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by John Wijngaards
The Tablet, 8 May 1999, p. 623-624.
Were women ordained as deacons in the early Church on the same basis as men?
The director of the Housetop Centre in London, which specialises in Christian
communication, believes he has proof that they were. If he is right, his
discoveries have far-reaching implications for the ministry of women in
today’s Church.
SO
women deacons in the early Church had no part in the sacramental ministry,
according to Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos (The Tablet, 3/10 April, p.
500). His statement must have made the thousands of women deacons who
faithfully served the Church in the past turn in their graves. For they were
formidable women, if we are to go by the 28 tombstones on which some of them
are commemorated. One was Athanasia in Delphi in the fifth century AD, who was
ordained by Bishop Pantamianos. The stone carries a curse: “May anyone who
disturbs the tomb in which this honoured and blameless deaconess lies buried
receive the fate of Judas who betrayed our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Fifty
years ago, church historians and theologians alike routinely dismissed the
women’s diaconate as obviously a historical sop to women, “a blessing
of some sort” or “just a minor order”, for the simple reason
that a sacramental ordination of women seemed a priori excluded. But the
historical facts are becoming clearer by the day, and this position is now
untenable.
From
the outset we should realise what is at stake. If, as the records show, women
were for many centuries admitted to the full diaconate which is now only
imparted to men, then they did receive the sacrament of “holy
orders”. For this sacrament has three levels: episcopacy, priesthood and
diaconate. Anyone who receives any of the three is consecrated to the
ministerial priesthood, as the Council of Trent defined it.
But
were women ordained as real deacons - into a sacramental diaconate “tied
theologically to the Holy Spirit”, to borrow Cardinal Castrillon
Hoyos’s words?
The
answer lies in precious Greek and Syriac manuscripts concealed in dusty
libraries, but now to be made accessible to all via the Internet
(www.womenpriests.org). They contain ancient ordination rituals for male
and female deacons, documenting the Church’s practice from the fourth to
the eighth centuries AD, and confirming the oldest ordination prayers already
found in the Apostolic Constitutions, a so-called fourth-century
“church order” with regulations for discipline and liturgy.
A
study of the documents shows that in the Church in the East, centuries before
it split with the West, both men and women were admitted to the diaconate
through a precisely equivalent sacramental ordination. Both were conducted into
the sanctuary to face the bishop, who was seated before the altar. Both
received the laying on of hands by the bishop, who invoked the Holy Spirit to
impart the grace of the ministry of the diaconate, using identical words. Both
were vested with a stole as a distinctive sign of their ministry. Both received
Communion from the bishop and both were handed the chalice with the precious
Blood. The impressive parallelism has recently caused the Orthodox theologian
Evangelos Theodorou to join a number of Catholic theologians in declaring the
diaconate of women to be as sacramental as that of men.
Perhaps we should go back to basics here. Sacraments are, by definition, sacred
signs. In its long history the Church has come to accept two aspects of the
“sign” in each sacrament: the matter (an object or an action)
and the form (the words that are spoken). In baptism, the washing with water is
the matter, the words “I baptise you in the name of the Father, the Son
and the Holy Spirit” are the form. These two elements make up the
substance of the sacramental sign. Where we find them present, we know that the
sacrament has been validly administered. And being precise in details here is
no luxury, as the Catholic Church has always insisted.
In
the case of Holy Orders, from time immemorial the imposition of hands has been
considered as the “matter” of the sacrament, the invoking of the
Spirit on the ordinand as the “form”. These constitute the essence of
the sacramental sign, by which everyone knows that this person has been truly
ordained.
Additional symbols are the conferring of the sacrament during the liturgy of
Mass right in front of the altar, the laying on of the distinctive vestment and
the handing over of an instrument of the ministry,such as a chalice. Through
all these external signs the universal Church publicly imparts the sacrament of
Holy Orders so that both the recipient and God’s people know the sacrament
has been completed.
But
if the Church ordained women deacons and male deacons with exactly the same
sacramental signs, how could anyone say that one - the diaconate of men - is
sacramental, and the other - that of women - is not? Do not the severe words of
the Council of Trent apply here? “If anyone says that, through sacred
ordination, the Holy Spirit is not given, and that therefore the bishop says in
vain: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’ . . . Let him be anathema”
(constitution on Holy Orders, canon 4)
A
typical ordination prayer for a woman deacon which the bishop would say from
the fourth to the eighth centuries while laying on his hands runs, in
abbreviated form, as follows: “Holy and omnipotent Lord, through the birth
of your only Son from a virgin according to his human nature, you have
sanctified the female sex. You grant not only to men, but also to women, the
grace and outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Please, Lord, look on this your
maidservant and dedicate her to the task of your diaconate, and pour out into
her the rich and abundant giving of your Holy Spirit.”
The
ordination prayer for male deacons given in the same documents mentioned
earlier is almost entirely the same, culminating in the same dedicatory phrase
and invocation of the Holy Spirit. In some longer prayers the bishop refers to
the example of Stephen (Acts 6:5) for male deacons, to Phoebe “our
sister”, who was “deacon of the Church at Cenchreae” (Rom.
16:1), for women deacons.
Those
who deny the sacramental character of the woman’s diaconate often point to
the fact that in these early centuries it was normally male deacons who
assisted at the altar and who helped in distributing Communion. “Men
exercised a different kind of diaconate”, the objectors claim. “Men
assisted at the Eucharist. Women did not.” Differences in the day-to-day
division of work do not prove there was a separate diaconate, however. Many
church officials in Rome, for example, have been ordained as bishops and
archbishops for diplomatic reasons. They work mostly in administration. Does
this make their ordination to the episcopate less valid than that of pastoral
bishops?
It
was pastoral prudence that inspired church leaders to employ women deacons
differently. Women serving the bishop in the sanctuary, which was screened off
from the people during the holiest of moments, might invite the suspicion of
impropriety. Moreover, women also had to battle with the prejudice of presumed
ritual uncleanness during their monthly periods. But it is wrong to infer from
this that, therefore, a woman deacon was ordained to a lower form of diaconate
than a man.
The
ordination rite of the woman deacon itself contradicts this since she was
handed a chalice, as the man was. Through the ordination prayers, women
deacons, as much as their male colleagues, were dedicated to this
“ministry” (the Greek word is leitourgia) in God’s Holy
temple. Moreover, we know from local Syrian church laws that women deacons
assisted at the altar when there were no male deacons, and that they took
Communion to the sick.
The
main function of the woman deacon was the pastoral care of women and here she
held a parallel ministry to the male deacon, though usually under her
colleague’s supervision. The woman deacon instructed women catechumens for
baptism, either in the church or at home. During the baptismal ceremony itself
she would anoint the bodies of women with the oil of the catechumenate, as the
male deacon did for the men. In those days catechumens stripped naked and oil
was rubbed over the whole body, front and back, on all the limbs, even between
the fingers and toes, ‘leaving no part unanointed’, to quote an
ancient rubric. Propriety demanded that a woman deacon performed this rite for
a woman catechumen, after which she would lead her, still naked, into the font
and submerge her three times, while the bishop spoke the baptismal form. Later
texts suggest that the bishop himself may also have descended to the font and
submerged the catechumen. In any case, it was the bishop who imposed the chrism
after the catechumen had been dried by the woman deacon and vested in a white
robe.
The
diaconate of women faced tough opposition.in Latin-speaking regions, such as
Italy, North Africa, Gaul and Britain. According to Roman law, which was
adopted in essentials by the Church, women could not hold any public office.
Also, the taboo of menstruation proved an enormous obstacle. In the West, the
“woman’s diaconate” continued to exist until the early Middle
Ages as a ‘blessing’ imparted to abbesses. It was but a feeble shadow
of the real thing that had existed in the East.
History has left us ample records of the activity of genuine women deacons who
flourished mainly in Greece, Asia Minor, Dalmatia, Syria and Palestine, from
certainly the third to at least the eighth century until here too, as in the
West, menstruation and other taboos eroded it. St Chrysostom at Constantinople
had 40 women deacons attached to the basilica of Hagia Sophia, as wel1 as 100
male deacons. From the correspondence of the Fathers we know a good many by
name: Salvina, to whom St Jerome wrote; Macrina, the sister of St Basil the
Great; Anastasia, an assistant of Severus Bishop of Antioch. We also have many
epigraphic inscriptions, such as that of Theodora in Gaul (sixth century) and
Sophia in Jerusalem (fourth century): “Here lies the servant and Virgin of
Christ, the deacon, the second Phoebe.”
So
here we have proof that women were admitted to holy orders for centuries, under
the sanction of ecumenical councils, producing ordained ministers who confirmed
in their own person the equality of men and women in Christ. Is this not the
true Tradition to which the Church should be faithful?
John Wijngaards
Read also the ‘Letters to the
Editor’ in the Tablet responding to this article.
Introduction?
Overview?
Manuscripts?
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John Wijngaards
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