Church Allowed Women Priests for 1200 Years
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Church allowed female priests in first millennia
Jennifer Green, Canwest News Service
Published: Monday, January 21, 2008
The Catholic church ordained women for the first 1,200 years of Christianity, says a new book by a U.S. scholar.
Then, in a struggle for political power in the 12th and 13th centuries, it vilified females, banned married clergy and rewrote its own history to excise clerical women.
Women were made deaconesses (equivalent to deacons) episcopae (bishops), and presbyterae (priests), and they preached, heard confessions, performed baptisms and even blessed the bread and wine for communion, says Gary Macy, a theology professor at Santa Clara University in California.
“The memory of ordained women has been nearly erased and, where it survived, it was dismissed as illusion or worse, delusion,” he says in The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West, published in November by Oxford University Press.
“This is a history that has been deliberately forgotten.”
During the first millennium, the church operated like a feudal or family business. Husband and wife might be clergy together, as modern-day televangelists now appear in matrimonial teams.
The couple could pass church property to their children and give relatives high positions. In 853, one bishop appointed his sister to guard the family property from future bishops who might not be worthy.
By the end of the first millennia, the political power of princes and the power of land-owning ecclesiastic families blurred considerably. Nepotism, says Macy, “was really out of control.”
Bishops who followed the monastic tradition were pushing for reform. “It wasn’t just the money,” says Macy. They believed clergy should separate themselves from the world at large, the better to act as a moral guide.
If priests could not marry, they would have no heirs, effectively taking them out of the feudal system. Some scholars have also argued it centralized church power against lay leaders.
To promote the campaign against marriage, women were portrayed as moral monsters.
At the same time, the church tightened — and heightened — its definition of “ordination.” Now it signified a permanent change in spiritual status, making an ordained minister the only person able to consecrate the body and blood in the Eucharist.
Macy believes women should be ordained to the Catholic priesthood, and acknowledges this view has coloured his book.
For now, he plans to go back to his usual area, studying the medieval history of the Eucharist. In the meantime, he hopes his book sparks a discussion on female priests today.
9 Responses to “Church Allowed Women Priests for 1200 Years”
January 24, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Wow! Maybe since this is a part of our history in the Church, there is hope for the future of women again in our Church. Isn’t it interesting how politics and power can wipe out something that could be so good? It gives me a little hope for the future of women in the Catholic Church……
January 24, 2008 at 9:13 pm
What is freely affirmed is freely denied. Assent is problematic until specific and authentic sources are cited to support the aforesaid hypotheses. Many gnostic and dissident sects, that mimicked Christian practices, flourished in the early centuries of the Christian era and engaged in rituals not recognized by “Believers of the Way.” It is unfortunate that sexual politics has now been introduced into socio/historic/religious research, that only serves to emblazon emotions, “muddy the waters,” and confuse the untutored.
January 24, 2008 at 10:12 pm
“Says Gary Macy.” Gee, let’s see, if this was so prevalent wouldn’t all of this have come out a lot earlier — and from several other more distinguished scholars at equally more distinguished universities. This reminds me of those entertainment shows on the History Channel. You know, the ones where there is only one guy who claims he knows the real truth about the pyramids at Giza, or is the only one who knows the true route the Hebrews took through the SInai out of Egypt. Gimme a break. These one-song “scholars” are a dime a dozen these days. Of course, readers of this blog eagerly and uncritically eat up anything that they sounds good to them. Rubbish.
January 24, 2008 at 11:12 pm
It could be of much help if the above statements were documented
January 25, 2008 at 12:13 am
I couldn’t have said better, Cato. Thanks for commenting.
January 25, 2008 at 6:08 am
For those who say,”Why wasn’t this documented before the present time?” I have heard all of that before when I was in Catholic High School. If I remember correctly it was a response to the question, Why celibacy for priests? It stuck in my head all these many years because at the time just like the present one has to admit that everything revolves around money in this case inheritance and power. As for women, domination by men seems to boost their ego and they are frantic to keep women from intruding in their perceived territory. Such attitudes do not seem “Christlike” to me. M.T. Hill
February 4, 2008 at 11:17 pm
In response to those who suggest my research was not well documented, I can only say that I provide full references to both the medieval texts and to modern scholars in my book. The book builds on the research of such famous scholars as Yves Congar, Pierre-Marie Gy, Christopher Brooke, and Jean Leclerq. So actually the material has come out earlier and by more famous scholars than I am. Not to make too radical a suggestion, but I suppose there is always the possibility of actually reading the book before dismissing it. I can understand why you wouldn’t want to buy it, but you can always borrow it from the library.
February 18, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Gary,
The fact that people are anxious to criticize your conclusions as unproven when they haven’t raised a finger to learn what you have written is proof that they aren’t interested in the truth. Don’t bother them with facts, their “minds” are made up!
As for Bill’s argument that “if this was so prevalent wouldn’t all of this have come out a lot earlier — and from several other more distinguished scholars at equally more distinguished universities?” there’s no connection between historical fact and current “conventional wisdom”. Look at how skeptical Catholics were about priestly pedophilia when rumors about it first emerged. And check out my http://JesusWouldBeFurious.Org/RCscandal to see how justified the Catholic scholar John Cornwell was in nicknaming Pius XII “Hitler’s Pope” because the Roman Catholic Church WAS “Hitler’s Church”.
March 10, 2008 at 12:26 pm
So does this mean that the Eastern Orthodox (who allow their clergy to be married and separated from Rome in 1054) also covered up the history of female ordination?
And if the church for whatever reason began to hate women why have women saints? Especially Magdalene and Photini who are proclaimed by the Early Fathers and the Eastern Orthodox to be equal to the apostles but never ordained? If women we hated then wouldn’t these women have been stuck from the history as well?