Excerpts from Deborah Halter's The Papal “No”
AT PROFOUND RISK TO HER LIFE, Ludmila Javorova
served for twenty years in the underground church [in Communist-controlled
Czechoslovakia ] and as vicar general for the man who ordained her. Bishop
Felix Maria Davidek was a former political prisoner whose validity as
bishop was accepted by Rome, and who functioned in the clandestine church
with the Vatican's implicit consent to ordain priests to work in secret.
When the Communist regime fell in 1989, the status of priests ordained
during those long years had to be negotiated with the Vatican. …Ordinations
of women [including Javorova] were declared “clearly invalid,” and their
priestly 
actions
were likewise invalid. Thus, said Rome, Catholics to whom these women
priests had ministered under threat of Communist persecution had not,
in fact, received valid sacraments. (pp. 10-11)
… THE VATICAN DAILY NEWSPAPER, L'Osservatore Romano…said that Jesus “does not communicate to women the message he received from the Father. It is a fact and we are bound to recognize it.” (p. 16)
RECEPTION AND ASSENT by the faithful is required for a teaching to be valid. The faithful receive and assent to a teaching when they put it into practice. The Church teaches that no Catholic can be forced into receiving or assenting to a doctrine or teaching that seems untrue. (p. 26)
IN THE EARLY 1970s, the Vatican's Doctrinal Congregation directed the Pontifical Biblical Commission (PBC) to study the role of women in the Bible to help determine the place that could be “given to women” in the church. The PBC unanimously declared that the New Testament alone was insufficient to settle “in a clear way and once and for all” the “problem” of ordaining women. (p. 37)
THE ATTENTION BEING GIVEN TO WOMEN was causing problems, [Pope John Paul II] said, because “many voices” were raising the “fear that excessive insistence given to the status and role of women would lead to an unacceptable omission regarding men
.” He did not cite the sources of those voices, or the specific nature of their concerns, but in 1995 Gerald Brown, president of the Conference of Major Superiors of Men in the United States, issued a statement concerning the Vatican's neglect of men and their issues. “One would hope that maleness would be more than the remainder of what is left over after all the dimensions of femininity have been articulated,” he said. (p. 83)