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At 10:33 AM 12/23/99 -0600, Dennis Martin wrote: >A very good question. The argument is based on the principle that sex >is far more essential than the color of hair or eyes. This is based >on the principle that human beings were created by God in two sexes >and that this form of creation is "in the image of God." Sex >differences and complementarity are thus not merely socially >constructed but lie at the heart of self-identity. Obviously this >will not be palatable to many modern people, but it has been central >to Jewish and Christian teaching for millennia. My point here is >simply to point out that the Catholic teaching is not an innovation >and is internally consistent. What then do you make of Galatians 3.28: "There is no longer Jew nor Greek, there is no longer slave nor free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus"? I make no claims to know what lies at the heart of self-identity, but ethnicity, class, and sex are fundamental influences on the experience of identity, whether of the self or of the other. Yet Christ, so the story goes, has set us free from the standards of the world and the dictates of the Law; he has remade us in his image and brought us into a new family in which differences cease to be divisions in the oneness of Christ. Whether or not todays Christians consider earlier groups long deemed heretical as Christians, they considered themselves Christian. Although most of our information about these groups comes from hostile sources, it is clear that the ordination of women was an issue for them. Marcion's group had female ministers, and the Montanists had women priests and bishops. Mary Magdalene was celebrated as apostola apostolorum in the Middle Ages, and in the second-century Gospel of Mary she had to defend her right not only to teach the other apostles about the truths Christ had shared with her but her right to receive them in the first place. Tellingly, her main adversary was Peter, but Levi defended her, saying, "Peter, you have always been hot-tempered. Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries. But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Savior knows her very well. That is why he loved her more than us." The Gospel argues that gender difference is not essential but an illusion or a construct. The exact circumstances surrounding this text are unclear, but it demonstrates that the matter was far from settled, as it remains today. 1 Corinthians, 1 Timothy, Ephesians, Colossians, Titus, and 1 Peter also reveal the contentious ambiguity surrounding the issue of gender and its concomitant rights and responsibilities. >And then at 10:48 AM 12/23/99 -0600, wrote: >A good point. I had intended to mention the scholastic discussion of >the issue but got sidetracked while writing and never came back to it. > When I have written in other contexts on this topic in the past, I >have usually written something to the effect that the question of the >sacramental ordination of women never seriously came up until recently >(whether early or mid-20thc). Aquinas and the other scholastics were, >under the circumstances, dealing with the question primarily >specualatively--I don't think anyone was seriously pushing the idea of >ordaining women at the time, so Aquinas was dealing with it as an >important principle rather than a real possibility on the horizon. > >Women may have taken some leadership roles among the Waldenses, but >only after the Waldenses had challenged some of the fundamental >principles of sacraments, so I wouldn't call this a raising of the >question of sacramental ordination of women. I am not a specialist on >the Waldenses, so I defer to those who know more about them, but I >think this would be a fair statement. The Guglielmites had a female pope, savior, and cardinal. Drawing upon the schema of Joachim of Fiore, they believed they were living in the transitus to a new and final age of world history, the age of the Spirit. She had already come in her human form as a woman named Guglielma who had died in 1279/81; her followers awaited her triumphant return in the full glory of God, which they believed would take place on Pentecost, 1300. In the meantime, they developed an ecclesiastical structure with their own pope or rather, La Papessa, Maifreda da Pirovano, and with the only cardinal selected by the time of their demise also a woman. Their theology can be summarized as follows: Guglielma was as fully God as Christ was, "true God and true human in the female sex," coeternal with the Father and consubstantial with the Son in his Passion and the Eucharist; her second coming would establish a new era on earth in which all Jews and Saracens would be converted to the true faith through her replacement of the current dominant church by the true church, the Guglielmites, and the replacement of Boniface VIII with Maifreda. Yet theirs was not only a heresy of women--their main theologian was male, and men made up a substantial portion of the believers. In the Guglielmite church, Maifreda performed the mass, a mass markedly similar to the Catholic mass except that it included six men and six women as participants, two of each sex serving as deacons. The repeated denunciation of women who preached and absolved sins through confession and baptism throughout the late Middle Ages indicates that some Christians felt that women could function as priests. Ecclesiastical authority of course vehemently disagreed, but at least among some Waldensians, Cathars, and Humiliati, among others, the ordination of women was taken seriously. According to Stephen of Bourbon, women Waldensians served as preachers of the faith even before the group was declared heretical in 1184 and long before they had made any substantial challenges to the principles of sacraments. Whether or not the Catholic church will ever recognize the right of women to be ordained remains to be seen. I tend to agree with Dennis that it represents too fundamental of a shift in the position of those who have and continue to define orthodoxy, but clearly it did not arise in the 20th c. With all best wishes for the holidays, Maeve %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%