Like any good priest, Judy Lee knows how to use a Bible story.
One of the readings for Roman Catholic Masses on a recent Sunday, from the Book of Wisdom, recounts how the Hebrews defied the pharaoh by worshipping God "in secret."
That passage resonates at the house in Fort Myers, Fla., where Lee is conducting Mass for 25 Catholics gathered in front of a coffee-table altar in defiance of the Pope.
"Rome says you'll be thrown out of the church for being here," says Lee, "because I'm a woman."
Lee, 67, considers herself a validly ordained Catholic priest. The Vatican disagrees.
"The Catholic Church ... has no authority to confer priestly ordination on women" because Jesus had no female Apostles, Lee was told in a letter from the local bishop, the Rev. Frank Dewane — who also informed her that she had been excommunicated for ignoring that doctrine.
Lee's reply: "Rome can impose all the rules it wants on women, divorced people, gay people. But it can't stop us."
She and the more than 100 other women who claim to be Catholic priests in the U.S. and abroad can thank the church for one thing: its hysterical response to their movement — in July the Vatican branded female ordination a delictum gravius, or grave crime, the same label it has given pedophilia — has elicited enough attention to lift their profile out of the catacombs.
As TV-news trucks waited outside, Nancy Corran, 37, took holy orders on July 31 at the Mary Magdalene Apostle Catholic Community, a five-year-old San Diego splinter parish with 150 members.
Rome's latest decree, says Corran, "was outrageous even for the church." Says Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and theology at the University of Notre Dame: "It's a sign the church knows this isn't going away."
That's the hope of Roman Catholic Womenpriests, a group founded eight years ago in Europe.
It has since ordained women like Lee and Corran in more than 20 American states and Canada.
Womenpriests and other organizations promoting female Catholic clerics, like the Women's Ordination Conference, don't expect to change Vatican doctrine anytime soon.
But their growing following signals that Catholics, already incensed by the never ending clerical sexual-abuse crisis, are losing patience with Rome's refusal to let women into the leadership of a church to which more than 20% of Americans belong.
"We're the Rosa Parks of the Catholic Church," says Bridget Mary Meehan, a Womenpriests bishop and former nun. "We no longer accept second-class status in our own religion."
Meehan, 62, once did ministry work that included "everything a priest does," she says — except saying Mass.
So in 2006 she was made a priest by a group of German female theologians who four years earlier had been ordained by a renegade cleric — and who were made bishops, they claim, by a sympathetic European bishop whose identity they won't reveal.
If true, that Da Vinci Code — like scenario, they argue, gives the Womenpriests the legitimacy of apostolic succession, the priestly line that dates back to Jesus' Apostles.
Like Meehan, most of the almost 80 Catholic women ordained in the U.S. hold advanced religious degrees and have logged years of lay work in the church, from premarriage counseling to serving Communion.
Many are married — another doctrinal no-no, since Catholic priests, with rare exceptions, must be celibate — and they often have outside jobs to make ends meet.
Mary Magdalene Apostle's pastor, Jane Via, is a San Diego County prosecutor.
They perform baptisms and legally recognized marriages.
They say Mass in private homes or sanctuaries lent by Protestant churches.
Lee ministers to the homeless of Fort Myers, which has one of the nation's highest home-foreclosure rates. "I was drawn to the strong moral imperative of Catholic social teaching," she says. "That's the doctrine that matters."
Most of the U.S.'s 65 million Catholics consider the church's logic behind the ban on female priests to be as thin as a Communion wafer. In a May New York Times — CBS poll, 59% said they favor ordaining women.
Groups like Womenpriests maintain that the New Testament and early Christian art show that women like Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus' most trusted followers, were apostles, priests and bishops before medieval misogyny took hold of the church.
Church leaders deny any sexism and insist that July's delictum gravius statement never meant to compare women's ordination to pedophilia per se. Still, critics feel that in its panic to defend doctrine, the Vatican is forgetting decency. What's more, says Kaveny, Rome's heavy-handedness has "gotten Catholics who had before been largely quiet about this issue saying, We should discuss this again."
Conservative Catholics say this is really about feminist politics, and certainly there is overlap.
The Womenpriests use a liturgy that stresses gender neutrality ("In the name of God our Father and Mother ..."), and they don't toe the Vatican line against birth control and abortion, endorsing instead the Catholic tenet of informed individual conscience. They also favor the kind of new-age, Mother Earth music that can grate on even progressive Catholics.
What really spooks Rome, the women say, is their drive to reform an insular, hyper-hierarchical church that betrays early Christianity's more democratic culture — and whose bosses have too often protected pedophile priests.
"We don't want to just add women to the structure already there," says Corran. Via, who works with child-abuse victims, notes that the church has excommunicated her but not one pederast cleric.
"We can no longer indulge this self-preserving all-male system," she says.
Asked why they don't go to the Episcopal Church, which ordains women, they say they won't abandon their religion and its sacraments because of a defective church. "We're leading, not leaving, the church," says Meehan.
It's debatable whether female ordination would help empower the Catholic laity or soften the church's overweening clericalism. Women, after all, know how to abuse authority too. But reform is a key draw for Catholics who attend Womenpriests Masses — and who the church says face excommunication as well.
"If you look at the history of Christianity, large-scale reforms always started with small movements like this," says Ray Trybus, 66, a Jesuit-educated lifelong Catholic and dean of psychology at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, Calif., who attends Mass at Mary Magdalene Apostle.
"Women tend to bring a different tenor and perspective that governments and corporations have benefited from and which the priesthood now needs to include."
Numbers may force Rome's hand.
Since 1985, the number of U.S. Catholic priests has plunged almost a third, to fewer than 40,000; more than 3,400 American parishes are without a resident priest, up from 1,051.
To replenish the ranks, the church will probably let male priests marry before it ever ordains women.
But the female priests say this should be about doing the right thing, not just the numerical thing.
That's the chant from their makeshift altars — and with an unintentional assist from Rome, they're finally being heard.
SIC: TIME/INT'L