Call me 'mother': ordained to be renegades.

The campaign for the ordination of women in the Catholic church took a dramatic turn on September 14 - but whether it moved forward, backward, or sideways is difficult to determine - with a ceremony at a small church north of Dublin in which a sixty-seven-year-old female hermit went through a ceremony of ordination presided over by a dissident priest who had himself undergone a rite of episcopal "consecration" five months earlier.

The ceremony, which was attended by about 150 people, represents the conjunction of a series of unlikely occurrences and extraordinary people. The ordinand is Sister (or Mother, as she now wishes to be called) Frances Meigh, who was born an Anglican, converted to Catholicism at the age of twenty-one, married and had three children, had her marriage annulled, and was consecrated as a hermit under canon law 603 in 1994 by Bishop John Crowley of Middlesborough, in the North of England. Bishop Crowley is a former private secretary to Cardinal Basil Hume of Westminster, and reputedly destined for further promotion in the hierarchy: the embarrassment potential of the event is therefore significant.

The cleric, Father (or "bishop," as he now describes himself) Pat Buckley, is a validly ordained Roman Catholic priest who worked for some years in the ordinary parochial ministry before failing out with his bishop. Since then, he has operated on a free-lance basis, but has not hesitated to take initiatives - such as officiating at wedding ceremonies for Catholics who have undergone civil divorce proceedings - not calculated to endear him to his former episcopal superiors. In May of this year, he was ordained as a bishop by the equally dissident Bishop Michael Cox, who traces his line of succession through a Bishop Kieran Broadberry, who was episcopally ordained at the age of seventeen by Bishop Clemente Gomez, who now describes himself as Pope Gregory XVII, and who was ordained some years ago by a formerly orthodox but subsequently dissident Vietnamese bishop.

Ordinand and cleric alike believe that the ceremony, though unlawful, was valid. Church sources maintain both that the episcopal line which has emerged in Father Buckley is theologically tainted, and that in any case, as Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger have insisted, the church has no power to ordain women, even if it wanted to do so.

There is no doubt that Frances Meigh's ordination has attracted an extraordinary amount of publicity - she told the London Guardian with "childlike glee" that she had given more than sixty media interviews, and has a list of well-wishers that includes such unlikely bedfellows as Chief Buthelezi of South Africa and Tony Benn, the former British Labor Cabinet minister. Nor is she without support in Ireland, where traditionally there are wellsprings of sympathy for people who challenge established authority in the pursuit of apparently hopeless causes. For his part, Pat Buckley has said that he will ordain a further four priests - all men - for his newly formed Society of Saint Andrew.

There are, nonetheless, aspects of what has happened which should at least give pause to proponents of the ordination of women. The line of episcopal ordination from Vietnam to Dublin is certainly questionable, insofar as it relies for its justification primarily on the contention that an exercise of sacramental authority may be valid even if unlawful. That provision was originally devised as a protection for lay people, rather than as a way in which clergy could take power to themselves without the need for accountability. And while it is true that normal Catholic episcopal ordinations tend to muffle, at the very least, the New Testament concept of the "election" of bishops, the ceremony at which Pat Buckley was consecrated, and the ordination of Frances Meigh at which he subsequently presided, were redolent of a type of essentialist 1950s theology in which power and ceremony provided the leitmotif.

For the time being, therefore, it is likely that the battle will continue to be fought more on the question of chromosomes than on the aspects of canon law involved in Frances Meigh's ordination. At best, she is an unlikely successor to Mary Magdalene, described in medieval homilies as "the apostle of the apostles"; at worst, her well-meaning actions may further reinforce Vatican attempts to tie the hands of future popes on this most controversial of issues.

John Horgan teaches journalism at the Dublin City University. His most recent report in Commonweal was "No Melting Pot" (September 25).