"I've been called to do this since I was 8 years old," said another woman, Kathleen Strack, 60, a former accountant who is studying psychology and has seminary training. "It's in the depths of my soul."
Several of the women who participated in the ceremonies Monday are divorced and have children.
The first group of seven women to proclaim they had been ordained did so on the Danube River between Austria and Germany in 2002. Dagmar Celeste, 63, was one of them.
All were excommunicated as "heretics" by the Vatican.
Celeste, divorced from former Ohio governor Richard Celeste and the mother of six, has restored an old home in Cleveland as a "retreat" to minister to the needy, she said, regardless of the church's decree.
"The church will change, eventually. It's just a matter of time," she said. More than 400 supporters of such change gathered in Ottawa last weekend to support the push for women's ordination and married priests.
The Episcopal Church and some other branches of the Anglican Communion ordain women. But the Vatican has hardened its position, with a 1994 apostolic letter from Pope John Paul II declaring in strong language that "the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women."
Many in the church have interpreted the statement as prohibiting any discussion of the matter. "But of course, that is all people talk about right now," said Evelyn Hunt, a former nun and president of the Women's Ordination Conference, which organized the weekend gathering.
Robert Royal, president of the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, which studies church matters, said he believed the women's activism would backfire.
"As a publicity stunt, it has a certain cachet," he said in an interview. "But this is the kind of evasion that will convince people in Rome that these people aren't really serious about having a communion with a church. They want to impose their own views, and it isn't going to work."
Staff writer Alan Cooperman in Washington contributed to this report.
