Ludmila Javorová

Ludmila Javorová (born 31 January 1932 in Brno) is a Czech Roman Catholic woman who worked in the underground church during the time of communist rule in Czechoslovakia and served as a vicar general of a clandestine bishop.

According to statements made in 1995 and later, the underground bishop Felix Maria Davídek, a friend of Javorová's family, secretly ordained her on 29 December 1970, during the early years of Soviet occupation of the country after the Prague Spring.

[1] On the other side, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that an ordination ceremony performed on a woman would be invalid as well as illicit; this doctrine is found in the writings of Thomas Aquinas and many others.

Pope John Paul II has written "Priestly ordination, which hands on the office entrusted by Christ to his Apostles of teaching, sanctifying and governing the faithful, has in the Catholic Church from the beginning always been reserved to men alone" in his Apostolic Letter, Ordinatio sacerdotalis.

Historians Fiala and Hanuš argue that these ordained women had very few specific sacerdotal tasks in Davídek's group, and conclude from this that their ordinations can therefore be considered as only a "symbolical act and a precedent".