Female Priests: Overview

Introduction

The role of women in the modern Christian clergy has been widely debated. While some churches have ordained women into the priesthood, others have remained firm in their stricture that only men can join the priestly orders.

The prohibition on the ordination of women is based on historical tradition as well as the interpretation of specific passages from the Bible. Not all religions have banned women from the clergy—for example, the Episcopal, Presbyterian, United Methodist, and Unitarian Universalist Churches as well as Buddhism and Reform Judaism allow the ordination of women—but Christianity has generally privileged men as leaders of religious service from its outset. Supporters of the ban point out the already important role that women are allowed to play as nuns and in other supporting roles. They also argue that if churches do not remain firm on their basic teachings, then the institutions change beyond recognition and lose their moral authority.

Numerous women, on the other hand, view the church as one of the last bastions of male-dominated privilege. Not allowing women to become ordained is a form of discrimination based on traditions that need to be modernized; Christianity should be inclusive rather than exclusive. A church that does not make some accommodations to the changes that cultures inevitably go through over time will have difficulties surviving. The ban on the ordination of women is not, they argue, God's commandment but a man-made restriction that can, therefore, be changed.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, some churches that had previously restricted women from being ordained began accepting them as members of the clergy. More traditional churches, however, remained adamant that such a change would not take place in their own hierarchies. The issue is nonetheless frequently broached, especially among Christians from Europe and the United States, and remains a serious point of contention between church officials and some parishioners.

Understanding the Discussion

Clericalism: The privileging of official church leaders over ordinary members of a church.

Clergy: The leadership of a church, including deacons, priests, and bishops, as opposed to the laity.

Deacon: A clergy member who holds a rank below that of the priest and who is allowed to carry out certain functions of the clergy. In some Christian sects, women are forbidden from becoming deacons.

Discrimination: Unfair treatment based on prejudices.

Ecclesiastical law: Laws pertaining to the governance of a church.

Laity: The plural of “layperson”; the people belonging to a church who are not members of the clergy.

Nun: A woman who has taken a vow to devote herself to God by living a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Often nuns live in convents and have limited contact with worldly things. Unlike Christian priests, they are not permitted to perform and administer religious rites.

Ordination: The process of being accepted into a religious office.

Priest: A person who has been ordained to perform and administer religious rites.

History

Christianity is steeped in its Judaic roots. In Judaism, women were not allowed to become rabbis until the twentieth century CE, and almost from its inception, Christianity maintained this tradition of having only men serve as spiritual leaders. The twelve apostles named in the Gospels, who were vested with spreading Christianity and baptizing converts, were all men. Some women did have central roles in the religion (most notably Mary, the mother of Jesus), but they were not granted the same duties. Women are mentioned in the New Testament writings as prominent members of their communities and were prophets, martyrs, and hosts of early church gatherings in their homes. Some evidence further suggests that women were ordained as deacons in the early church, at least until the Byzantine period; historians disagree, however, as to whether the women were only assistants and, as such, did not perform and administer rites.

During the medieval period in Europe, women could and did attain leadership positions within the Roman Catholic Church by becoming the administrative heads of convents of nuns. However, they were afforded far less power and authority than male clerics, who could rise to bishop, archbishop, cardinal, or even pope, and had not only administrative but also spiritual and sometimes geopolitical jurisdiction.

Antoinette Brown was the first female pastor in 1825, having found a progressive parish in New York. She attended theology classes at Oberlin College but was not allowed to graduate. Supporters of both sides of the issue have used this controversy to make their argument, and the possibility cuts to the center of the debate. One side argues that the proscription is based on divine law. The other side argues that it is based on ecclesiastical law, which changed over time and has gradually become more exclusive. Moreover, if a precedent existed for the ordination of women and they acted similar to priests, then the basis for the modern prohibition is largely unfounded. One exception is the Quakers, who allowed women to serve as ministers in the early 1800s.

Such rules persisted in the major Christian sects until the twentieth century. The Anglican Church ordained a single female priest in 1944, while in the 1970s, in Czechoslovakia, a bishop reportedly ordained several women to act as priests in the Catholic underground movement. During the communist period, religious practice was proscribed by the government, and the bishop believed that it was necessary to have more priests who could operate secretly. His actions remained a secret for the next two decades and were never approved of by the Vatican.

As the feminist movement gained ground in the United States, Canada, and Europe, women started taking a greater role in church hierarchies. In 1961, the Universalists and the Unitarians joined to become the Unitarian Universalists. They were the first large denomination to have a majority of female ministers, with females outnumbering their male counterparts by 1999. The Anglican Church began allowing the ordination of female priests in the 1970s, but the issue is handled within the church in a variety of ways. In some countries, especially in the developing world, local Anglican branches still do not allow women to be ordained at any level of the clergy. Others ordain them as deacons or priests while, with a few exceptions, not allowing them to become bishops. Other Protestant sects, including the United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church, Assemblies of God, and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, have also ordained women.

The Catholic, Orthodox, and Southern Baptist churches and the Church of the Latter-day Saints have remained the most intransigent on the issue, refusing to institute any change and noting the incompatibility of women with the priesthood. Their case rests on scriptural passages showing that Jesus chose only men to serve as his apostles and thus trace the tradition to Jesus rather than later ecclesiastical laws. They point out that even as central a figure in Christianity as Mary was not granted priestly status. Therefore, the Vatican has stated, the Catholic Church does not possess the authority to alter divine law. Women nonetheless have other important functions to serve within the church.

Pope John Paul II, who served as pope from 1978 until 2005, revisited the issue several times during his tenure. In 1994, declaring the issue permanently closed, he adhered to the church's canon laws in a letter titled “Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.”

Proponents of the ordination of women criticized the ban as a further entrenchment of patriarchal values. Despite the pope's firmness, they continued to challenge the edict, arguing that it does not have any divine basis and therefore can be changed. Some said that the edict contradicts biblical traditions that promote equality. On a practical level, they have also pointed out the decline of male priests in the twentieth century. To have enough clergy to serve Catholics of the world, they argue that women will have to be ordained.

Pope John Paul II was forced to revisit the issue of female ordination in 2002. In Austria, a Catholic archbishop ordained nine women from the United States and Europe as priests in a secret ceremony. The act, undertaken as a protest against Vatican policies, instantly incited controversy and condemnation, and the Vatican was quick to point out that the archbishop belonged to a breakaway church that the Catholic Church did not recognize. The women were given the opportunity to renounce their ordination and repent of their error, but refused. As a result, the Vatican excommunicated them from the Catholic Church.

The women pledged to continue their work as priests and argued that the Vatican is too quick to categorize a church as breakaway when there is a dispute over policy. Their view that the church has to change or lose followers has wide acceptance, but so does the church's perspective, that one of the church's virtues is its constancy.

The successor of Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, reaffirmed the ban on female ordination. In 2010 the Vatican announced automatic excommunication and potential defrocking for anyone who tries to ordain women and any woman who attempts to receive ordination, as well as other punishments for non-ordained individuals who administer religious rites like confession—all penalties that observers noted were harsher than those meted out to clergy suspected of child sex abuse. Meanwhile, other Christian sects continued to open their priestly orders to people previously excluded, such as women and gay individuals.

Female Priests Today

Supporters of ordaining women became more hopeful when Pope Francis was elected as Pope Benedict XVI’s replacement following the latter's resignation in early 2013. Seemingly more progressive, Pope Francis still firmly upheld the decision of his predecessors and once again declared that the issue was closed; however, he also made statements supporting women’s value to the church and expanding their opportunities for contribution—short of leadership positions that would continue to be reserved for men.

When Francis visited the United States in late 2015, protesters affiliated with the organization Roman Catholic Womenpriests carried signs and lay down in the street outside of St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, DC, where he was scheduled to meet with US bishops. A group of excommunicated priests descended from the women ordained in Austria in 2002, the organization has continued to assert a connection to the Roman Catholic Church, claiming validity in being ordained in apostolic succession, but calls the ecclesiastical law unjust.

Pope Francis continued to oppose ordaining women as clergy but has simultaneously moved to elevate the stature of women within the Catholic Church and increase dialogue about the issue. In 2016, he established a commission to study whether women could serve as deacons but reaffirmed the church's ban on their ordination to the priesthood. At a 2019 meeting, he rejected proposals to ordain the de facto church leaders in remote areas such as the Amazon—whether female or married men—to address the priest shortages there. A couple of years later, Francis and the Pontifical Council on Legislative Texts revised ecclesiastical law for the first time in four decades, not only codifying the increasingly common practices of women reading aloud from the Bible at mass, serving at the altar, and distributing communion but also the punishments for attempting to ordain women.

On the other hand, Francis also initiated the Synod of Synodality, a historic multiyear lay consultation on church direction, which included women's roles in the church among its ten working groups on sensitive issues. It also marked the first Roman Catholic synod to include nuns and some lay women as voting participants. Under Francis's leadership, nearly 1,200 women were employed at the Vatican in 2023, constituting about one-quarter of its workforce and nearly quadrupling the number of female employees over a decade. Finally, although he reiterated opposition to ordaining women as deacons in both a 2023 book and a 2024 television interview, official dialogue continued at the Vatican.

The results of the landmark International Survey of Catholic Women (ISCW), released on March 8, 2023, suggested a marked difference of opinion between the laity and church leadership on the issue. The ISCW found that two-thirds of Catholic women across 104 countries favored the church admitting women to the priesthood. Critics argued the wording of questions skewed the results and obscured the views of conservative Catholic women, however.

Meanwhile, in the Orthodox Church, the Patriarchate of Alexandria and Africa voted to restore the female diaconate in 2016. It went on to ordain the first Eastern Orthodox deaconess in modern times in May 2024. Orthodox officials were quick to note that patriarchates function more autonomously than the Catholic hierarchy does and that the diaconate is a calling of its own, not necessarily a pathway to the priesthood.

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