you find the PC(USA) in the most interesting places…

So, during my morning coffee break I am skimming through one of my regular blog reads, Clerical Whispers , an Irish Roman Catholic blog at heart but one that does a good job of also covering Irish and Scottish Presbyterian news as well as Anglican developments.  And as I’m scanning through I find an article with not one, but two links to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

The story is about a group derived from the Roman church that is ordaining women as priests in the RC tradition.  Of course, as the article notes this is not the teaching of the wider church:

Noting that church law and teachings prohibit the ordination of women, Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said that ordinations of women are invalid.

“You don’t wake up and say, ‘I’m going to be a priest today,'” Walsh said.

This is not news to the group who clearly post on their web site

Yes, we have challenged and broken the Church’s Canon Law 1024, an unjust law that discriminates against women. Despite what some bishop may lead the faithful to believe, our ordinations are valid because we are ordained in the line of unbroken apostolic succession within the Roman Catholic Church.

OK, I’ll leave that for them to sort out.  We Presbyterians have enough questions of our own.

Anyway, over the weekend the group ordained (or is that “ordained”?) two women as priests and three more as deacons at Spiritus Christi Church in Rochester, New York, a church that “was established in 1999 in a split with the Rochester Diocese ” according to the article.  One each of the priests and the deacons are from Rochester with the other priest from New Hampshire and the other deacons from Pennsylvania and Maryland.

PC(USA) Connection #1:  In listing the work of the Rochester woman ordained as a priest it includes her work as a Peacemaker for the Presbytery of Genesee Valley.

PC(USA) Connection #2: It is also interesting to note that the church that hosted the ordination service, Spiritus Christi, is a church that now shares facilities with the Downtown United Presbyterian Church in Rochester.

So we Presbyterians are finding connections into all sorts of doctrinal debates and places the boundaries in other denominations are being stretched.