This is a new, enlarged edition of a groundbreaking book that gathered historical evidence from ancient liturgies, literature, art and inscriptions on graves to show that the practice of ordaining women as deacons in the first ten centuries of the Church was normative. Doing so, the women inhabit and re-create the central tensions in Catholicism today.Ī recent theological statement from the Roman Catholic Church has increased hopes that while women may not be ordained as priests, their ordination as deacons may soon become reality. Womanpriest reveals RCWP to be a discrete religious movement in a distinct religious moment, with a small group of tenacious women defying the Catholic patriarchy, taking on the priestly role, and demanding reconsideration of Roman Catholic tradition. In order to understand how womenpriests navigate tradition and transgression, this study situates RCWP within post–Vatican II Catholicism, apostolic succession, sacraments, ministerial action, and questions of embodiment. As an ethnography, Womanpriest analyzes the womenpriests’ actions and lived theologies in order to explore ongoing tensions in Roman Catholicism around gender and sexuality, priestly authority, and religious change. Womanpriest is the first academic study of the RCWP movement. While some Catholics and even non-Catholics today are asking if priests are necessary, especially given the ongoing sex-abuse scandal, The Roman Catholic Womanpriests (RCWP) looks to reframe and reform Roman Catholic priesthood, starting with ordained women. This book is openly available in digital formats thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. O’Brien shows that the assertion of women’s non-ordainability is a matter of canon law rather than doctrine. These canons were a cultural practice in search of a theology, and the subsequent theological justifications for restricting ordination to men appealed to supposed female inferiority against the background of priesthood as eminence rather than service. Repeated canonical prohibitions on ordaining women show both that women were being ordained and how those bans were very selectively implemented. Restrictive developments in the concept of ordination from the twelfth century onwards do not negate how, before that, women were validly ordained according to contemporary ecclesial understanding. Furthermore, extensive epigraphical evidence, from a wide geographical area, references women deacons and presbyters during the first millennium. The sub-apostolic period downplayed women’s ministry for reasons of cultural adaptation, not because it was thought that fidelity to Christ required it. In the primitive Church, with the offices of deacon, presbyter, and bishop in process of development, women exercised ministries later understood as pertaining to those offices. O’Brien shows that claims by Roman dicasteries for an unbroken chain of authoritative tradition on the non-ordainability of women-a novel rather than traditional argument-are not historically supported. Women’s Ordination in the Catholic Church argues that women can be validly ordained to ministerial office.
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