"Pope Francis Comments on Women Suggest Reason for Optimism"

http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2013/aug/04/bonnie-erbe-pope-francis-remarks-about-women-for/

...“It is not enough to have altar girls, women readers or women as the president of Caritas” charities, Francis said. “Women in the church are more important than bishops and priests,” just as “Mary is more important than the apostles.”New scholarship during the past two decades has turned on its head church conceptions about proper roles for women in the hierarchy. Scholars are discovering early Christian women had much more power in the church, as apostles and as leaders of home churches — the only type there were under Roman rule, which banned Christianity."Karen King is one such scholar. She is a professor of New Testament studies and the history of ancient Christianity at Harvard Divinity School.
‘’Women held offices and played significant roles in group worship,” King writes. “Paul, for example, greets a deacon named Phoebe (Romans 16:1) and assumes that women are praying and prophesying during worship (I Corinthians 11). As prophets, women’s roles would have included not only ecstatic public speech, but preaching, teaching, leading prayer, and perhaps even performing the Eucharist meal. ... Women’s prominence did not, however, go unchallenged. Every variety of ancient Christianity that advocated the legitimacy of women’s leadership was eventually declared heretical, and evidence of women’s early leadership roles was erased or suppressed.”
To this day, women’s early leadership roles are challenged and denigrated by many members of the church hierarchy.
Do I hope or believe Pope Francis will promote women to positions of real authority? Something tells me even he will not do that. But the fact he’s talking about it at all is hugely significant."
Contact columnist Bonnie Erbe of Scripps Howard News Service at bonnie.scrippshoward@gmail.com.
Bridget Mary Meehan's Response:
I agree that it is significant that women were apostles and leaders in the early church and presided over the Eucharistic meal in house churches. Today that role is reserved for the priest. Now if we open up sacraments to the entire community as celebrants and both women and men are called forth by the community to preside, then we are back to the early church model. This is what Roman Catholic Women Priests Movement is doing in many grassroots communities, but I wonder if it is where Pope Francis wants to go! Bridget Mary Meehan, ARCWP, www.arcwp.org