John O'Brien

Women’s Ordination in the Catholic Church

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Women's Ordination in the Catholic Church argues that women can be validly ordained to ministerial office. O'Brien shows that claims by Roman dicasteries for an unbroken chain of authoritative tradition on the non-ordainability of women--a novel rather than traditional argument--are not historically supported. In the primitive Church, with the offices of deacon, presbyter, and bishop in process of development, women exercised ministries later understood as pertaining to those offices. The sub-apostolic period downplayed women's ministry for reasons of cultural adaptation, not because it was thought that fidelity to Christ required it. Furthermore, extensive epigraphical evidence, from a wide geographical area, references women deacons and presbyters during the first millennium. Restrictive developments in the concept of ordination from the twelfth century onwards do not negate how, before that, women were validly ordained according to contemporary ecclesial understanding. Repeated canonical prohibitions on ordaining women show both that women were being ordained and how those bans were very selectively implemented. These canons were a cultural practice in search of a theology, and the subsequent theological justifications for restricting ordination to men appealed to supposed female inferiority against the background of priesthood as eminence rather than service. O'Brien shows that the assertion of women's non-ordainability is a matter of canon law rather than doctrine. As such, that law can be reformed.
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317 printed pages
Original publication
2020
Publication year
2020
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Quotes

  • Francisco Samourhas quoted3 years ago
    279
    Origen develops the point: “How great the wisdom of this woman that she was even deemed worthy of the apostle’s title.”
  • Francisco Samourhas quoted3 years ago
    The early church fathers universally understand Junia to be a woman. Joseph Fitzmyer lists sixteen Greek and Latin Christian writers of or around the first millennium who unambiguously accepted that Junia was a woman.
  • Francisco Samourhas quoted3 years ago
    There is no direct evidence that “they have been with us the whole time” (Acts 1:21), but they must come close to it. The flow of the verses before and after this one in Romans 16, suggests they were husband and wife, but as we have seen in considering 1 Corinthians 9:5, Junia was not by that fact any less a missionary or any less an apostle. She too is to be numbered “among the apostles” (en tois apostolois).

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