The Catholic church ordained women for the first 1,200 years of Christianity, says a new book by a U.S. scholar.Then, in a struggle for political power in the 12th and 13th centuries, it vilified females, banned married clergy and rewrote its own history to excise clerical women.
Women were made deaconesses (equivalent to deacons) episcopae (bishops), and presbyterae (priests), and they preached, heard confessions, performed baptisms and even blessed the bread and wine for communion, says Gary Macy, a theology professor at Santa Clara University in California.
"The memory of ordained women has been nearly erased and, where it survived, it was dismissed as illusion or worse, delusion," he says in The Hidden History of Women's Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West, published in November by Oxford University Press.
"This is a history that has been deliberately forgotten."
During the first millennium, the church operated like a feudal or family business. Husband and wife might be clergy together, as modern-day televangelists now appear in matrimonial teams.
The couple could pass church property to their children and give relatives high positions. In 853, one bishop appointed his sister to guard the family property from future bishops who might not be worthy.
By the end of the first millennia, the political power of princes and the power of land-owning ecclesiastic families blurred considerably. Nepotism, says Macy, "was really out of control."
Bishops who followed the monastic tradition were pushing for reform. "It wasn't just the money," says Macy. They believed clergy should separate themselves from the world at large, the better to act as a moral guide.
If priests could not marry, they would have no heirs, effectively taking them out of the feudal system. Some scholars have also argued it centralized church power against lay leaders.
To promote the campaign against marriage, women were portrayed as moral monsters.
At the same time, the church tightened -- and heightened -- its definition of "ordination." Now it signified a permanent change in spiritual status, making an ordained minister the only person able to consecrate the body and blood in the Eucharist.
Macy believes women should be ordained to the Catholic priesthood, and acknowledges this view has coloured his book.
For now, he plans to go back to his usual area, studying the medieval history of the Eucharist.
In the meantime, he hopes his book sparks a discussion on female priests today.
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