Women Deacons?

Well, the Synod is underway and Archbishop Paul Andre Durocher of Gatineau Quebec, President of the Canadian Bishops’ Conference, raised the issue of ordaining women to the Diaconate.  Of course it has the krazies in a flap.  There are those who still want to hold that women are to be veiled virgins or fecund mothers—leave everything else to the men.  But several of you have contacted me as to what I think about it.  I don’t know why that matters.  I don’t get a lot of say in things, just the chance to sit on the sidelines and take the occasional pot-shot when some itinerant emperor parades by naked.  Of course, given the dysfunction in our Church structures, that happens pretty often these days, faster than I can blog. 

But as to what I think of women deacons?  I think it is a great idea.  Long overdue.  I mean long—like maybe a millennium and a half—overdue.  Why did we ever stop ordaining women deacons?  They could have been a great help in spreading the faith up into Northern Europe in the sixth and seventh and eighth centuries.  They could have been of great pastoral help in the European urban expansion of the 12^th and 13^th centuries.  They could have anchored the faith in the rough seas of the 16^th century Reformations.  They could have been great and effective evangelists in the missionary expansions of the 17^th-20^th centuries.  And most important of all, if we had kept women deacons from the days of the primitive Church, our skirted clerics wouldn’t be so friggin’ frightened of human beings with lady parts now.   Honest to God, the way they go on you’d think we are going to have menstrual blood all over the altar steps.  Or that it couldn’t be cleaned up if it did happen.  Move on boys, nothing to see here. 

The first thing we need to remember is that while deacons receive the Sacrament of Holy Orders at their diaconal ordination, their participation in the priesthood is that priesthood common to all the baptized.  They do not share in the “ordained priesthood” in which priests share and bishops possess in its fullness.  Therefore, any theological blocks that may exist to women in the presbyterate or episcopate are not relevant to the admission of women to the diaconate.  Of course, since the diaconate is the fire-door to the priesthood we are letting the girls get awfully close; one senile bishop’s bejeweled hands away and no alarm bells to stop in time! Worked for the Episcopalians, but then a lot of things work for them that don’t for us and I am not going down that rabbit hole.  

It may surprise some readers too that while women deacons are a well established historical fact up until the fourth century, the Roman Catholic Church has continued the practice, albeit in a severely abrogated form.  Nuns of the Carthusian Order, perhaps the strictest of Religious Orders whose members live as hermits, on the occasion of the Solemn Profession of Vows are vested in the diaconal stole and given the right to read the Gospel at certain services.  (The right of liturgically proclaiming the Gospel is the most important of the rights and privileges of Deacons in the Catholic Church.  The Deacon takes precedence in the reading of the Gospel over any priest or bishop present.  Even the Pope!  Even Cardinal Burke!!!)  While no one considers the nuns to be “deacons,” nor to have received the Diaconate in the same sense in which men are ordained deacons, the unique role of these women is a vestige of the once common practice of nuns being ordained to the diaconate.  I have also read that the practice of Deacon-nuns has not completely disappeared in some of the non-Chalcedonian Churches of the East and there are Orthodox Churches considering reintroducing Deaconesses, especially in monastic communities.  So, in other words, some of the men aren’t afraid of the competition as long as the women are locked away where they can’t mess things up for the boys.  Got it?  Isn’t it always the way?

And I think this is the real problem in reintroducing the Diaconate to women.  For many conservative Catholic laity it is simply another indication of the radical social revolution of the last 75 years in western society where women have broken through glass ceiling after glass ceiling, displacing male leadership and chipping away at patriarchy.  For a significant portion of clergy—including male deacons—it opens a male preserve to radical change that would mark “the rise and the fall of many in Israel.”  I think there is serious need for us as a Church—note, for us as a Church, not simply the “them” in the red beanies—to discuss the broader and deeper issues of gender, power, and human sexuality.  We need to come to some level of honesty as to what the real issues are that we are permitting to shape us as a Church and how those issues are advancing or retarding our mission of proclaiming the Kingdom of God.  The questions are a lot deeper than ordaining women to the diaconate and the questions are long overdue.  

Back When God Was A Lady

There is a lovely antiphon for the Benedictus at Morning Prayer for Trinity Sunday:

O Holy and Undivided Trinity, Creator and Ruler of all that exists, may all praise be yours now, forever, and for ages unending. 

I am well familiar with it.  Just read it yesterday morning.  But alas, I am lazy, I confess it,  and pray in English; little did I know the theological bombshell the English text was concealing.  That is the trouble with English, or rather with the imprecise, translations pushed by those Liturgiam Authenticam folk who are responsible for the current Liturgical texts and who use the liturgy to push their own sexist ideology.  I should have listened to Archbishop Lefebvre after all and kept to the lingua materna of the Church.  Well no, not actually, as that would be Greek.  But the wicked stepmother tongue.  Latin.

After my posting yesterday about the Maryland Maven rallying the torch and pitchfork crowd against Father Dan Fitzpatrick of Durham in England and his “heresy” of referring to the Holy Spirit in the feminine, a reader sent me an extraordinary comment pointing out that the Benedictus Antiphon for Trinity Sunday Lauds—in the pre-conciliar breviary (and of which our previously cited novus ordo vernacular antiphon is a translation, and a poor and misleading one at that)—is a truly remarkable exposition of the femininity not only of the Holy Spirit, but the Godhead Hims—whoops, Herself.  Get a load o’ this!

Benedícta sit creátrix et gubernátrix ómnium, sancta et indivídua Trínitas, et nunc et semper et per infiníta sæculórum sæcula.

I don’t even know where to begin!  Trust me on this, the Latin text is infinitely superior to the English Translation just on the literary level.  I mean, as Latin goes, it is exquisite. It just cries out to be melodiously chanted by virginal monastics who have been made eunuchs for the sake of the liturgy.  But, that aside, let’s unpack it theologically for a moment.

Trinitas in Latin is feminine.  I knew that.  But I presumed like nauta (sailor) and agricola (farmer) it is a feminine noun referring to a male being and therefore taking adjectives in the masculine form.  All languages have their idiosyncrasies.  But no, I should have remembered that it is a sancta et individua, that is to say, feminine Trinitas. Moreover, whoever composed this antiphon way “back in the day” went way overboard to push the feminine theme using the feminine creatrix rather than the masculine creator and the feminine gubernatrix rather than the masculine gubernator.  This antiphon then refers to God, Creator and Ruler of All –as a lady creator and a lady ruler.  I mean it is just incredible!!!  And Sister Joan Chittester had nothing to do with it!!!!  Neither did Elizabeth Johnson!!!!  In fact, almost certainly it was some guy who did it.   The Krazies will assure me that he was almost certainly gay.  Damn gender-benders!

Pope John XXII established the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity for the universal Church in the 14^th century, but the feast itself and the proper office to it is much older, having been composed by Stephen of Liege in the early 10^th century.  I don’t know that this particular antiphon referring to the Creator and Ruler of the universe in the feminine goes back that far—though as it appears in the Rite of York as well as in the Liege ceremonial, an indication that it is pretty ancient, undoubtedly long before Quo Primum and Pius V— it is certainly pre-12^th century.  Ol’ Steve of Liege and his buddies were way ahead of their time.  Can you imagine if they were to be members of the upcoming Synod???  Why those ol’ battle axes from Les Femmes and Restore DC Catholicism would be joining up with the ladies in lavender  from Rorate Caeli and New Liturgical Movement to bar access to the Synod Hall to these heretics.  Creatrix indeed!!!  I bet ol’God is going to hitch up the coleos divinos and smite a few of these liberal pansies who called him a creatrix et gubernatorix.  

When women ruled the Churches 3

The Modern Abbey and Abbey Church
at Bingen in the Rhineland

We have seen that at times—and by historical standards fairly recent times—women have exercised considerable authority in the Catholic Church.  We looked initially at the abbey of Quedlinburg and then at Saints Bridget of Kildare and Hilda of Whitby.  In our last blog we had a detailed example of the ceremony of obeisance given by the clergy in the prelacy of Conversano to the Abbess who was their prelate nullius.   We can return to the Abbey of Quedlinburg and a bull issued by Innocent III.  (We will be looking at Innocent, who reigned from 1198 until 1216, in our series of Reformations.  Innocent was responsible for what is probably the second most successful internal reform of the Church, second only to Trent.) This is what Pope Innocent wrote in a Bull concerning the Abbess of Quedlinburg:

Our daughter beloved in the Lord, the Abbess of Bubrigen [Friedberg says in a footnote that this should be read as Quedlinburg in the diocese of Halberstadt] has set forth the following in a petition sent to us: Sometimes when she suspends her canonesses and the clerics who are subject to her jurisdiction [clericos suae iurisdictioni subiectes], because of disobedience and other lapses, from their office and benefice, they do not observe a suspension of this sort because they are strongly convinced that she cannot excommunicate; hence, their excesses remain uncorrected. So that the said canonesses and clerics show obedience and respect to the above named abbess and obey her good admonitions, we consign therefore to your discrimination to what extent you — according to previous admonition — wish to inflict on them ecclesiastical censure under exclusion of appeal.  

The Abbey of Santa Maria la Real de las Huelgas
in Burgos, Spain--the seat of a very important
abbess in medieval Castile

Quedlinburg had been founded by the Abbess Matilda, the widow of King Henry the Fowler and mother of the Emperor Otto.  Otto, you may remember from an earlier blog, placed his daughter Matilda as its second abbess.  He richly endowed the Abbey with lands and properties and exempted it from all external jurisdiction, including exemption from the Bishop of Halberstadt who was the local ordinary. This is not the only Abbey with such exemption.  About thirty years before Pope Innocent wrote to the
Abbess of Quedlinburg, Adrian IV had issued the following Bull to the Abbess and nuns of Herford in Germany:

We forbid that in the said monastery any bishop outside the Roman pontiff exercise jurisdiction, and indeed in the sense that he never — unless he will be so invited by the abbess — may presume to celebrate solemn Masses there. 

While these prelatial abbeys were most common in the Holy Roman Empire, they were by no means limited there.  The most important of these Abbeys where the Abbess exercised ordinary jurisdiction not only over the nuns but over the surrounding area with its churches, clergy, and faithful was the Royal Abbey of Las Hueglas in Spain, a Cistercian foundation.  The Abbess was declared to be , a "noble lady, the superior, prelate, and lawful administratrix in spirituals and temporals of the said royal abbey, and of all the contents, churches, and hermitages of its filiation, of the villages and places under its jurisdiction, seigniory, and vassalage, in virtue of Bulls and Apostolical concessions, with plenary jurisdiction, privative, quasi-episopal, nullius diacesis."

According to the original Catholic Encyclopedia: By the favor of the king, she was, moreover, invested with almost royal prerogatives, and exercised an unlimited secular authority over more than fifty villages. Like the Lord Bishops, she held her own courts, in civil and criminal cases, granted letters dismissorial for ordination, and issued licenses authorizing priests, within the limits of her abbatial jurisdiction, to hear confessions, to preach, and to engage in the cure of souls. She was privileged also to confirm Abbesses, to impose censures, and to convoke synods.  Basil Pennington once told me that these prerogatives, or at least the canonical ones, were still in place at the opening of the Second Vatican Council.  I don’t consider Pennington to have been a reliable source of information as he tended to go on the principle of “don’t let the truth spoil a good story,” but I can’t say that he wasn’t right on this.  

Perhaps the most significant Abbess of the Middle Ages was the famous Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179).  Though not officially canonized, she is regarded as a saint by the Catholic Church.  She is an immensely popular figure in certain circles today and she certainly was an accomplished woman—a musician, scientist, physician, poet, philosopher, theologian and who knows what else— she was actually authorized to preach by Pope Eugene III at the recommendation of his mentor, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (who, in turn, was no fan of women nor advocate of their cause).  I have no idea of what prompted Bernard’s recommendation but here we have papal authorization for a woman to preach, a license that would be rather difficult to obtain today.  Why aren’t women authorized to preach today?  I know nuns (and laywomen as well) who are far better preachers than many priests and deacons (and even some bishops.)  Perhaps I just answered my own question.   

When Women Ruled the Churches 2

Actress Peggy Wood as the Abbess in
The Sound of Music

We have looked at several powerful women who had great (and positive) influence in the Church, indeed who parlayed their role as abbesses to playe direct roles in Church administration.  Matilda of Quedlinburg convoked reforming synods as did Hilda of Whitby.  Brigid of Kildare actually exercised jurisdiction over a diocese and, through her royal connections, was the most influential leader of the Irish Church in the sixth century and became not only one of the three great “patron saints” of Ireland but did so precisely because she, like Patrick and Colombanus—the other two—actually shaped the character and temperament of Irish Christianity.

How did these women—and others like them—achieve this power?  We need to understand the role of women in Germanic culture as opposed to the role of women in Mediterranean culture.  Now, first of all, when I say “Germanic” let me be more specific.  I do not mean among the peoples who comprise modern day Germany but rather all the tribes from Northern Europe who occupied what is today Germany, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria and the non-Slavic lands north of the Alps.  Much of what we say about them can also be said of the Scandinavian tribes and the Celtic peoples of Ireland and Britain.  In these societies there was a fundamental equality in and before the law between men and women.  Women had rights of inheritance, property, and often even say in political assemblies.  It was not unknown for women to exercise kingship.  In 61 AD The Celtic queen,  Boudica, stormed and burned the Roman colony where London stands today.  Caesar, in the Gallic wars, tells us how surprised he was at female military and political leadership.  This is because in the Mediterranean world women were subordinate to men. They never would have led an army or commanded men!  Women had no legal personage.  They could not sue in court nor could they be sued.  They lived under the “mundiburd”—the legal protection—of a male.  A woman was under the authority of her father until he took her hand in placed it in the hand of her husband and with that gesture, the authority over her passed from father to husband.  In her widowhood, she lived under the authority of her son (and usually the thumb of her daughter-in-law). 

A Real Abbess, The Right Reverend Dame Benedicta
von Spiegel, Lady Abbess of Saint Walburga in Eichstatt
until her death in 1950. Note the crozier, pectoral cross,
and pontifical gloves as signs of her rank. 

Monastic life freed women from this subordination.  When women fled to the desert to live as hermits or in colonies of nuns they escaped male authority.  Nuns were women monks.  We lose the awareness of this in modern English where we have two words—“monk” and “nun” for men and women monastics respectively.  In Syriac, Greek, Latin, and even the modern romance languages such as Italian this is not so.  It is the same word with only a gender-specific suffix to let us know if the monastic is a male or female.  A female monastic community in the ancient world might often inter-related with a male monastic community.  The women monks might offer to weave clothe for the monks in return for some of the harder physical labor—construction projects perhaps—that they did not feel they had the strength to do.  (You might be surprised, however, at some of the projects these “delicate ladies” did undertake.)    And the nuns depended on monks for chaplaincies, though even there many of the duties we associate with a chaplain—the various blessings and rites and even the hearing of confessions—were performed by the abbess.  (The linking of “confession” and sacramental absolution, as well as the requirement for the Sacrament of Penance was not defined until the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.  Before that time, in monastic communities confession was linked more to the spiritual direction the abbot (not always a priest until the eleventh or twelfth centuries) or abbess.)  Sometimes, in fact in the early and central Middle Ages (the fifth through the eleventh centuries), and sometimes even later, the chaplains attached to monasteries of nuns were actually monks or canons who belonged not to an abbey of men but to the nuns’ abbey and owed their obedience to the abbess. 

An Abbess, by the way, is an interesting person legally.  While in the desert communities of ancient Egypt and Syria monks were governed by an abba (a “father”or a “Dad”—remember that Jesus tells us to call God “Abba”), and nuns by an ama (a “mom”), the practice soon dropped the feminine idea of an ama and feminized the word for “Dad.”  An abbess is a female abbot.  She is a women who is doing the work of a man.  She is a woman who has the authority of a man.   The Abbot is the pater familias of his monastic community.  The Abbess is also the pater familias, the “father” of her monastic community.  She is not a “mother superior;” she is a female “father superior.”  This is a hard concept for us to understand, but do you know that Queen Elizabeth of England is legally a man?  Elizabeth Windsor, the lady who drives a Land Rover and breeds racing horses is a woman, but Elizabeth II, the person who wears a crown and opens parliament stands before the law as a man.  In fact in the Middle Ages a queen regnant (a woman who heads a nation as different from a queen consort—a woman married to the king) most often referred to herself as “Rex” (king) rather than “Regina” (queen).  In the same way an abbess is legally a man, or at least was so regarded in the Middle Ages.  (And again, the key word is “legally” which differentiates between the person in private life and the person in their public office.) 

When one combines this monastic autonomy with the Germanic legal codes recognizing women as equal to men in law, then any problem with women exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction vanishes.   If an abbot can be an Abbot Nullius—an abbot who governs a diocese—then so can an abbess.  One such Abbacy Nullius headed by a woman was Las Hueglas in Spain which I understand lasted at least until the middle of the last century.  Another was the Abbacy of Conversano in Italy.  This lasted until suppressed by Napoleon in 1806.  Here is a description of the ceremonial of obeisance by the clergy to a newly enthroned Abbess.  

A power of jurisdiction almost equal to that of the Abbess of Las Huelgas was at one time exercised by the Cistercian Abbess of Conversano in Italy. Among the many privileges enjoyed by this Abbess may be specially mentioned, that of appointing her own vicar-general through whom she governed her abbatial territory; that of selecting and approving confessors for the laity; and that of authorizing clerics to have the cure of souls in the churches under her jurisdiction. Every newly appointed Abbess of Conversano was likewise entitled to receive the public "homage" of her clergy,--the ceremony of which was sufficiently elaborate. On the appointed day, the clergy, in a body repaired to the abbey; at the great gate of her monastery, the Abbess, with mitre and crosier, sat enthroned under a canopy, and as each member of the clergy passed before her, he made his obeisance, and kissed her hand. 

We will look more at these medieval abbesses in future entries.  But in the meantime remember there is historically no problem having a woman at the head of your diocese.

Roots of the Reformation XVIII: The Papacy of Whores

The Pope and his curia
medieval manuscript, Krakow

The papacy was in terrible decline from the 9^th century onwards –result of its immense wealth and the contentiousness to control it that made the papacy a pawn of several great Roman families that wanted to manipulate the wealth and power attached to the papacy for their own uses.  But this totally wiped out the moral credibility of the papacy and, at this stage of development of the doctrine of papal power, loss of moral credibility meant loss of power. 

The main power brokers for a long time were the family of Counts of Tusculum.  Two of the women of this family—Marozia and her mother, Theodora—prostituted themselves to different popes and schemed to put their sons and grandsons on the throne of Peter.  Marozia, the younger of the two women, while still only 15 was the mistress of Pope Sergius III.  Sergius seems to have been rather young  himself at the time of his being made pope, and he owed the papal office to Theophylact, the Count of Tusculum and father of Marozia.  Theophylact was the vestarius (treasurer) to the popes—a position which gave him access to the papal wealth.  There was a lot of confusion in the papacy at this time.  Leo V had been forcibly dethroned and imprisoned to be succeeded by Christopher.  Modern Church historians consider Christopher an anti-pope—but as recently as the early twentieth century he had been included on the list of legitimate popes and his picture is among the papal mosaics stretching from Peter to John Paul II decorating the basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome.   In any event, his reign was quite short as after four months Sergius III—the “boyfriend” of Marozia—drove him from office and had him imprisoned in the Castle Sant’Angelo.  Both Leo and Christopher were strangled in Prison—some sources claiming that Christopher had Leo strangled and Sergius had Christopher so dispatched; others saying that Sergius ordered the murder of both in order to remove any counter-claims to his own papacy.  So you’ve got a fellow who was made pope by his girl-friend’s father and who has murdered—or ordered murdered—his predecessor(s).  We haven’t even begun yet.  In 910 Marozia and Pope Sergius have a son who, twenty years later, will himself become pope as John XI.  Sergius was long dead, of course, but Marozia was still around and engineered the election.  Marozia had a long string of lovers—some sources say including one or more of the intervening popes—and several husbands.  One of the husbands—Guy of Tuscany—attacked Rome where he and Marozia murdred pope John X and installed a succession of popes—Leo VI, Stephen VII, and her son by Sergius, John XI—who were no more than her puppets.  When Guy died, Marozia persuaded his brother, Hugh of Arles, to abandon his wife and marry her.  Alberic II, Marozia’s  son by her first husband, Alberic of Spoleto, had enough of her, however, and led a rebellion, putting both her and his half-brother, Pope John XI, in prison where they were murdered.  Lest you think that Alberic II was a good guy protecting the Church from all these evil people—he married his stepsister and then nominated his son to be pope.  The son, at age 17, became pope in 955 as John XII.  here is what was written of him:

Then, rising up, the cardinal priest Peter testified that he himself had seen John XII celebrate Mass without taking communion. John, bishop of Narni, and John, a cardinal deacon, professed that they themselves saw that a deacon had been ordained in a horse stable, but were unsure of the time. Benedict, cardinal deacon, with other co-deacons and priests, said they knew that he had been paid for ordaining bishops, specifically that he had ordained a ten-year-old bishop in the city of Todi... They testified about his adultery, which they did not see with their own eyes, but nonetheless knew with certainty: he had fornicated with the widow of Rainier, with Stephana his father's concubine, with the widow Anna, and with his own niece, and he made the sacred palace into a whorehouse. They said that he had gone hunting publicly; that he had blinded his confessor Benedict, and thereafter Benedict had died; that he had killed John, cardinal subdeacon, after castrating him; and that he had set fires, girded on a sword, and put on a helmet and cuirass. All, clerics as well as laymen, declared that he had toasted to the devil with wine. They said when playing at dice, he invoked Jupiter, Venus and other demons. They even said he did not celebrate Matins and the canonical hours nor did he make the sign of the cross.

Whoa boy, ya think ya seen it all.  But wait—what happened to Theodora, the mama bear in this adorable family of adulterous murderers.  (And why didn’t Sister even tell us about this in sixth-grade history?)   Oh, by the way, before I go further: Pope John XII is a great, great, great, great, great, great, grandson of Charlemagne—through his mother.  Not that that is relevant.  It isn’t.  Just a little fact of history.  Theodora was not idle through all this.  She was a senetrix (a lady Senator) of Rome—more a title in those days than an actual position.    But Lady Senators were most rare and in fact it was a title that legitimized her immense political power.   Theodora was mistress to John X whom Marozia and Guy of Tuscany had killed.  Was Marozia jealous of her mother’s power?  Did that inspire the murder?  Who knows, it is all a mess.

Some modern historians claim that the various sources (Luitprand of Cremona, the Liber Pontificalis, and other contemporary histories)  portray Theodora and Marozia harshly, even falsely, because they were jealous of females exercising the political power that these women managed to wield.   That could—to a certain extent—be true; all historians have bias and there are no true “facts” in history.  The very tone of voice prejudices the student to the teacher’s point of view.  Nonetheless, these ladies and the accompanying popes are no candidates for canonization.  This period, known by the pejorative but wonderful appellation: the Pornacracy (the Rule of Whores), marks the most morally deprived period on the history of the popes.  Trust me when I say that this entry has only skimmed over the murders, adulteries, sodomies, bribes, simonies, blasphemies, and only the devil knows what else that has adorned the papal throne.  While great saints have sat in Peter’s chair, its history is not one of holiness.  But the question arises—and it is a question not only for the tenth century—who can reform the papacy when it needs reform?  What happens when the man on Peter’s throne is a depraved whoremaster?  Or, even more serious, what happens when the man on Peter’s throne is only a puppet for some figure, male or female, in the shadows who has control of the Church?  Don’t say it can’t happen—it has and more than once.   And it may have happened much more recently than you might think.  Hmmm.  Very recently.  The man in the window may not be the man with the power.