Christ's Attitude to Women

If we want to enter Christ's mind with regard to the position of women, we need to clearly distinguish two areas:

• his immediate decisions, such as choosing only men to be members of the apostolic team;
• the underlying principle of equality between men and women as partners of his new-testament priesthood.

The immediate decision of choosing only men as apostles was dictated by the social predominance of men. Jesus left the full emancipation of women to the later Church, just as he left the abolition of slavery, the division of holy orders, the details of the sacraments, and so on, to the later Church.

However, Christ clearly established the principle of fundamental equality in his priesthood that qualifies women to share in the eucharistic ministry:

• Jesus Christ abolished the Old Testament priesthood based on race, family and gender and instituted a universal priesthood of the faithful.
• Jesus showed in his own ministry a personal openness to women.
• Luke sees in Jesus' openness the germs of a future ministry of women.
• Both Luke and John see in Mary a type of the future ministry women.

For related online Libraries see: Equality for Women The ORDINATION OF WOMEN in the Catholic Church Catherine of Siena VIRTUAL COLLEGE THE BODY IS SACRED MYSTERY AND BEYOND We hope that you have found this document helpful. It costs our small charity - HOUSETOP CARE - on average £10 / $20 / Euro15 to make such a document freely available to you. This is because we have to identify the best scholarship available, retrieve texts, obtain permissions, scan, edit, link and convert documents to html format and run a small office to make this all possible. Having benefited from the online library, any donation, small or large, that you can make to support our work would be gratefully appreciated. Click here to make a donation now.

On women, natural law and sexual ethics.

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