Title: Roman Catholicism - Gender and Sexuality
Headings: Roman Catholicism
RELIGION LIBRARY
Roman Catholicism
Ethics and Community
Gender and Sexuality
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Content: Some modern Catholics argue that Christ's choice reflected a particular societal context and that the exclusion of women from the priesthood and the diaconate is now a matter of politics and power. They believe the Church should recognize that women's creation in the image of God enables them to stand in service to others just as fully as men, and that the thinking that has kept this from happening is not immortal truth but a changing social definition. Traditionally the Church taught that women were not created with the same degree of perfection as men, unable to reason as well or reflect God as fully. While this conception of women, explicitly laid out by St. Thomas Aquinas, is no longer taught, many modern Catholics believe that the Church's current teachings remain subtly informed by it. Women's exclusion from the priesthood was long a barrier to the diaconate as well, since deacons were merely priests in training. With Vatican II's restoration of a diaconate that does not lead to the priesthood, women's ability to fulfill this role has become more of an open question. In fact, Pope Paul VI commissioned a study to determine whether women could serve in the diaconate, but it was never published and the whole issue has been effectively tabled. The Church has not definitively stated that women will never be restored to the diaconate, a role that was open to them in New Testament times and for many centuries thereafter, but such a restoration does not appear to be on the immediate horizon. Beyond the realm of ordination, though, the modern Church strongly affirms the dignity and worth of women. The same Pope John Paul II who definitively excluded women from the priesthood had written a few years earlier in Mulieris Dignitatem (1988) of women's vital role in the Church, their importance in the family and in society, their equal worth before God, and the need to break down societal barriers such as unequal pay that have kept them in secondary status.