06 — The Ministry of Women

Behr-Sigel published nothing on women in the Church until 1976, when at sixty-nine she was invited to give the opening address at the first international consultation of Orthodox women, at the monastery of Agapia in Romania. From that address grew a decade of lectures and essays, the book Le ministère de la femme dans l’Église (1987), and a sustained campaign for the recovery of the ancient order of deaconesses. This section covers the constructive work: what she proposed, and what came of it.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu)

Files in This Section

• Agapia 1976 and the Ministry of Women — the consultation, the address, the decade of reflection it opened, and the book of 1987.
• The Recovery of the Deaconess — the ancient order, the Rhodes consultation of 1988, the petition to the Ecumenical Patriarch, and what the Churches have and have not done since.

The Distinction This Section Keeps

The question of the female diaconate and the question of the female priesthood are theologically distinct, historically distinct, and canonically distinct. The Orthodox Church historically possessed an order of ordained deaconesses; it has never possessed women presbyters or bishops. Most advocates of restoring the deaconess firmly reject the ordination of women to the priesthood, and the repository’s own treatment insists on the distinction (see The Deaconess and Women in Orthodoxy).

Behr-Sigel is the figure who complicates the distinction, because she came to hold that the two should be deliberated together rather than separated. That position is treated in Section 07, which is where the collection’s §4.2 obligation is discharged. This section deals only with the ministry of women short of the presbyterate — the diaconate, the charisms, the actual offices — and readers should not read forward into it what belongs to the next section.

The Shape of Her Constructive Case

Three moves, stated here in outline and developed in the files.

Begin from what is already there. Her method is not to demand new offices but to look at what Orthodox women have in fact been and done — the ammas of the desert, the deaconesses of Byzantium, the abbesses, the iconographers, the catechists, the martyrs, the mothers — and to ask why so much of it goes unnamed and unstructured. The repository’s own Women in Orthodoxy makes the same inventory.

Recover rather than innovate. Her deaconess argument is an argument from the tradition: the order existed, was ordained at the altar with the invocation of the Holy Spirit, and was never canonically abolished. Restoration would then be renewal, not innovation — the position of the Rhodes consultation of 1988 and of the scholars who have argued it since.

Adapt rather than reconstruct. She did not want the Byzantine deaconess re-enacted. The ancient order’s central liturgical function — assisting at the baptism of adult women — has largely lost its occasion with the normalization of infant baptism. What she sought was the order restored adapted to present needs: catechesis, charity, pastoral care of women, the ministries the Church actually requires (Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, interview, Eastern Christian Books, November 2013).

See Also

• 05 — The Theology of the Person — the ground of the argument
• 07 — The Ordination Question — the contested extension
• The Deaconess — the repository’s history of the order
• Women in Orthodoxy — the doctrinal treatment
• The Holy Mysteries — the mystery of orders

References

• Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth. Le ministère de la femme dans l’Église. Paris: Cerf, 1987. English: The Ministry of Women in the Church, trans. Steven Bigham. Redondo Beach, CA: Oakwood Publications, 1991.
• Conclusions of the Inter-Orthodox Consultation, Rhodes, 1988 (orthodoxdeaconess.org).
• FitzGerald, Kyriaki Karidoyanes. Women Deacons in the Orthodox Church: Called to Holiness and Ministry. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1998.
• Hinlicky Wilson, Sarah. Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. London: T&T Clark, 2013.