Title: Roman Catholicism - Gender and Sexuality
Headings: Roman Catholicism
RELIGION LIBRARY
Roman Catholicism
Ethics and Community
Gender and Sexuality
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Content: Roman Catholicism - Gender and Sexuality
RELIGION LIBRARY
Roman Catholicism
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Ethics and Community
Gender and Sexuality
Gender is a topic of much concern in the Catholic Church, which reserves the sacrament of Holy Orders to men. This means that women cannot be deacons, priests, or bishops and effectively excludes them from all higher levels of Church service and authority where ordination is a prerequisite. It is the Church's longstanding belief that women should not be admitted to the priesthood because Christ did not choose any women to be among his closest twelve disciples, whom Catholics view as the first Christian ministers. If Christ chose only men despite his willingness to break many social norms where women are concerned, then it is because he wished to institute the ministerial role for men alone. The question of women in the priesthood remains very much alive despite Pope John Paul II's forceful statements in the Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (1994), declaring that "the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful." 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.