Their is seemingly no end to the stupidity that can get published in newspapers these days as long as that stupidity is in conformity with the zeitgeist. For instance, you can say any perceived bad thing is caused by global warming and you will get coverage today without any need for any of that pesky evidence stuff. The same is true for any “scholarship” that puts the Church or Church history in a bad light. A great example is the whole ‘Jesus Tomb’ debacle from a year ago. No evidence or peer review needed, just a claim that undermines the church in some way and you are good to go. Witness the latest example of pseudo-scholarship that makes into the media. From the Calgary Herald:
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.
Wow? Really. But how did all the people forget? What about all the evidence that must abound for a 1300 year old practice? Macy has the answer.
“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.”
Oh. That explains it. Everybody, and I mean everybody, deliberately forgot about it. They also expunged from any and all documentation of the thing they deliberately forgot. Convenient eh? What evidence does Macy have to support his wild theory or is he just advocating for something he wants now?
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.
No kidding, this is what Macy believes? This is advocacy pure and simple dressed up in the guise of ‘scholarship’ aided and abetted by Oxford University press and now the Calgary Herald. Everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves. Shame. That is an idea. I think I will write a book that claims shame is a medieval concept invented by the Church to promote clothing sales because they secretly own a controlling share of federated department stores. Silly? I bet Oxford would print it.
January 21, 2008 at 2:28 pm
There is no evidence that women ever received Holy Orders legitimately. That said, there is enough to be gleaned from history which, thrown together in one book, can be misleading. The underlying assumption is that any gaps in the findings are invariably the result of some sort of “suppression” of evidence. This in itself has never met the burden of proof, as if that were even an issue for such “scholarship.”
What follows is a short version of a refutation…
There was a female diaconate in the early Church. It thrived mostly in the East, and reached its height near the end of first millennium. What is referred to in the ancient books as “ordination” (in Greek, “chierotonia”) as applied to them, is a broader use of the term than we would use today. In recent years, parts of the Orthodox Church are reviving the ancient office. Its holders do NOT receive Holy Orders.
There were a number of sects in the early centuries of the Church, which presumed to “ordain” women as priestesses, who would simulate the Eucharist. All were condemned by Church councils at the time. Ancient inscriptions identifying a “presbytera” is most likely a reference to the wife of a priest, a term still used by the Greek Orthodox today.
Women have never been bishops. By the Middle Ages, however, both abbots and abbesses had the administrative powers equivalent to a bishop. This included the ceremonial trappings of possessing crosier and mitre and ring, as well as the pledge of obedience by priests. Brigid of Kildare and Hildegard of Bingen would have been two examples of abbesses with these powers, but this did not make them bishops. With the rise in later centuries of jurisdictional administration and the nation-states, this practice was virtually eliminated. Today, an abbot wears the vesture common to a bishop. There are presently two “mitred abbesses” in the USA; one in Connecticut(???), the other in Colorado. They have the privilege of bearing the crosier, and in keeping with the ancient practice, their mitre would be carried in procession on a pillow.
Advocates of women’s ordination point to a mosaic in the Church of St Praxedes in Rome, where a woman bears the inscription “Episcopa Theodora,” citing this as “evidence” of a female bishop. There is a reason Rome has never “suppressed” this “evidence” — she was never a bishop. In fact, she was the widowed mother of Pope Pascal, bishop of Rome in the ninth century. Theodora was likely a woman of great holiness, and a wealthy benefactor for that church. As the mother of a bishop, she would have borne that title.
Some years ago, I wrote a piece on the female diaconate for the Arlington Catholic Herald. It can be found today at the EWTN Online Library:
http://www.ewtn.com/library/liturgy/aroseby.txt
January 21, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Well being ESPN you can do anything except of course question whether Donovan McNabb is over hyped. That will get you fired.
January 21, 2008 at 11:32 pm
How does this fool Macy teach at a Catholic university?
Oh yeah, it’s Jesuit.
January 21, 2008 at 11:57 pm
“this view has coloured his book.”
That explains it all. It is a coloring book. And somebody stole his when he was in Catholic school. So he wrote a new one.
January 22, 2008 at 1:57 am
Nice blog. Chock full.
Say! Is that a picture of William F. Buckley on the top of your blog? I would be careful not to put him in the same image with Chesterton! Chesterton might not approve.
I’m never suprised what the “new right” and “old left” in MSM will swallow about the Church. You sum it up well.
As for me… I’m spending more and more time studying paleoconservatism and it’s roots. There is a nexus between authentic conservatism and Catholic Social and Moral teaching which paleoconservatism seems to have articulated well. I’m currently a big Huckabee fan (met him in NY just before he announced). But more and more I’m liking Ron Paul. While Huckabee would push an un-doable Human Life Amendment… Ron Paul’s political philosiphy would completely DEFUND PP.
Well. Thanks for the nice blog. I will check it out more thoroughly as time permits.
Mine is relatively new. See me at http://fatimanow.blogspot.com/
Ad Jesum!