SHE could be described as a rebel without a pause. Certainly, that is Betty Maher's intention. Her opposition to the Catholic Church's attitude to women is expressed "persistently, but not with anger", and not least in her book Called To Be A Nuisance which will be published next week.

As the title suggests, "being a nuisance" is a vocation for women like Betty Maher, and there are many of them.

Their belief is that the denial to women of a full ministering role in the Catholic Church is wrong, unjust, theologically unsound, and a source of constant frustration. This applies in particular to women who feel a call to serve as Catholic priests.

Maher sees her own vocation as primarily one of being a wife and mother. But she is very supportive of those women who seek to live out their calling as priests but are stopped from doing so. She is a member of BASIC, (Brothers And Sisters In Christ) which has been advocating the ordination of women. On the feast of the Annunciation (on March 25th), they held their fourth annual prayer service in the chapel at Trinity College, Dublin. It involved music, singing, dancing (a lone woman in black who danced to Beethoven's Fur Elise), and an address by a Dominican Sister, Cathenne Gibson. Sister Catherine spoke of the meaning of the Annunciation story as a biblical tale underlying the calling of women to the service of God.

"God needs us as God needed Mary," she said, before making a wry observation about the comet Hale Bopp. While watching it one night recently, she realised it had not visited these parts for 4,000 years, and "in a moment of darkness", she began to wonder whether when it came back in 4,000 years time "the members of BASIC would still be praying for the ordination of women in the Roman Catholic church".

Betty Maher's own path to nuisance began when she was a child. A 60 year old Dubliner - she lives in Rathgar - she recalls two incidents involving Catholic church teaching which struck her as wrong as a child. There was a murder trial, in which either husband or wife was charged with killing the other. It emerged during the trial that the wife had gone six times to a priest to say she couldn't go on living with her very violent husband, and each time she was told she had to go back to him. As a result "one of them was dead," and that struck the young Betty Maher as both inevitable and wrong.

Then there was the matter of "the Pauline privilege", which stipulates that where two non Christians are married and one decides to convert and leave the other to marry a Christian, "maybe even leaving a wife and children", they could do so with the blessing of the church. That also struck her as deeply wrong.

But she was an adult before she put her foot down and simply refused to go along with church practice.

After the birth of her first child 34 years ago, she was "churched" - this was a "cleansing" ceremony, which took place shortly after a mother gave birth. Reflecting on it later, she was "pretty appalled" that a women should be considered unclean after giving birth. So when her second child was born, she refused to go through with the ceremony, and likewise following the birth of her three other children.

Through the 1970s and much of the 1980s her life was taken up with rearing the children, so it was the mid 1980s before she had time to address the questions which bothered her about her religion and its treatment of women in particular.

She began attending theology courses, as well as seminars and conferences, where "lay people were losing their inhibitions" when it came to discussion of ideas about the church and God. It began to strike her as "an utter injustice" that so many women she met, who felt called to the priesthood, should have people say to them "there is no place for you". It was "totally wrong that one human being can say to another `you can't'," she felt. This injustice she traced to "people in higher authority in the church".

HER own personal calling would be to a pastoral ministry. She would "greatly wish to minister to the sick and dying". She felt called to it, but "you needed a Roman collar" to be allowed do so full time. She has been fighting on that front for "over a decade" and at last things seemed to be loosening up. Her fear, however, is that it may have come too late for her, that she is now too old.

Men, she believes, "hijacked everything" in the early centuries of the church, but it is her firm belief that whereas "one can be a feminist without being a Christian, it is not possible to be a Christian without being a feminist".