Last night we had a nice family dinner and the subject turned to religion. My brother’s girlfriend, a converted Catholic, started a conversation about females entering the priesthood, etc., and my sister asked me how I felt about it. I told her that I am not for it, and let it go at that.
My brothers girlefriend jumped in and asked me why, stating that females were allowed to be priest’s (esses) in the Roman Catholic Church in the past, and why not now.
Okay, perhaps my knowledge of the history of my religion is not the best, but were women actually allowed to be priest’s in the Roman Catholic Church?
Oh, and please do not allow this to turn into a debate about morality (or lack of) in the Catholic Church, etc.
No, women have never been allowed to be priests in the Roman Catholic Church. There have been several attempts around of the world of female ordinations by bishops of breakaway Catholic sects, but these are not recognized by Rome, and those involved often are excommunicated for it.
The general answer is no, there have never been female priests in the Roman Catholic church. There have been times and places when women have performed various priestly functions, with or without tacit clerical approval. You also have the odd abberant example, for instance, St. Brigit of Ireland was consecrated as a bishop, and therefore was technically a priest. That is hagiography and not history, though, and there’s the medieval legend of Pope Joan if you want to get really fictional.
About the apostrophe, I am an idiot.
Thanks for the link. In doing my research prior to starting the thread, everything I found talks about attempts to ordain females in recent history, but nothing dating back in past centuries.
I should add that there are many examples of women acting as evangelists in the early Christian church. But if we are talking women formally ordained into the priesthood, not in the Roman church.
There is no clear history of women ever being ordained women in the Catholic church.
There are two tantalizing bits of history that some folks would like to use to claim a “change” in policiy.
The first is that there are some indications that in the very earliest (twenty years or fewer following the time of Jesus) period, when the community gathered to celebrate the Eucharist, the presider may have been the host/owner of the house where the celebration took place. Since we know than on several occasions, the houses identified were described as being the “house of” a woman (whether a widow owning her own house or a Christian woman married to a pagan so that her name is the one by which the Christians identified it is not clear), some people have concluded that the woman must have been the president of that Eucharist, giving her the office that would evolve into the priesthood.
Note, however, the number of inferences used to get to that conclusion.
The second is that we do have references to women exercising authority within the church in the early days. On some occasions they have been identified as “deaconess” (which, if one extrapolates that the “deacon” was the religious position directly subordinate to the priesthood, suggests that the women were partaking of holy orders in some fashion), and, if as deaconesses, why not as priests? One issue with this proposal is that the Greek word we now translate as “deacon” is simply the Greek word for servant and there is no bright line demarcation indicating when the description “servant” became the title “deacon.” A second issue is that we do not have a reference to a Christian woman that explicitly uses the word for priest (or bishop). Again, however, there is no bright line demarcation to indicate when presbyter (elder) or hiereus (priest) or episkopos (overseer) became official titles rather than descriptions of tasks and there are referencs to the feminine versions of elder and overseer in some early writings. (I know of no reference to a feminine version of priest.) So some folks would like to examine references to female elders or female overseers and infer that the meant female priests or bishops.
Given the strictly male liturgical authorities in Judaism and the rather restricted liturgical functions of women in pagan Greco-Roman society, my own suspicion is that such folks are reaching, but it is true that there is not a clear declaration that women were prohibited from priestly functions in the first century.
Many folks claim that in the early years of the church, women were frequently ordained as priests. The claim is put forth that in the 5th century, Pope Gelasius I sent a letter to the bishops of Southern Italy instructing them to stop ordaining women. http://www.womensordination.com/
Make of it what you will. I suspect there was a lot that went on in the early church that was erased from history due to the disapproval of those who followed.
Nope, never. The Eastern Orthodox are as opposed to the ordaining of women as presbyters as the Latins are. Women were at one time (and in the past hundred years, in a few places, have begun to be again) ordained as deaconesses, and they received laying on of hands by the bishop and received communion in the altar with the other clergy, but there were several differences from other clergy: they had no liturgical function, had to be over the age of 40 and unmarried, and were only used for certain purposes, such as baptizing women (as baptism was in ancient times done in the nude), serving as sacristans in convents, or other extra-liturgical ministry. There is absolutely no precedent in the east for priestesses.
Because I know it will come up: The Episcopal Church and several other national churches in the Anglican Communion, and the Old Catholic Churches (the group that split from Rome in 1870 over Vatican Council I) have ordained women priests. And of course many Protestant churches have ordained women pastors, elders, and ministers, for many years.
But, as a matter of proper nomenclature, nobody has ordained priestesses in Christianity. After a hot exchange on this on a Christian board I used to participate in, I pointed out to one snitty Roman Catholic that “only Mariolaters claim that Anglicans ordain priestesses.”
To give him credit, he got the point.
