Women and Holy Orders

Being the Report of a Commission appointed by
the Archbishops of Canterbury and York
Published by the Church Information Office, London. Dec. 1966

CHAPTER V

The Case against the Ordination of Women to the Priesthood

50 (a) It would be contrary to the tradition of the Church, from the time of the Apostles. If it is to be maintained that that tradition is wrong it has to be demonstrated, either that the Apostles failed to divine or to implement the intention of Christ, if he intended women to partake in the priestly ministry, or that Christ erred in not declaring this to be his intention. Neither proposition can validly be maintained.

51 It is therefore quite legitimate to assert that the exclusion of women from Holy Orders is just part of the nature of things, in this case of the nature of the Christian Church.

52 (b) The conviction that the priesthood can only be male is supported by the deliberate inclusion by Christ and the Apostles of women with men in the wider priesthood of the whole Church. There is a general priesthood of the whole people of God, comprising men and women, and a specific priesthood of those who have been ordained to it. The wider priesthood of the Laos indicates that if the ministerial priesthood is composed only of males, this is in the divine ordinance as much as the existence of the Church itself. If only secondary difficulties stood in the way, the ministry could easily have been opened to both sexes.

53 (c) Allied to this argument is that based on the recognition that Christianity was a revolutionary religion, not least in the greatly heightened esteem and value accorded to women. The Gospel and the Church which proclaims it had no hestitation in softening the authoritarian character of the attitude of Israel towards women, and departing from the custom of the society in which it was cradled. The maleness of the Christian priesthood must therefore have deeper grounds than mere conservatism or a poor estimate of the feminine nature.

54 (d) All theistic religions (that is to say, religions in which the God or Gods transcend the created order and stand behind nature and history, as well as acting in them, rather than being merged in a monistic or pantheistic unity) have male priesthoods. Female priesthoods belong to the nature religions in which human nature is sensed to be merely part of society, society part of nature, and nature itself Divine. The Christian Church, rooted in the biblical view of God and his relation to the world, has without question adopted a male priesthood. It is therefore pertinent to ask whether the feature of a male priesthood can be modified by the addition of a female priesthood without altering the essential character of the Christian ministry, and without affecting the human psyche at those deep levels at which it responds to religious symbolism.

55 Such a modification of the tradition of the male priesthood could be more disruptive of the Christian Church than any heresy or moral deviation.

56 (e) The assertion that the ordination of women is the logical outcome of a steadily growing recognition of woman’s full humanity is fallacious. A philosophy of social evolution making for this kind of equivalence of women with men has no backing in historical, philosophical, biological or religious theory.

57 (/) Western civilisation has witnessed a hypertrophy, a morbid enlargement, of its masculine aptitudes, and the feminist movement, by bringing women into the characteristic masculine way of handling life, has aggravated the disease. The characteristics of the two sexes must be regarded as complementary. In the concrete, for the art of living, there are male and female aptitudes. A refusal to recognise this polarity of the sexes tends to create not satisfaction, but further and more deep-seated restlessness.

58 (g) The view that sex is irrelevant in deciding who should or should not be ordained to the priesthood has been based on a belief that there is a sexless human nature common to men and women underlying their sex differences. This view is no longer tenable. There is in fact a masculine and a feminine human nature with some complication from the shadow of the opposite sex in each.

59 More recently this argument has been abandoned in favour of one based on the complementariness of the sexes from which it is deduced that an exclusively male priesthood cannot be fully representative. To this it may be replied that the maleness of the ministry is an essential feature of its representative character. A male priest represents both sexes in a way which a woman does not in organised society and in the Church.

60 (h) Note should be taken of one of the arguments advanced by Dr N. P. Williams in his paper ‘ Deaconesses and “ Holy Orders ”.’ (1) He advanced the thesis not so much that it is dogmatically certain that women cannot receive ‘ Holy Orders ’, but that there is an overwhelming probability based upon the example of Our Lord, the teaching of the New Testament and the universal practice of the Church that they cannot, and that no serious reason has been adduced for supposing that they can. In the face of so serious an uncertainty he asserts that no power short of an Ecumenical Council could dare to assume the responsibility of modifying or altering a practice founded upon so august an authority.

61 (i) A female priesthood would present practical difficulties. A woman could hardly fulfil simultaneously her responsibilities as a parish priest and as a married woman. Problems would arise at times of pregnancy and during the periods when the prior claim upon her time and attention would be as a mother to her children. There would be considerable complications in the relationships between husband and wife in cases where both were in priests’ orders. Possibly these matters could be controlled by canonical regulations, but should it be decided that women can, in principle, be ordained to the priesthood, it is hardly likely that a rule of celibacy for women or other restrictions not applicable to men would be acceptable.

62 (j’) The professional opportunities now open to women render the question of their admission to the ministry obsolescent if not obsolete, and the great body of Christian congregations, by their general indifference to the question, implicity witness that this is so. The Church of England should be sure that, in examining this matter, it is considering contemporary woman, contemporary society, and the contemporary Church, and not those of a generation or more ago.

63 (k) Finally, those who hold the conviction that the priesthood should be withheld from women stress that this should not be regarded as a deprivation of something which would extend the area of their service. On the contrary, they believe that women have their own kind of ministry in offering the specific gifts of the feminine sex to the furthering of Christ’s work on earth. These opportunities should be extended. Much of their value would be lost if women were drawn into the ordained priesthood.

1 N. P. Williams, by E. W. Kemp (SPCK, 1954), pp. 194 ff.

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