The Real Tradition of Women as Church Leaders
By Sandra Dufield, Freelance Writer
Bridgeville, PA

     In claiming church tradition doesn’t allow women to be ordained priests, Vatican and Catholic officials would do well to consider the history of their tradition.

     According to Dorothy Irvin, a Catholic theologian and archaeologist, the traditional Christian church had women priests and the archaeological evidence of this is preserved for us to see today.

     In the Church of St. Praxedis in Rome there’s a mosaic depicting four women leaders. One woman, Theodora (ca. 820 A.D.), has the title Episcopa above her head, which means a bishop who is a woman.

     In a cathedral at Annaba, in what is now Algeria, is a mosaic covering the tomb of a woman. Along with her name, Guilia Runa, is her title presbiterissa, which means female priest. The same title is on women’s tombs in Rome. Two read, “Veronica presbitera daughter of Josetis” and “Faustina presbitera.”

     Additionally, a fourth-century fresco in Rome’s Catacomb of Priscilla shows a woman being ordained. She’s wearing an alb under her chasuble, which is first worn at ordination. Only priests and higher church leaders could wear it. Next to her, with his right hand on her shoulder, is a bishop, identified by his chair and his pallium, also worn during ordination.

     Although tradition is a key argument used to oppose the ordination of women, another argument cites the fact the twelve disciples were all male. It contends if Christ wanted women to be church leaders, some of “The Twelve” surely would have been women.

     While initially convincing, the rationalization crumbles when another pivotal distinction of the day is considered: ethnicity. The disciples were also all Jewish. Does this mean when we choose church leaders today, only those with primary Jewish ancestry can be considered as candidates?

     Every argument the Vatican and other denominational officials give to block women’s ordination can be biblically and theologically challenged. Saying “no” to women priests and pastors is nothing more than the “good old boy” system at work in a sacred institution, and the remnant of the survival of sub-Christian thought that leached into the early church, influencing the way men and women were perceived.

     Elements of gnostic and ancient pagan thought saw women as flawed, problematic, and more susceptible to malfeasance than men. The early church failed to adequately challenge and eradicate these permeating cultural distortions—in time scripture was interpreted through the contaminated lens of the ontological inferiority of all women.

     This attitude is reflected in the statements of prominent early church leaders such as Thomas Aquinas—“Woman is defective and misbegotten;” Gratian—“Woman is not made in God’s image;” and even St. Augustine, who wrote, “What is the difference whither it is in a wife or a mother; it is still Eve the temptress that we must be aware of in any woman. . . . I fail to see what use women can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children.”

     While the inferiority argument is considered heretical in the church today, the unbiblical prejudicial constructs it upheld still exist. They have been replaced and repackaged with expressions like “equal in essence, but unequal in function” and “different roles.” The dismissal and diminishment of women has a modern home in the modern church.

     Very early church tradition had women serving in all areas of ministry. The restriction of women in the church did not derive from tradition, but from the gradual importation of sub-Christian thought from outside the church, infused into the church.

     Until the Vatican and other denominational leaders acknowledge women’s call to full discipleship and reinstitute the tradition of women’s ordination, they will continue to perpetuate constructs of the heretical thought that diminishes and dismisses half the Christian community based on an innate genetic distinction: femaleness.

Updated Friday, November 24, 2006