later statement, but said her order had been put in an impossible position.

On Saturday, Sister Chittister said that while discussions with the Vatican about her attendance at the conference were continuing, all 135 sisters in her community had signed a document offering their support, while the younger nuns had signed another document also requesting that should any sanction be imposed on her for going to Dublin, it be imposed on them as well.

Benedictines had been around for 1,500 years, she told the conference on Saturday. "We survived the Dark Ages, feudalism, two World Wars. We're not going to let a little letter from Rome get us down," she said.