Women Catholic Priests.

Twelve women will be ordained today is a secret ceremony in Pittsburgh.

On Monday, 12 women in bright white robes will board the Majestic, the flagship of the Gateway Clipper fleet, at the Station Square dock in Pittsburgh. The ship will become a floating church -- and the stage for what might be the most central controversy in Catholicism today. The robed women are in the vanguard of the growing womenpriests movement, the most flamboyant and incendiary challenge to the Roman Catholic Church's unrelenting discrimination against women. Declaring herself "present" (in Latin, ad sum), each of the 12 will be ordained priests or deacons by women bishops -- themselves secretly ordained to the episcopacy by active Roman Catholic male bishops whose names will remain locked in a vault until they die. This ceremony is totally verboten: Women's ordination or even advocating for it is forbidden by the Catholic Church, under pain of excommunication, which means no sacraments, ever, not even a Catholic burial.