Meet the female priest defying Catholicism for her faith Rome's reaction was predictably icy. They received an order to recant. What else had Mayr-Lumetzberger expected? They might have wanted to talk to us, listen to why we did what we did. She's certainly an optimist, but is she also a natural rebel? Me, no. She laughs at the thought. I'd rather be seen as a prophet. I'm doing the right thing, only a little bit too early. There is steel behind the benign exterior. Prophets are, of course, without honour in their own country, the Bible instructs, and Mayr-Lumetzberger and the other six women were summarily excommunicated. She then took defiance to a new level and was consecrated as a bishop by "more than one bishop who was in good standing with Rome. It was their idea not mine. Christine presiding over a wedding ceremony in 2008 She has always refused to name the male bishops involved in case they suffer the Vatican's wrath for exceeding their authority. Her reticence undeniably weakens her case, but it also points to the grit in her story. With excommunication, her protest should have petered out, but it hasn't. Instead, others from within the church, including bishops, have lined up to egg her on to even greater defiance. "Most Catholic priests in Austria," she says, "are very nice to me. They call me 'Mrs Bishop. And they show me respect. And this time we don't have to take her word for it. On her laptop - decorated with a red rose - "Mrs Bishop" has file after file of pictures of herself, in full episcopal robes, performing baptisms, marriages and funerals in Catholic churches up and down Austria - and beyond. She's being doing one every two weeks for the past decade, she estimates. In the snaps, she's there on the altar at Kremsmunster, the oldest Benedictine monastery in Austria, with the congregation spread out in front of her. Or leading a long funeral procession side-by-side into another church with a male priest. So they accept her as one of them? And suffer no consequences from their bishops for sharing their pulpits an excommunicated woman? No, never once. One of the key themes in the Synod on the Family in Rome is the yawning gap between Catholic teaching and what actually goes on in Catholic parishes and lives on such questions as divorce, contraception and homosexuality. Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger is highlighting another. And she is not alone. In Canada, America, South Africa, Spain, France, Italy, Germany and Austria, there are, she estimates, hundreds of women priests, some ordained by her, all in the active ministry, plus a dozen other women bishops who have followed in her pioneering footsteps. They are all part of the Roman Catholic Women Priests movement. Far from being exiles from the mainstream Catholic community, they're busy serving it, at its very heart. It is a seamless garment. Christine conducting a funeral earlier this year Christine Mayr grew up in a strongly Catholic home in an Austria where 75 per cent of the population still professes itself Catholic. As a child, she recalls, she knew the mass texts by heart, but wasn't even allowed, because of her gender, to be an official altar server. In 1970, she went into a convent run by the Benedictines of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. "Their work was as helpers to priests," she recalls. I still see myself today as a helper to priests. This was a time of great reform in Catholicism, prompted by the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. She believed that, by signing on as a nun, she was putting herself at the front of the queue when women's ordination finally was permitted. But the tide was already turning against such radical reform. Suddenly everything in the convent was forbidden and they started to open our letters, telling us to concentrate on our prayers. She left in 1975, and worked as a religious education teacher, but when she fell in love with Michael, a divorced man with children - "he had already left his wife, I was never interested in other women's husbands" - and then married him, she was barred from teaching in Catholic schools. She never, though, lost her belief that God was calling her to the priesthood. After attending the European Women's Synod at Gmunden in Austria 1996, she was inspired to work with a group of like-minded women on a theological and pastoral training for female priests. And then to implement it. I remember taking a copy of the programme we'd designed to my local bishop. I wanted him to share it with other bishops. He was a bit afraid, but he said to me, When are you going to stop just talking about this? It was like a light bulb had gone on. Women's ordination needed real faces and real people to do it. That is what she sees herself as today - being a good example of how, quietly and diligently and where needed, women can be good and admired Catholic priests. "In June," she recalls, "I was saying a funeral mass in his church with a very conservative Catholic priest I had known for 40 years. The family had asked for me. I only say mass in public if people ask for me. He was very concerned about how we should arrange it. I think he was a bit frightened. Of being found out by his bishop? No, of me, but I try always to create a win-win situation. In the end he agreed that he would assist me. It's become so normal. Some people want a woman priest because they believe we offer different things, that we can feel with them in a different way, that we can be easier with them than a man, that we can, for example, hold a grieving mother in a way that a male priest cannot. Excommunication, though, is surely a heavy price to pay. "It doesn't touch me," she says serenely. The canon [church] law used against me was an unjust law made by celibate men who rule over people whose lives they do not really know, and who give no explanation as to why these negative laws should be followed. Except fear. Does that damning judgement extend to Pope Francis, currently prompting high hopes of many of the sort of changes she is also advocating - though he is not, it should be noted, in favour of female ordination? He's working very hard to change things. It is difficult to start on that road. I hope the presence of people like me make it a little bit easier. The Catholic Church in general is good. It is just that it is blind in one eye. By way of illustration, she holds her hand up to cover half of her face. On her third finger, her bishop's ring catches the light.