This myth was refuted long ago, by several protestants no less.
A number of books deal with the topic, including a chapter in fellow freeper Patrick Madrids' book, "Pope Fiction".
Posted on 01/06/2005 8:26:14 PM PST by Diago
oops, that post should have been to eastsider
Doo doo doo doo...
An Anatomy of Error VIMorris Dancing
A fascinating aspect of the campaign to see women ordained to the priesthood in the Anglican Communion has been the attempt to find ancient precedent for the practice. ‘Consonant with scripture and required by the tradition’ was Michael Adie’s over-optimistic formula on 11 November 1992. So it was clearly incumbent on somebody to come up with a sound and ancient provenance for the practice. Otherwise, how could one explain the fact that what was so plainly ‘required’ had never actually been done?
To be fair to the most ardent proponents, they supposed in 1992 that the required evidence was readily to hand.
The ground work was put in place (as one might expect) by a liberal Roman Catholic. The venerable feminist Joan Morris died in 1985, but not before she had woven a veritable web of inconclusive speculation – and set more hares running than the White City Dog Track.
‘Pope Joan’, ‘Theodora Episcopa’, the female ‘concelebrants’ of the catacomb of Priscilla, the revival of interest in ‘Junia Apostolos’: all can be traced back to Morris. Nor has any serious work been done subsequently either to question or verify her assertions. Across the entire spectrum, from the academically prestigious to the journalistically jejune (from Tom Torrance to Lavinia Byrne) people have been content simply to repeat – or occasionally to embellish – what Joan Morris had already written.
So to what does the Morris oeuvre amount?
A bishop and a Pope?
The legend of ‘Pope Joan’ (recently the subject of a book by Peter Stanford and a television programme based on it) has probably, as a result, finally been consigned to the cabinet of curiosities to which it properly belongs. The evidence adduced by Stanford is compromised at every point. Georgina Masson’s Companion Guide to Rome gives one more reliable information on the subject in a paragraph and a half than does Stanford in two hundred pages.
About ‘Theodora Episcopa’, the supposedly prelatical mother of Pope Paschal I, there has been no advance on Morris either. Poor Joan does not even appear in the bibliography of Lavinia Byrne’s Woman at the Altar: The Ordination of Women in the Roman Catholic Church, which is hugely dependent on her work and where Theodora makes the obligatory guest appearance. The idea that, at the height of the iconoclast controversy, no mention is made in Byzantine documents of an iconodule Pope of Rome who had a non-celibate woman bishop for his mother remains audacious in the extreme. [But who cares?]
Concelebration?
Nor has subsequent scholarship thrown further light on Morris’s assertions about the now notorious fresco in the Catacomb of Priscilla. Tom Torrance maintained that this shows Aquila and Priscilla and a few friends concelebrating (‘with attendant deacons’). Mary Ann Rossi (‘from the Women’s Studies Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’ – let the reader understand) opined that it undoubtedly shows seven women concelebrating – with the joyful self-possession which she recognizes from the concelebrations of Mass undertaken by herself and friends.
The facts, alas, are against both. There are no ‘deacons’ in the fresco – Torrance had, quite simply, never seen the picture when he pontificated. And if this fresco is indeed a picture of any kind of ‘concelebration’ it would be not only the earliest surviving representation of a eucharistic rite, but precede any other evidence for concelebration by about a thousand years.
Foremost among the Apostles?
Enthusiasm about the ‘apostle’ Junia appears, at first sight, to have far greater credibility. No less an authority than St John Chrysostom appears to have given her credence. But closer examination renders her status (and even her existence) more than doubtful. Reference to a Junia who was ‘foremost among the apostles’ (Romans 16) has understandably excited the enthusiasts for a female episcopate. But it is all far from plain sailing.
In the first place, the feminine form of the name is not the only reading in the relevant manuscripts. In the second place, the phrase – which has sometimes been translated as ‘foremost among the apostles’ – can as well (some say better) be translated as ‘well-known to the apostles’. Last of all, there is the problem of why Andronicus and Junia, if they really were apostolically ‘foremost’ (were they brother and sister, husband and wife, we wonder?), are mentioned nowhere but here. Whilst Priscilla and Aquilla are the hardy perennials of the Pauline mission, Junia and Andronicus (putatively of higher status than either) get hardly a mention.
The truth is that Junia the Apostle’s reputation rests merely on the absence of a single consonant from some manuscripts, and on an interpretation of an idiom in New Testament Greek which could be construed no more certainly by John Chrysostom than by us. A single letter would condemn the female ‘apostle’ to ignominious masculinity; and a variant interpretation of the idiom would render her gender sublimely irrelevant!
So much for the Morris legacy, which amounts to little if anything. There remains the work of Professor Giorgio Otranto of the Institute of Classical and Christian Studies at the University of Bari.
Down South
Otranto worked for some years on the epigraphy of Christian tombs in Calabria and Basilicata, and published in 1982 an ‘evaluation’ of a letter of Gelasius I (492–496) to the bishops of Southern Italy, which seems to have specifically addressed the problem of women celebrating the eucharist:
‘We have heard to our annoyance,’ writes Gelasius, ‘that divine affairs have come to such a low state that women are encouraged to officiate at the sacred altars and to take part in all matters imputed to the offices of the male sex, to which they do not belong.’
Otranto’s conclusion from this remarkable letter (the Latin of which is hardly unambiguous) is no less remarkable – and Byrne it need hardly be said is close behind him. With the confident gesture of the trickster who pulls a rabbit out of the hat, Otranto concludes that because a pope condemned priestly acts by women, that there must have been priestly women. And because priestly women are supposed once to have existed, that their priesthood ought now to be valid and accepted. Furthermore, that because the priestly ministry of women is not received and accepted now, that there must be (and have been) a conspiracy to deny their existence then. The proof both of the existence and the legitimacy of women priests rests simply on the condemnation of them!
This interesting argument could obviously prove useful in other circumstances. The condemnation of almost anything might, on these principles, be taken as condoning it. Paul’s stricture against Corinthian adultery, for example, would simply encourage contemporary Christians to commit it; and a solemn anathema by an ecumenical council would infallibly pronounce the orthodoxy of a doctrine.
But the bold claim that the tradition ‘requires’ women’s ordination drowns, we suggest, in the limpid pool of history. That age which should have fostered women priests in profusion, even on the evidence of their most enthusiastic proponents, did not do so. Theirs, sadly, is an argument from something less than silence. None but ‘heretics’ perceived the ‘necessity’.
You will put your quotation marks in that last sentence where you will.
"Episcopa" above her image refers to the fact that Theodora was the mother of Pope St. Paschal I (817-824), who had the Church built to honor her. Dissident Catholics who clamor for women's ordination have foolishly tried to coopt the reference and spin it as her being a bishop.
If the category really was "Legend Says..." then I don't see any reason to complain.
Furthermore, if they had a question referring to Peter as the first pope, I wouldn't call & complain even though I believe that's false doctrine.
I believe they said the category was called "Legend Says..." so at this point I'm not sure what all the hub-bub is.
This myth was refuted long ago, by several protestants no less.
A number of books deal with the topic, including a chapter in fellow freeper Patrick Madrids' book, "Pope Fiction".
I am speculating on why not how.Speculating as to why Christ instituted the exclusively male priesthood? Or why Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians faithfully preserve the divinely instituted male priesthood?
First one.
I would assume that priests keep this directive with high fidelity because it is the word of God.
Starting with Christ’s priesthood, Christ is the unique mediator between the Father and the people. He effects that mediation both by interceding for the Church, representing the Church to the Father as head of the body of the Church, and as God's representative to his people, the Church, as the Bridegroom who betrothes the Church. The sexual imagery of Christ's mediation would lose its force if sex were merely contingent.
Ordained priests, in an analogous and derivative way, make real the dual role of Christ the Head. In baptism, we have all put on Christ; he has incorporated us into his body and each person acts in persona Christi. But to use the formulations of canon law, the priest is said to be acting in persona Christi capitis, of having the unique role of representing the 'headship' of Christ Jesus. The uniqueness of the priesthood is that Christ wills that his role as head and his pastoral presence be no less present than it was two millennia ago.
Christ the High Priest's two roles — representative and bridegroom — are fundamentally male, for whatever reason in the mystery of God. Theologically, the importance of the iconic meaning of Christ as male is paramount. On a purely physical level, the priest is the icon of Jesus, who was a man; but on a deeper level, the priest is the icon of Christ who comes as the Bride of the Church to conceive within the Church the life of grace, an icon for the whole mystery of Christ’s mediation of God to the people.
One of my recollections of the Vatican was a dark hallway to the left, about 20 feet down and just above floor level on the right side there is a caved in skull head sculpture and skeleton arm reaching up. Has anyone else seen that and know what it was?
Briefly, for background, the matter associated with each sacrament must meet certain specifications (a topical example being male and female for matrimony). For the sacrament of holy orders, the proper matter is a male.
Thus, with regards to the priesthood, the Church looks to a person's sex, not gender, when vetting candidates because of the male sex's intrinsic potential to generate. (Cf. #34 ("the priest is the icon of Christ who comes as the Bride of the Church to conceive within the Church the life of grace")).
There's the problem! If the guy was French, he would likely be mistaken for a woman. After all, just look at French"men" today. To find a man to run their country, they had to find an import from Hungary. And my male cat has been French since he was neutered.
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