Can women be ordained to the priesthood? This is a question which provokes much debate in our modern world, but it is one to which the Church has always answered "No." The basis for the Church’s teaching on ordination is found in the New Testament as well as in the writings of the Church Fathers.
While women could publicly pray and prophesy in church (1 Cor. 11:1–16), they could not teach or have authority over a man (1 Tim. 2:11–14), since these were two essential functions of the clergy. Nor could women publicly question or challenge the teaching of the clergy (1 Cor. 14:34–38).
The following quotations from the Church Fathers indicate that women do play an active role in the Church and that in the age of the Fathers there were orders of virgins, widows, and deaconesses, but that these women were not ordained.
The Fathers rejected women's ordination, not because it was incompatible with Christian culture, but because it was incompatible with Christian faith. Thus, together with biblical declarations, the teaching of the Fathers on this issue formed the tradition of the Church that taught that priestly ordination was reserved to men. Throughout medieval times and even up until the present day, this teaching has not changed.
Further, in 1994 Pope John Paul II formally declared that the Church does not have the power to ordain women. He stated, "Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the magisterium in its more recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless considered still open to debate, or the Church’s judgment that women are not to be admitted to ordination is considered to have a merely disciplinary force. Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Luke 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful" (
Ordinatio Sacerdotalis 4).
And in 1995 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in conjunction with the pope, ruled that this teaching "requires definitive assent, since, founded on the written Word of God, and from the beginning constantly preserved and applied in the tradition of the Church, it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal magisterium (cf. Second Vatican Council,
Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium 25:2)" (Response of Oct. 25, 1995).
The following quotations from the Fathers constitute a part of the tradition on which this infallible teaching rests.
Women and the Priesthood
Can women be ordained to the priesthood?
- - - - -
No. And I do not get why these radical feminists are so insistent. If they want to be priestesses, leave the Holy Mother Church and become Episcopalian.
This is not about Christ, this is about them and its disgusting. I would like to see more excommunications regarding this.
If it was even possible, women clergy in the Church would be called priestesses. “Woman priests” is like saying “man priestesses”, it is just stupid.
The wiccans have no problem using the word “priestess”, unlike these fem loons who can’t even bring themselves to use the correct term for what they imagine themselves to be.
Freegards, thanks for all the pings