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Roman Catholic Womanpriests
The action of the American Catholic priests follows the “Call for Disobedience,” launched in Austria last month by priests and deacons who requested their bishops to promote priesthood for women and married men, in hope to make up for the shortage of priests in the Church.
The Austrian priests also demanded that a “church reform” prayer be recited in every Mass of the Roman Catholic Church.
The rebellion in the Austrian church was signed by 300 priests, by which they were asking: to pray for church reform at every Mass; not to deny Holy Eucharist to “believers of good will,” including here those who remarried and the non-Catholic Christians; to avoid offering Mass more than once on Sundays; to hold a Liturgy of the Word as “priestless Eucharistic celebration” in a time of priests shortage; to ignore canonical norms that restrict the preaching of homily to clergy; to oppose parish merges; to advocate the ordination of married men and women.
A bishop in Australia has issued a pastoral letter by which he said he would ordain women and married men, “if Vatican allows it.”
Roman Catholic Womenpriests
The Vatican already said that the ordination of women is not even open for discussion, in spite of the severe shortage of priests, resulting in closing down parishes. There are many cases in which a priest serves more than one parish.
There is an American movement called Roman Catholic Womenpriests, presenting itself as a renewal movement within the Church that began in Germany with the ordination of seven women in 2002.
Two of them were ordained bishops in 2003, and a third bishop woman was ordained in 2005.
In 2008, Dana Raynolds became the first American Roman Catholic Bishop, and claims to be part of a renewal of the ministry of the church.
Roman Catholic Womenpriests
The movement claims to be in apostolic succession and to carry the work of ordaining women by the Roman Catholic Church, though the official teaching of the Church, both in Western Christianity and the Eastern Orthodoxy, while listing the cases of ordaining women to non-liturgical works within the early church as deaconesses, has absolutely no indication of ordaining women to priesthood, let alone to bishop.
In a Q&A section of their website, the Roman Catholic Womenpriests explain why it is false to assume that women were never ordained by the church.
They use the accurate accounts of ordaining women as deaconesses to encompass all three priestly ranks. Thus, they maintain that women were ordained as deaconesses in order to serve sacramental tasks, which is hardly the case considering that deacons don’t have a strictly sacramental function not even today.
They are some sort of assistants to priests and bishops, without the power to confect the Eucharist, perform the other sacraments, preside over Eucharistic reunions or preach the word without the blessing of the priests or bishops.
More than that, the historical records say that diaconesses were implicated in catechizing newly converted people, in helping administering the onction to women (since it was inappropriate for a man to touch the body of an adult woman who was baptized), and other activities that are not linked to the altar.
Roman Catholic Womenpriests
This can be construed as a misinterpretation of such “evidence,” since if it were true, it would have created a devastating theological storm in the Eastern Orthodoxy, which, among the things it criticizes the Western Church for, does not list womenpriesthood.
If there had been any womenpriesthood in the West until the 9th century, when the church was undivided, it would have been noted by the Eastern Orthodoxy. Such a serious business would never have been concealed by the Fathers of the Church. Or, the Eastern Orthodox Church has no record of womenpriests, both in West or East.
Nor would have escaped the sharp criticism of the pre-reformers of the Western Church, who keep absolute silence on the matter.
History records that the only woman who was ever a pope, Pope Joan, was killed by the people of Rome allegedly in the days of the Borgia family, when they saw her gender (and that she was already pregnant). Whether we believe the story to be true, or we consider it a simple fable, the mood of the people speaks for itself about the alleged practice of the first millenium in Christendom.
Even if one assumes that the evidence shows that the West was ordaining women during the first millenium, such practice would have been illegitimate and with no possible claim to apostolic succession, since the church, which during the first millenium was one, did not share in all parts of it this practice. Its lack in the Eastern Orthodoxy makes it an idiosyncracy of Western regions, that can be explained and understood at most the same way as the Roman Catholic Womenpriest movement itself.
Under no circumstance could it be construed as a tradition of the church one, given that Christian tradition is defined as “that which was believed by all, everywhere, in all times,” and the definition was set by a Westerner from the first millenium, Vincentius of Lerin.
Another argument in favor of womenpriesthood presented on the site is that affirming that women cannot image Christ is a lie. While it is true that women can image Christ in as much as anyone else who was created in his likeness and image, they were not called to “image” him publicly through priesthood neither by Christ or by the apostles, first bishops or anyone else until the age of the feminist movement. Priesthood is not about “imaging” Christ or keeping his place while he is gone, but about serving him as he commanded us to. And he did not command us to ordain women, nor did he do it himself.
In fact, before the age of feminism there was no talk in the Christian society about the ordination of women.
The Roman Catholic Womenpriests consider that they were ordained by bishops who stand in apostolic succession, thereby they stand themselves in such succession.
But, according to church teachings of the Fathers, a bishop that commits an heretic act or something that is completely strange to the orthodoxy of the church stands no longer in apostolic succession.
Consequently, though the men who placed their hands on the women who became priests could have been ackowledged as bishops of Rome, they were no longer in apostolic succession as soon as they consented to go against the teaching or the tradition of the church they were supposed to uphold. Thus, by the time they have ordained the womenpriests they were no longer in the position to ensure apostolic succession nor legitimacy, as it is seen from the official position of the church in Vatican.
The questionable nature of this ordination is clearly highlighted by the mention on the website that “There have been ‘catacomb ordinations.’ However, due to the nature of these ordinations, the names of the ordinands must be kept private.” Why? What is the nature of the ordination? Why would the ordinands be kept secret? Inquisition has been dead for long, and Christians live in a free world now.
The movement’s website has a part that is called Principles, and a subtitle that resembles the firsts words of the ancient creeds of the early church: “We believe…”.
One would expect to see here the recitation of the Nicene creed, as it was adopted by the First Council of the Church in 325, and then sanctioned and completed by the Second one, in 381.
The Credo of the Roman Catholic Womenpriests goes like this: “We believe: 1. Men and women were created equal by God and can therefore equally represent Christ; 2. Jesus gave an example of inclusiveness and respect of persons that led, in the early church to the ordaining women and men from all states of life as deacons, priests and bishops” and goes on like this for 6 more chapters.
It doesn’t take to be much of a theologian to see that this movement has no connection actually to what the Church in Rome teaches on this matter, especially since Vatican has specifically maintained it did not recognize the ordination of women.
American reverend Roy Bourgeois, the priest whom those who signed the letter are trying to protect, received a letter from Vatican by which he was threatened with excommunication unless he recanted. He wrote back, saying that he was only following his conscious, and never received any other letter from Vatican until now that the order he belongs to was ordered to give him the first of two “canonical warnings” that will lead to his excommunication, unless he complies to them.
Pope John Paul II has issued an apostolic letter in 1994, called Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, by which he said that the church had no authority to ordain women, because Jesus’s apostles were all men and that it was the tradition of the church to ordain men all along.
The movements that advocate women within the Roman Catholic Church claim that the fact that the Virgin Mary is revered above all creatures in the church shows that the women have no less dignity than the men in church.
While no one ever has claimed within the Church, both in the West and the East, that women had less dignity, quite the other way around, women never had more dignity recognized than within the Christian society, the argument related to the Mother of God works in fact in favor of the traditional view of the church, since she who is revered above all creature, and will stand at the right hand of her son in the kingdom of heaven was no apostle, no bishop, no priest, and had no sacramental function, other than to be the “church” that carried Jesus to the world, the motherhood, which is a dignity bestowed on all women in the world.
If one adds to that the words of the saint Paul to the bishops and priests in the First Epistle to Timothy, in which he said each one of them must be, among others, “the husband of one women,” the question of accepting women’s ordination by both the Roman Catholic Church or Eastern Orthodox Churches is unlikely to ever be “open for debate.”
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