On 10 July 2002, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a monitum against the women, warning that they would be excommunicated if they did not admit the invalidity of the ordinations and repented. As a consequence of this violation of canon law, specifically canons 1008-1009 and 1024-1025, and their refusal to repent, the Vatican excommunicated the women. The women asked the Vatican to revoke the excommunication, but this request was denied in Decree on the Attempted Ordination of Some Catholic Women. Since then several similar ceremonies have been held by Roman Catholic Womenpriests, a group in favor of women's ordination in Roman Catholicism. These womenpriests were not excommunicated as quickly as the original Danube seven, however, since 2008, all people involved in the ordination of women are automatically excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church, through the mechanism of latae sententiae. Despite this threat, some of the women ordained as priests became ordained as bishops, in order to continue to the womenpriest movement without putting more male bishops in jeopardy. Currently there is a lobby within the Roman Catholic Church in favour of the ordination of women to the priesthood. However, the church officially teaches that the ordination of women is impossible: Pope John Paul II asserted the theological impossibility of ordaining women, arguing that the action is unfounded in holy scripture and absent from the church's bimillenial tradition. Pope John Paul II maintained that it is ontologically impossible for the church to ordain women because the priesthood is a participation in the relational aspect of the Trinity which, according to the Catholic Church's own teaching, is dependent on a masculine nature, the idea of gender complementarity, and the phrase In persona Christi. Supporters of women's ordination argue that there are both direct and indirect scriptural references to women's ministry, and an ancient tradition of ordaining women, some say intentionally clouded over by the male hierarchy. Pope Francis supports John Paul II's statements, claiming he had the last word on the issue. Other notable Roman Catholic documents that deal with the ordination of women include
Responsum Ad Propositum Dubium, 1995 Pope John Paul II
The sacramental validity of the Danube Seven ordinations is not recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, setting up a fundamental dispute and controversy between the Danube Seven and the Church. Although the women believe that they are validly ordained, the Catholic Church teaches that because a valid subject for ordination was not present, no ordination took place. The Church says that this teaching is based on Divine Law. Despite the position of these seven women and some Catholic scholars, the Catholic Church continues to consider the ordination of women to be impossible.
At the 1978 Lambeth Conference the Anglican Communion decided that all of its churches were autonomous and thus had the right to make their own choices on the legality of the ordination of women. The admission of women to the priesthood in many parts of the Anglican Communion, including the Church of England in 1992, and the actions of the Philadelphia Eleven and the response of the Episcopal Church in the 1970s, fueled some Catholics' calls for a greater role for women in ministry. At the same time the Anglican Communion's moves created an apparently insurmountable obstacle to Anglican-Catholic unity. Bishop Rómulo Antonio Braschi left the Catholic Church to lead an international missionary, the Catholic Apostolic Charismatic Church of Jesus the King.
