IT'S Only two months after the inauguration of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI, and Roman Catholics in his native Germany have conducted a ceremony that would make him hopping mad. Witnessed by Julian Pettifer, and reported in last week's Crossing Continents (Radio 4, Thursday), the service, held in secret, saw the "ordination" of an unnamed woman by a group of Roman Catholic priests.

This follows the case of the Danube Seven: a group of women who claimed the status of priests after a ceremony aboard a boat moored on the Danube.
 
 Cardinal Ratzinger was firm with the Danube Seven, and Pope Benedict is also likely to act decisively in this case. But, despite their excommunication, members of the Danube Seven - some of whom now call themselves bishops - continue to take part in "catacomb ordinations". Patricia, one of those involved, was brought up in South Africa under apartheid, and believes that it is legitimate to oppose unjust laws by breaking them. She holds that the ban on women priests is a law of the Church, not of God.

Pettifer's dramatic journalistic scoop was presented in the context of a wider report on the challenges facing institutional religion, particularly in areas formerly behind the Iron Curtain. The second half of his report took us to Kiev, where the Charismatic denomination the Embassy of God is baptising 1000 people a month, while the Orthodox Church is seeing a decline in attendance.

The Embassy of God has many of the attributes of an American-style Evangelical church, including the strong emphasis on giving. But its truly remarkable aspect is that it is led by a 38-year-old Nigerian, the charming and entirely plausible Pastor Sunday Adelaja. With an infectious roar of laughter, he  rebuts accusations that he enjoys a lavish lifestyle at the expense of his flock, and claims John Wesley as his model and guide. 

The local Orthodox priest, Fr Alexander, dismisses the Embassy of God as nothing more than show business. More tellingly, a former member accuses Pastor Sunday of an authoritarianism that resembles the dictatorship his congregation has so recently flung off. There is, he implies, a nostalgia for this kind of regime. 

With this, Fr Alexander agrees: the departure of communism, he says, has left a crisis of spiritual as well as political authority, and the Orthodox Church has not effectively risen to that challenge.

For another perspective one might usefully tune in to Bill Law's series  on Tuesday mornings.  Saudi Stories (Radio 4) attempts to get under the skin of this most alien of cultures, and kicked off with a look at extreme expressions of jihad.  It is only in the past couple of years that the Saudi authorities have admitted that a worryingly large minority of its youth is attracted to the notion of a holy sacrifice.

Its response has been typically no-nonsense: more than 100 have been executed  for a variety of jihad-related conspiracies. But, as one "reformed jihadist" explained, the problem lies in a lack of inspiration from the political class: there is no liberal leader, no Churchill, Gandhi, or Mandela.  New heroes are needed for the 21st century.