The Argument Over Ordaining Women

Whether women may be ordained is the sharpest live dispute the practice generates, and it runs differently through different traditions rather than splitting neatly along a single line. The Catholic church holds the question closed rather than merely undecided: Pope John Paul II's 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis declared 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 faithful, language deliberately chosen to place the question outside further theological debate, a position the Orthodox churches independently share on similar grounds concerning an unbroken male priesthood held to trace back to Christ's own choice of apostles. Protestant practice has moved in the opposite direction over roughly the same period: most mainline denominations, including most Anglican provinces, Lutheran and Presbyterian churches and the larger Methodist and Baptist bodies, now ordain women, a change that in the Church of England produced its own internal crisis, with a minority of clergy and parishes leaving for Catholicism or Orthodoxy after the change was approved in 1992 and implemented from 1994, and further debate followed the consecration of the first woman bishop there in 2015.

Within Judaism, non-Orthodox movements ordain women rabbis routinely, while Orthodox Judaism has not, though a small and contested number of women have taken clergy-equivalent titles within some Modern Orthodox communities in recent years, a development traditionalist Orthodox authorities have rejected as inconsistent with the tradition's structure rather than as a live open question.