The church and women in history
For the Magisterium of the Catholic Church[1] , the gender hierarchy is as God wills it. For two millennia it has preached that women are much more subject to men than men are to women. Women are excluded from priestly and episcopal charges and the diaconate they exercised in the early centuries of the church is only just being discussed afresh. Over the centuries, the majority of theologians validated this position, even though in the fourth century, the Apostolic Constitutions[2] III 6, 1-2, SC 329, 132 acknowledged the fact that “The Lord conveyed or prescribed nothing to us” on the matter.
Theologians and bishops have been at times perplexed by the place of Mary in worship. At the 433 Council of Ephesus, which pondered Christ's dual (human and divine) nature – a union without confusion according to the Council Fathers – Mary's own nature came under scrutiny. The Council had gathered to reconcile the Church after the controversy concerning the title of “Theodokos”, mother of God that popular devotion had ascribed to Mary. Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople had suggested to refer to her as “Christodokos”, mother of Christ, which he felt accorded better with Scripture. For him, Mary was only the mother of the man Jesus. The Council Fathers' majority decided to authorise the use of the term Theodokos, provoking a schism with what became the Nestorian church.
Whatever the intensity of Marian devotion, which fluctuates with time and may be variably encouraged by the clergy, two sets of arguments recur that assert women's inferiority and their inaptitude to priestly duties:
1. Tradition and proprieties. The tradition defers to the content of Scripture: Mary the holiest of women was never a priest – an argument taken up by John Paul II[3] in his encyclical letter Sacerdotalis Ordinatio (1994).
2. The subjection of women by nature. As explained by Thomas Aquinas[4] , unlike in men, be they slaves, women evince no eminentia gradus (level of dignity above others).
It must be noted that the idea according to which women cannot escape their condition because of their biological nature was also cited by civil society to exclude them from all public functions. Hence this question much discussed by historians: is the Catholic clergy a normalizing agent on society and in this particular instance a moral authority imposing female inferiority on society? Or is the Church the reflection, the by-product of society at large?
It is at any rate established that during some periods of history Church and state could concur to hold women down in subaltern position. In the 19th century, in all the countries reached by Napoleonic conquests, the Code civil enshrines women's minority in the legislative and economic systems and within the family. In 1880, Pope Leo XIII[5] chimes in with his l'encyclical[6] Arcanum divinae on Christian marriage
