section_path: Social, moral and cultural issues/Holy orders and women
section_name: Holy orders and women
paragraph_text: Holy orders and women
  
  Women and men religious engage in a variety of occupations such as contemplative prayer, teaching, providing health care, and working as missionaries. Catholic women have played diverse roles in the life of the church, with religious institutes providing a formal space for their participation and convents providing spaces for their self-government, prayer and influence through many centuries. Religious sisters and nuns have been extensively involved in developing and running the church's worldwide health and education service networks.
  
  Holy Orders are reserved for men. Efforts in support of the ordination of women to the priesthood led to several rulings by the Roman Curia or popes against the proposal, as in Declaration on the Question of the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood (1976), Mulieris Dignitatem (1988) and Ordinatio sacerdotalis (1994). According to the latest ruling, found in Ordinatio sacerdotalis, Pope John Paul II affirmed that the Catholic Church "does not consider herself authorised to admit women to priestly ordination".
  
  In defiance of these rulings, independent opposition groups such as Roman Catholic Womenpriests have performed ceremonies they affirm as sacramental ordinations, with, reputedly, an ordaining male Catholic bishop in the first few instances, which, according to canon law, are both illicit and invalid and considered mere simulations of the sacrament of ordination. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith responded by issuing a statement clarifying that any Catholic bishops involved in ordination ceremonies for women, as well as the women themselves if they were Catholic, would automatically receive the penalty of excommunication (latae sententiae, literally "with the sentence already applied", i.e. automatically), citing canon 1378 of canon law and other church laws.