The Ordination of Women
Still a bugbear in the Roman Catholic Church, which will not hear of women taking any official part in the hierarchical priesthood and rituals of their male-centric organization.Because it would defy historical tradition, and deny the ancient biblical precepts of women's place in the scheme of the Christian religion. Good thing that women, eager to serve their needy flock and to become a respected part of the church and the religion they are devoted to, have been accepted in other places, think Anglican and Episcopalian.
The last two popes and their established cardinals and bishops remain steadfast to the vision of their church and the place of women within it; as orderly congregants and supplicants, a meek flock of accepting femininity . Yet a newly published book, a scholarly enterprise looking into the early years of Christianity has come to the conclusion: in its first thousand years of existence the church appears to have ordained women.
Women were ordained - the author, Gary Macy, professor at California's Santa Clara University, in this book The Hidden History of Women's Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West, published by Oxford University Press - as deaconesses (equivalent to deacons) episcopae (bishops), and presbyterae (priests). In which positions they performed baptisms, communion, preached and heard confessionals.
After the first millennium a new ethos began to make itself felt, where bishops began to agitate for monasticism, a need to keep themselves separated from the world, to cleanse themselves, the better to be seen as a moral guide. They opted to sacrifice themselves (the word 'sacred' means set apart), selflessly eschewing the bonds of marriage, effectively ensuring they would not procreate, not produce genetic heirs.
Then swept in a period of misogynistic ideology, when women were seen at fateful monsters preying on the virtuous good-nature of men. An 11th-Century reformer, Peter Damien, wrote the viciously damning portrait of women that the author reproduces in his book, worth a second glance:
"I speak to you, o charmers of the clergy, appetizing flesh of the devil, that castaway from paradise, you, poison of the minds, death of souls, venom of wine and of eating, companions of the very stuff of sin, the cause of our ruin ... you bitches, sows, screech-owls, night owls, she-wolves, blood suckers ... harlots, prostitutes, with your lascivious kisses, you wallowing places for fat pigs, couches for unclean spirits - from you the devil is fattened by the abundance of your lust, is fed by your alluring feats.Impressive in its denunciatory viciousness, wouldn't you say? Little wonder such exemplars of monstrous demoralization were shunned as leaders of Christian flocks. A hermaphrodite could be countenanced for ordainment, if he could prove to be more male than female. But then there was still a hesitancy to do so, the argument being that this man even so "ought not to be ordained on account of deformity and monstrosity".
Prayers and rituals expressly performed by ordained women were laid away and forgotten, no longer copied, nor used, nor given second or third thought to. They never existed. If the place of women in church affairs was referred to in ancient texts they were given little notice, thought to be errors never corrected in the scriptorium that produced them. "Theologians came to assume that not only could women not be ordained, but they had never been ordained."
The author, himself a practising Catholic and a medievalist historian, personally believes that women should be ordained to the Catholic priesthood. Long may he write.
posted by Pieface @ Monday, January 21, 2008
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