Women Priests in the Ancient Church

1. Properly ordained women priests

In the Early Church it has never been a general practice to ordain women as priests for reasons explained elsewhere.

However, there have been exceptions to this general rule. It seems that in a number of countries women were ordained priests.

The evidence can be found both in archeological inscriptions and historical records. Read these documents:

• "Notes on the Female Priesthood in Antiquity", by Prof. George Otranto in Journal of Feminist Studies 7 (1991) no 1, pp. 73 - 94.
• ‘The Problem of the Ordination of Women in the Early Christian Priesthood’, by Prof. George Otranto, paper of USA lecture tour, 1991.
• Letter of Atto, Bishop of Vercelli, to the priest Ambrose.
• ‘The Fractio Panis and the Eucharist as Eschatological banquet’, by Damien Casey in the Mcauley Electronic Journal 2 (2002).

Here is a tombstone for the Catholic woman priest Leta in South Italy, 4th cent. AD.

See also:

• The ordination of St. Brigit of Kildare as a bishop (6th cent. Ireland; ascribed in a legend to an ‘accident’ inspired by the Holy Spirit)

2. Women in pastoral leadership roles

There are also examples of women involved in pastoral ministries that came close to the priesthood.

• In the second-century ‘New Prophecy’ movement, which was originally not a heresy, Prisca and Maximilla were leading prophets. See the article by Anne Jensen.
• Both in East and West sacramentally ordained women deacons served the parishes.
• In the early sixth century, three bishops from the region of Lugdunensis (present-day Lyon ) in France: Licinius of Tours, Melanius of Rennes, and Eustochius of Angers, attempted to restrain two Celtic priests who encouraged the participation of women in the liturgy.
• Until the 16th century, in the Basque regions of France and Spain, socalled soreras or freilas exercised a female ministry that is probably a remnant of the early women's diaconate.

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.

Please, credit this document
as published by www.womenpriests.org!