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Women's Ordination and Infallible Teaching, An Inquiry
Was The Teaching Infallible?
[The Third Essay On the Women Ordination Ban]

3) Patristic interventions: First off, no individual Church Father should be read as infallible--some of them (e.g. Origen and Tertullian) were guilty of heresy at times and later condemned as such. Secondly, while respectful attention must always be paid to patristic writings, they are not the same thing as the ordinary magisterium. It is the College of Bishops as a whole in union with the pope that possesses the ordinary magisterium, not this or that Church Father.

 Now a number of Church Fathers did condemn not only the idea of women priests, but also women performing any liturgical function including even handling altar cloths and vessels. In 494 Pope Gelasius said this: "Contempt for divine truths has reached such a level that even women, it is reported, serve at holy altars." What is meant here is not priesthood but the functions of altar servers and what would now be lectors and eucharistic ministers. Obviously, this was not an irreformable judgment! Yet note that Gelasius characterizes what are now legitimate forms of participation by women in the liturgy as "contempt for divine truths". So even where a pope appeals to divine revelation to condemn some idea, it is not generally the case that he is free from error. Neither Pope Gelasius nor Pope John Paul II were speaking infallibly. If Gelasius was mistaken--and he clearly was--then it is possible that John Paul II is also.

 Some further examples of clearly reformable teachings: In the 4th century the Council of Laodicea (in the East) forbade women from even entering the sanctuary; and in the Middle Ages several bishops complained that "in some provinces, contrary to divine law and canonical directive, women enter into the sanctuary, handle consecrated vessels without fear, pass clerical vestments to the priests, and--something even more monstrous, improper and unseemly than all that--distribute the Body and Blood of our Lord to the people and other inherently indecent things... we have attempted to prevent it so that such liberties do not continue to be taken....It is most astonishing that this practice, which is forbidden in the Christian religion, could have crept in from somewhere...undoubtedly, it took hold through the carelessness and negligence of some bishops." Anybody still claim that these things are inherently indecent and contrary to divine law? Obviously, the general bans on women's active participation in the liturgy were not infallibly taught. The fact is that misogyny was rife in the Church for a long, long time along with extremely dubious anthropological assumptions. Another example is from Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis (4th century): "For the female sex is easily misled, weak, and without much sense", "Every heresy is a bad woman", etc.

 Epiphanius condemned the Collyridian women who were celebrating a blasphemous Mariolatrous "eucharist". This was typical of patristic condemnations of women acting as priests--the condemnations were directed at women who were engaged in various heretical sects and performing rites which were not sanctioned by the then current *discipline and law* of the Church. Various Gnostic, Montanist, and Valentinian liturgical practices involving women were condemned in this way. But it is important to note that with few exceptions, the denunciations of women playing priestly roles in these heretical sects were based on the fact that they were acting in a way that was in violation of established Church law and discipline. Ecclesiastical law and discipline, as we know, and as can be gathered from the quotes above, are not as such irreformable and do not in general pertain to the deposit of faith or divine  revelation. Even law concerning what is required for sacramental validity can change, a good example being the irreconcilable teachings of the Council of Florence and of Pius XII (Sacramentum ordinis) on the requirements for valid  form and matter in the sacrament of orders!

 I mentioned a "few exceptions" where the basis of a Patristic denunciation was not simply contemporary legal and liturgical norms. In a few cases, and Epiphanius is one of them, an appeal is made to the example of Jesus. But note: in a previous post, I observed that the import of the example of Jesus is far from obvious. It should be noted too that Epiphanius claims that Jesus did not allow women  to baptize, whereas of course there is no absolute prohibition on women baptizing even now in canon law. If Epiphanius thought that the example of Jesus in this regard was absolutely normative for the Church, then he was certainly  in error, since women can in certain circumstances baptize. This error--a false inference from the practice of Jesus, allied with his obviously misogynistic anthropology, makes Epiphanius, in short, not a safe source. He is cited by Augustine and by John Damascene but again, the problem is the fact that they were talking about the liturgical practices of heretical sects. They give no new reason for thinking that orthodox women couldn't be ordained in principle, though of course they presuppose the contemporary canonical ban.

 In the West, Ambrosiaster's commentaries on Paul were influential. Here again the text cited is 1 Cor:14:34-35 about women keeping silent in church. But see my previous remarks on the Pauline texts for why this can hardly be construed as normatively definitive (to say nothing about the fact that it hardly concurs with current canon law which plainly allows women to  speak in church). Ambrosiaster also denounces the practice of ordaining deaconesses. What he didn't know was that in parts of the Eastern Church deaconesses were already ordained for service and were numbered among the clergy or "ordo". (Note two things here: canon law does not restrict the notion of being a cleric to people who have received sacramental orders; and I am not claiming that deaconesses received the sacramental diaconate, merely  that there existed a rite of ordaining them for service in the Church in parts of the East). Ambrosiaster's commentaries are also packed full of the most shocking misogynistic and erroneous assumptions about women. Again, not a  particularly good source. Unfortunately a good deal of this found its way into the writings of the Medieval canonists and theologians. St Thomas Aquinas's reasons for holding that women cannot be ordained are so embarrassingly bad  that I will spare you the details. Suffice to say that he bases his case on the idea that "With respect to particular nature, woman is something defective and contingent..." ST q 92 a 1 ad 1, and "Now, as an eminence of position cannot be signified in the female sex, since the state of subjection is inherent in that sex, it cannot, therefore, receive the sacrament of ordination" ST Suppl q 39 a 1.

 So what do we have--denunciations of heretical sects engaging in liturgical rites at variance with current ecclesiastical law, faulty interpretations of the example of Jesus (e.g. women *can* baptize), facile repetitions of the Pauline injunctions on women not to  teach and to be silent, rampant misogyny, and untenable anthropological assumptions. All of this is incorporated for centuries into canon law, passively received by the great majority of bishops who simply take it for granted,  and--the key point--who make no further effort as a moral whole to teach that the canonical ban on women priests derives from a doctrine which is to be definitively held as belonging to the deposit of faith. But it is this kind of teaching act which is required by Lumen gentium for anything to qualify as infallible teaching of the ordinary magisterium.

 This brings me to my next topic, the distinction between what is of faith, and what belongs only to custom, law, and discipline:

 Here we should repeat what I have already pointed out above. The patristic interventions on women priests occur in a context in which within the Catholic Church of the time,  contemporary disciplinary and canonical norms dictated that women cannot be ordained. Now compare this to the period of the Reformation. Catholic theologians and bishops condemned the Reformers for such practices as allowing priests to marry, use of the vernacular in the liturgy, distribution of Holy Communion under both species, free access to Scripture for the laity, etc. Of course these were not the only things the Reformers were condemned for--they also denied some of the sacraments, held erroneous doctrines of grace, rejected the episcopacy and papacy, and other things of that sort. In other words, some of the condemnations were based on law and discipline, some were based on considerations of divine revelation. Only in recent years has the Church accepted some of the Reformers' practices as its own, and in the case of others such as dispensing with compulsory clerical celibacy, it could do so in future. So it is important to realize that when we find various patristic sources condemning women priests, we must not automatically assume that in every case this condemnation is based on divine revelation. In a few cases, (e.g Epiphanius) appeal is made to Scripture, but often no such appeal is made, and so it is not clear whether the condemnation is based on grounds of law and discipline, or on grounds of faith. But we cannot rely on the mere existence of canonical norms as conclusive evidence of an irreformable doctrinal basis, because there are too many cases where a canonical norm has been changed. We must, in other words, have grounds which are independent of the canonical norms to ascertain which norms are based on infallible, unchangeable doctrine.

 The early bishops also often did not communicate much with each other and didn't know that different liturgical practices existed in different localities. But what is required for infallibility in the ordinary magisterium? Moral unanimity of teaching among the College of Bishops in union with the pope by which they concur on a judgment of faith to be held conclusively as the authentic teaching of the Church founded in the deposit of faith. The patristic and later evidence gives us nothing of the sort. Instead, a few highly fallible and in some cases plain erroneous statements  are made by bishops who are not reliable guides in any case on what women can and cannot do in principle--e.g. baptize, handle altar vessels, enter the sanctuary. Where we do have uniformity it is in the areas of untenable  anthropology, and a reactive defense of existing discipline, custom and law. This is not unanimous teaching about what is definitively to be held regarding the deposit of faith.

  Finally, and I do mean finally, what have the official documents of the Church said about the criteria for *establishing* that some teaching has been infallibly promulgated by the ordinary magisterium? I know of 3 such statements:

 1) Canon 749 of the Code of Canon Law says that no doctrine is to be understood as having been infallibly defined unless this fact is clearly established. This is far from being a simple matter. For example, the Council of Florence in 1442 probably spoke for all the bishops at the time when it declared that all pagans and Jews would be damned if they did not convert to Catholicism before they died. This is not the doctrine of the Catholic Church nowadays, is it? Later development clarified this to mean something like, assuming their failure to convert was due to mortal sin--which is not normally a safe assumption to make. But would this have been thought about explicitly by the bishops at the Council of Florence in 1442? Unlikely then, or for a long time before or after 1442. I.e. they did not address the question in its modern framework. Hence a simple repetition of that doctrine could hardly be said to have been infallibly taught--and this has only been clearly established in relatively modern times. A long-standing tradition per se is not therefore proof that a doctrine has been infallibly taught.

 2) Consulting with all the bishops to see if they regard a doctrine as having been infallibly taught--this Pope John Paul indicated was a suitable means of establishing a doctrine as being infallibly taught in a passage of Evangelium vitae (EV 62). The context was the teaching prohibiting abortion.

 3) Pius IX suggested another criterion--the common response of the faithful to the magisterium's teaching (Tuas libenter 1863), a suggestion which finds an echo in Canon 750 of the Code of Canon Law. This canon states that when a teaching has been infallibly proposed, this is "manifested by the common adherence of Christ's faithful".

 Do we have common adherence of Christ's faithful to the ban on women priests? Has the College of Bishops as a whole been consulted? Has the ban been clearly established as being infallible? No. No. No. None of these  official criteria of infallibility mark the ban on women priests. In conjunction with all my previous reasoning on this issue, I conclude that it is very doubtful that the doctrine stating that women intrinsically and in virtue of divine revelation cannot receive the sacrament of orders is a doctrine that has been infallibly taught. Of course, the doctrine might still be true--I don't know. But I see no reason in orthodox Catholic theology that requires me to believe that it has been infallibly taught and so commands the assent of faith.

 Peter Burns, SJ
-End of Part 3 of 3-

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