THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF WOMEN’S ORDINATION: FEMALE CLERGY IN THE MEDIEVAL WEST

Abstract

Faced with the Roman Catholic definitive teaching of the inadmissibility of women to the ministerial priesthood of 1995 and coupled with the 2008 universal sanction of automatic excommunication void of a formal penal process, can the intriguing findings of Gary Macy, Santa Clara University’s John Nobili, S.J. Professor of Theology trigger a new conversation in the Church? Macy has taught for twenty-nine years on the medieval church and on Christian ritual at the University of San Diego, California. He has published several books and over twenty articles on the theology and history of the Eucharist and on women’s ordination. As a competent historian, the author argues that theologians and canonists intentionally manipulated the reality of ordained women in medieval western Catholicism to erase its memory, and the latter redefined ordination to exclude women.