Ludmila Javorová

Ludmila Javorová (born 1932, 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. She is known for being one of a number of Czech women who underwent an ordination ceremony as a priest, the religious result of which is in dispute.

Javorová was born into a Catholic family, and expressed a wish to become a nun, but that was not possible in the time of communism. She started to work in civilian professions and to support Church activities in her free time.

According to statements made in 1995 and later, the underground bishop Felix Maria Davídek, who was a friend of her family, secretly ordained Javorová on December 28, 1970, during the early years of occupation of the country after the Prague Spring. She had served him as his secretary and deputy, after his return from prison in 1964, and "gradually took over important tasks in organising the clandestine Church structure Koinótés. Davídek named her his vicar general and later ordained her as a priest."

After the end of communist rule in Czechoslovakia in 1989, Javorová seemingly tried for some time to conceal her status from the wide public, saying that "the time is not ripe to talk about that". About 1995 she changed her mind and decided to speak. She helped to prepare a book interview about her experiences, authored by Miriam Therese Winter. Javorová now lives in Brno and remains an active member of the Roman Catholic Church. She is currently a speaker of the Liturgical Commission of her local parish.

While there appears to be no evidence that an ordination ceremony did or did not take place as claimed, its theological significance is in controversy.

On one side, Davidek justified the ordinations by the pastoral needs of a church suffering harsh persecution (he himself endured fourteen years in Communist prison for his faith) and in particular, of women tortured in prison who had no access to male priests but may have been ministered to by priests of the same gender. Archbishop John Bukovsky is quoted as saying that the ordinations were "illicit but valid".

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