Frequently asked questions about women's ordination
-But the Church has Never Ordained women? How can WE start doing this now?
This is not true. For the first nine centuries of the Church, we know with certainty that women deacons were ordained. This practice continued for a longer time in the eastern Church. Emerging evidence shows that women were priests and bishops in the early Church.
-Jesus Did not choose any women. Jesus Only Ordained the Twelve Apostles and they were men. How can women be priests? This goes against what Jesus wanted.
First of all, Jesus didn’t ordain anyone. The practice of ordination is something that developed through time as the Church grew. Both men and women were followers of Jesus. Not only does history show that, in the kernel of revelation, women were there at the beginning, women led, and women were ordained, it also shows that:
Sacramental ministry for men developed progressively with an open door through Church history; and conversely,
Un-Christian misogyny and prejudice closed that door to women so that their roles were diminished and it has remained bolted shut ever since.
Instead of growth for women, as has been the acceptable standard for men, patriarchy, social and cultural prejudice against women crept into the minds of early Church male leaders. Unsurprisingly they opted to suppress the natural development of women’s sacramental partnership. Phobia against menstruation and the wrong belief that women were unclean, inferior, misbegotten men affected views on women. These attitudes are not part of divine revelation yet evidence shows that this is why men eventually excluded women from the sacrament of ordination.
Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, The Last Supper, seems to have cemented into people’s minds that there were only twelve male apostles. It is true that the twelve men are frequently mentioned are frequently mentioned in scripture. But women apostles are mentioned, too. The first apostle commissioned by Jesus to announce the Good News of the Resurrection was a woman, Mary Magdalene. She is now known as the Apostle to the Apostles. Later in scripture, Paul works with the Apostle Junia, a woman. Arguably, the Samaritan Woman at the Well earlier in the New Testament was also an Apostle. She has the longest conversation recorded in scripture with Jesus. She understands his message and goes to tell her people.
The papacy and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) have always responded to criticism of the ban on women by pointing out that Jesus only chose men as members of the Twelve. But the Twelve:
were a group distinct from, and smaller than, the larger group of “apostles”;
their primary distinctive function was merely symbolic, i.e. their number evoked the twelve founding tribes of the people of Israel, so as to underline that Jesus was effectively founding a “new Israel”, i.e. the entire community of his disciples, men and women;
crucially, they cannot be regarded as the original church ministers, and so as a model for all future such ministers, for two key reasons:
they were not replaced after their death (with the exception of Judas Iscariot, as a one-off), and so did not have successors;
they did not seem to have had any official position in the earliest church (James the brother of the Lord, rather than Peter, was clearly head of the nascent Jerusalem church, according to the Acts of the Apostles).
In summary, the Twelve’s function was primarily symbolic, as representatives of the new Israel (i.e. the entire community of the church), and not of a supposedly male-only, patriarchal clerical caste. Last but not least, the group of the “apostles” was a larger group than the Twelve alone, and it included women: a certain Junia is explicitly mentioned by Paul in Romans 16:1 as “outstanding among the apostles.” Interestingly, the name Junia had long been changed by translators to its masculine form, “Junias”, because it was deemed impossible that Paul had called a woman “apostle.” But New Testament scholars have now re-established definitely the feminine gender of the name, and so the marvellous evidence of a prominent female leader of the nascent church has been restored.
Most of what’s in the paragraph above is explained at length in wonderfully written famous response by renowned New Testament scholar Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza to Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, entitled simply “The Twelve”.
-The Exclusion of Women is an Infallible Teaching of the Catholic Church. The Door is Closed. How Can you push for the Ordination of Women?
Assertions are made that Pope John Paul II’s 1994 Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis is infallible. In the document, he expresses his view that women cannot be ordained. He further and forbids any conversation about the subject. On this account, the document that has come to be known as 'the Papal No'.
Infallible? No. The document has been carefully analyzed not just by one expert but many. Canon law sets out requirements for how a teaching can be infallibly made. An excellent article from one of the websites of our member group Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research delves into all the wobbly features that have been identified by canon lawyers and theologians such that the document cannot be considered infallible.
A link to their page providing coverage about this is here: Theologians Assess Ordinatio Sacerdotalis
Two of our favourite articles covering this subject are by Elizabeth Johnson, csj’s Assessment of Ordinatio Sacerdotals found in ‘Disputed Questions: Authority, Priesthood, Women’ and Peter Burns, SJ’s ‘Was the Teaching Infallible?’
John Paul II’s prohibition against discussion has been problematic in that it put a chill over work for the cause. In our experience, whenever a question is forbidden by an institution or power, it’s because the institution or power is uncomfortable with the prospect of having to defend its answer. Better simply to lash out at anyone doing the asking. The spirit for the work of women’s ordination is strong and the prohibition has not stopped advance of the cause.
Some say the door is closed. It is true that it is at present. It is also true that closed doors do open.
