“Women Become the Scapegoat” - Catholic Women Priests Part 3 by Diana Milesko

            The meanings of words change over time. For example, the meaning of awful went from ‘amazing’, to ‘terrible’; decimate, from ‘reduce by one-tenth,’ to ‘destroy’; and, cell from ‘a small unit’ to ‘mobile phone’.

            So too has the word, “ordination” changed over centuries. Jesus never ordained anyone. In the early Church, “ordination” meant ‘to confer a role in a community.’ Records exist of ‘ordinations’ of doorkeepers, people committed to the care of books, sacristans, abbesses, etc. While women and men served at the altar as priests and deacons, they were not necessarily ‘ordained’ to do so.

            Not until the 12th century did ‘ordination’ acquire it’s present meaning of ‘bestowing authority.’ Thus, to talk about early Church ‘ordination’ as we think of it today, is to impose a definition developed in the 12th century onto an earlier period. [Gary Macy, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination.]

            So what, really, was going on in the Church all those hundreds of years?

            The 9th to 14th centuries were a time of great upheaval, and women became a scapegoat for Church troubles. Papal wars with the Italian States created threats to papal authority as the Church became bolder in its claims for power. Other events that expanded the Church’s cruel and misogynistic practices include:

---The Church had become immensely corrupt. Parish priests were illiterate and immoral; high ranking clergy were appointed by and served, powerful lords

---Married priests gave away Church land as inheritances. To end this practice, clerical celibacy was demanded; to ensure celibacy, women were villified  

---In its attempt at reform, the Church worked to remove women from service at the altar

---Crusades put the Church in contact with Aristotle’s faulty reasoning about women

---The Church became centralized and asserted Papal supremacy

---Witches (benevolent healers,) once denied as ‘real’ by the Church, were used to defame women. The Church depicted witches as the Devil’s consorts

---Pope John XXII authorized the Inquisition to prosecute witchcraft

---Church infighting created two popes who ruled simultaneously: Urban in Rome; Clement at Avignon

---Pope Innocent VIII authorized inquisitors to persecute witches. Their manual was published and reprinted for 200 years.

            Tracts against women reflected the tortured souls of men who mendaciously claimed women had sex with Satan and lustfully tried to corrupt men. Through a deliberate, methodical effort, Church hierarchy erased the memory of women priests.

            Yet archaeological evidence in Rome, Italy and Africa shows women were ordained as deacons, priests and bishops. 

             “Women as well as men functioned as prophets and priests.  Among ancient mosaics paintings, statuary, dedicatory inscriptions and funerary epitaphs, scholars have found evidence for women’s leadership.  In the writings of the New Testament, letters, sermons and the theological treatises of the early Church, women’s leadership is well attested.  Where women leaders played prominent roles, male authors muted their contributions by the way they wrote their stories. [Karen Jo Torjesen. When Women Were Priests.]          

            For example, the Virgin Mary prophesied in “The Magnificat” (Luke 1:47-55) “He has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent empty away.” This resounds across centuries as a prophecy, yet Luke does not call the Virgin Mary a prophet.      

            Inscriptional, canonical, literary and epigraphical evidence validate the fact that there were clearly female deacons and priests in the early Church. Well into the 12th century, women were considered as fully ordained as male clergy. [Gary Macy, The Hidden History of Women Priests.] Even condemnations of women priests by the Church (as in the Synod of Nimes, or Letter of Gelasius,) are ironically, testament to women priests. [Kevin Madigan and Carolyn Osiek, Ordained Women in the Early Church.] They show women priests did exist and they were hated by the institutional Church. Thus the claim that women have never functioned as priests in the Church is simply not true.