A Divine Calling: One Woman's Life-Long Battle for Equality in the Catholic Church

As a student in Trinity College Dublin, Soline Humbert experienced a call to the priesthood in the Catholic Church, which she was unable to pursue because of the ban on women’s ordination. She found herself on a collision course with a powerful church hierarchy intent on quashing any such vocation, and was even warned of excommunication if she persisted.

In this ground-breaking memoir, Soline candidly shares her struggles, her dark nights of the soul and her ecstasies, as well as her decades-long effort to bring about an end to women’s exclusion from the priesthood. She is told again and again: ‘The door to women’s ordination was shut and would remain shut.’ And that was that.

But as the Catholic Church continues its decline in weekly Mass attendance, its huge drop in male celibate priestly vocations and waning cultural significance, as it reels from decades of scandals due to child sexual abuse by clergy, it is becoming increasingly clear that the time for change is at hand.

A Divine Calling is an inspirational story of hope, determination, courage and one woman’s passionate desire to make a difference.

“Soline … lays bare the profound suffering she has endured wanting to serve God as God wants and the Church needs, but being rebuffed, ignored, labelled, stereotyped, as if God only talks to clerics and like them has no time for women as equals. Who could believe in such a God?” – Mary McAleese, from the Foreword