Posted on 01/18/2018 9:26:34 AM PST by Carpe Cerevisi
WASHINGTON — Fifty-seven Orthodox Christian clergymen and lay leaders, including the heads of two leading Orthodox seminaries in the U.S., have issued a public statement calling on church leaders to defend Orthodox teaching on the creation and calling of man as male and female by opposing the appointment of deaconesses in the Orthodox Church.
The statement comes in response to a public statement issued in October by nine Orthodox liturgical scholars in the U.S. and Greece, expressing support for the Patriarchate of Alexandria’s November 2016 decision to “restore” the ancient order of deaconesses and its February 2017 appointment of deaconesses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The Roman Catholic Church has also taken the first step toward the appointment of deaconesses with Pope Francis’s 2016 establishment of a commission to study the issue. That commission is headed by Archbishop Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer, Secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Half of the commission’s members are women. One of them, Phyllis Zagano, professor of religion at Hofstra University, is a well-known advocate of deaconesses.
Several Protestant churches, including Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians, began appointing women as deaconesses in the nineteenth century. Most have since ordained women to all higher orders such as priest and bishop.
The statement by the Orthodox opponents of deaconesses takes issue with the liturgists’ representation of the place of deaconesses in Orthodox tradition and raises serious doctrinal issues relating to the appointment of deaconesses. It also questions whether Alexandria’s appointment of deaconess in the Congo revived an ancient order or instituted a new order with an old name.
(Excerpt) Read more at aoiusa.org ...
“I trust I have made myself sufficiently obscure?
Maybe somebody with a better-organized mind can express this more clearly.”
—
Thanks, yes there are exceptions/exemptions, I knew that, for example, a married Anglican priest can become a Catholic priest.
Excuse my late reply.
‘Tis a bit convoluted at times.
Think this through with me
/ Let me know your mind
Oh - and give my best to Uncle John.
:^)
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