The Over-Claiming and the Record

A large part of what circulates as “Elisabeth Behr-Sigel’s position” cannot be traced to anything she published. Advocacy organizations have claimed her as an authorization; opponents have taken the strongest available reading as the real one; and in December 1998 the general secretary of the World Council of Churches told the press that research by Behr-Sigel and Bishop Kallistos Ware had concluded that there are no essential or ecclesiological obstacles to the ordination of women in Orthodoxy — a claim stronger than anything either of them had put in print. This file separates the record from the reception.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu); §4.2 both-sides file

The 1998 Ecumenical News International Report

The documented case, and the most consequential.

In December 1998 the WCC’s general secretary, Konrad Raiser, told a press conference — reported by Ecumenical News International on 17 December 1998 under the headline “WCC Official Raises Possibility of Women’s Ordination in Orthodox Churches” — that research by “two respected Orthodox theologians, Bsh. Kallistos (Ware) & Elisabeth Behr-Siegel” had reached the conclusion that “there are no essential or ecclesiological reasons preventing the ordination of women in the Orthodox tradition” (ENI, 17 December 1998, as reproduced in the webmaster’s notes to Hieromonk Patapios, “A Traditionalist Critique of The Orthodox Church,” Orthodox Tradition XVI, no. 1; the same item is recorded in the repository’s Kallistos Ware file).

That paraphrase is stronger than either author’s published position.

For Ware, the point is settled: his own formulation, two years later, was that he was not persuaded by the arguments for women’s ordination, that the arguments against it seemed “less conclusive” than he had thought, and that “we Orthodox should regard the matter as an essentially open question” (Gallaher, “True Man,” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022). “Not convinced by the arguments in favor” and “no essential or ecclesiological reasons preventing” are not the same proposition. The repository’s Ware file states flatly that “the ENI/Raiser paraphrase should not be cited as Ware’s position.”

For Behr-Sigel, the position is more complicated, because her published views went further than Ware’s and because at least one strand of the reporting of her does support something like Raiser’s formulation (see the three readings set out under [Disputed] in The Question She Raised). But Raiser was not reporting her position; he was reporting a joint conclusion of a two-author research project, and the joint conclusion he described was not one the two authors had jointly published. The volume they produced — L’ordination des femmes dans l’Église orthodoxe (Cerf, 1998), Englished as The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church (WCC, 2000) — is not a joint argument at all: it is three separate chapters, two by her and one by him, the latter previously published in Fr. Thomas Hopko’s volume against women’s ordination.

[Disputed: whether either author publicly corrected the Raiser paraphrase. No correction was located for this file, and none is asserted. The absence of a located correction is not evidence that none was made.]

Why This Matters More Than It Looks

Three consequences follow, and they run in different directions.

It damaged her standing among Orthodox, deservedly or not. From December 1998 onward, an Orthodox reader encountering “Behr-Sigel” in the press encountered a woman said to have proved that nothing in Orthodoxy prevents women priests. Whatever she had actually written, that is the claim her critics were answering. A considerable portion of the hostile reception of her work is a reception of Raiser’s sentence.

It illustrates the ecumenical charge exactly. The criticism set out in The Orthodox Criticism — that an Orthodox theologian working chiefly on a Protestant platform will be used to supply an Orthodox warrant for conclusions already reached elsewhere — is not a paranoid construction. It happened, in public, in 1998, in the mouth of the WCC’s chief officer.

It does not excuse her critics from reading her. The existence of an over-claim does not establish that the underlying position was modest, and this file is not an argument that it was. Her own published position on the priesthood question went beyond Ware’s and is genuinely contested; the point is only that it should be contested as she stated it.

The Advocacy Reception

Behr-Sigel is regularly cited by organizations campaigning for women’s ordination in other communions, and by Orthodox reform advocacy, as the Orthodox authority for the position. The repository’s own Women in Orthodoxy file records the crucial qualification: “It should be stressed that even Behr-Sigel framed the priesthood question as one to be examined, and that the great majority of Orthodox hierarchs and theologians regard the male priesthood as settled.”

The pattern is the same as the one the repository records for Ware: “Advocacy sites reproduce the 1978 essay and note the later revision; theological writers seeking change have treated Ware’s ‘open question’ as authorization to keep asking. Both uses go further than his text” (Fr. Kallistos Ware).

It should also be recorded that the St. Phoebe Center for the Deaconess, the principal Orthodox body advocating restoration of the female diaconate, advocates specifically for the diaconate and not for the priesthood (orthodoxdeaconess.org; Women in Orthodoxy). The most organized inheritance of Behr-Sigel’s practical program in the Orthodox world is one that declines her most contested conclusion.

The Hostile Reception

The mirror-image distortion is equally common: the treatment of Behr-Sigel as a straightforward advocate of women priests who happened to remain nominally Orthodox. Fr. Lawrence Farley’s characterization of her as having “pushed this agenda for many years” is of this type (Farley, “Women, Lived Orthodoxy, and Ordination,” orthochristian.com).

Against this, the record shows:

She published nothing on women in the Church until 1976, at sixty-nine (Hinlicky Wilson, interview, Eastern Christian Books, November 2013).
Her first public position on the question, at Agapia, ran on Paul Evdokimov’s conservative categories.
Her mature demand was for conciliar deliberation, not for action.
She never advocated unilateral action by any Church or bishop.
She lived and died in the Orthodox Church, was a churchwarden of her parish, taught at Orthodox institutions, and was invited to give the Florovsky Lecture at St. Vladimir’s Seminary in 2003 (OCA, “In Memoriam,” oca.org, 2005).

A “campaign” of that description is a strange campaign. It does not follow that her position was harmless or right; it follows that the description is inaccurate, and inaccurate descriptions make poor arguments even against positions that deserve to lose.

Three Frequent Errors of Fact

Independent of the theological dispute, three factual claims circulate about her that this collection could not support.

“She was a woman Protestant pastor who converted to Orthodoxy and spent her life trying to bring women’s ordination with her.” The documented sequence is chrismation (12 December 1929), then the auxiliary pastorate (1931, about eight months), then forty-five years of silence on the question. See Strasbourg Theology and the Pastorate at Villé.

“She and Kallistos Ware jointly argued for the ordination of women.” They co-authored a volume of separate chapters in which he explicitly declined to be persuaded by the arguments in favor and asked only that the question be treated as open, and in which his contribution had previously appeared in the standard Orthodox volume against. See The Question She Raised.

“The Orthodox Church has restored the female diaconate, as Behr-Sigel wanted.” It has not. The Church of Greece’s decision of 8 October 2004 applies to senior nuns in monasteries; the Patriarchate of Alexandria acted for its African missions in 2016–17, with the sacramental status of the 2017 consecrations disputed at the time; the 2024 ordination of Deaconess Angelic Molen in Zimbabwe was again Alexandria alone, and as of 2026 no other autocephalous Church has followed. Behr-Sigel died in 2005 and saw none of it. See The Recovery of the Deaconess and The Deaconess.

What the Record Supports

Stated as economically as the sources permit, and with the acknowledgment that point (iv) is where the record thins:

She held the standard Orthodox arguments against the ordination of women to be theologically defective.
She held the question to be one for the Church’s free and conciliar discernment, and not to have been conciliarly settled.
She held that the diaconate and the priesthood should be deliberated together rather than the diaconate alone.
Whether she finally asserted that women can and should be ordained to the presbyterate is contested, with at least three incompatible readings in circulation and no formulation this collection could verify from the primary text. See the [Disputed] note in The Question She Raised.
She never claimed to speak for the Church, never advocated unilateral action, was never disciplined, and died in the Church’s communion.

The honest position, for a reference work, is that the fourth point remains open — and that a reader who needs it settled must go to L’ordination des femmes dans l’Église orthodoxe (Cerf, 1998), which this collection was not able to consult.

References

Ecumenical News International, 17 December 1998, “WCC Official Raises Possibility of Women’s Ordination in Orthodox Churches,” reporting Konrad Raiser; as reproduced in the webmaster’s notes to Hieromonk Patapios, “A Traditionalist Critique of The Orthodox Church,” Orthodox Tradition XVI, no. 1, 39–72.
Gallaher, Brandon. “True Man: Kallistos of Oxford as Orthodoxy’s First Universal Teacher of the Global Age.” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022. (Ware’s three-part formulation.)
Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth, and Bishop Kallistos Ware. The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church. Geneva: WCC Publications, 2000 (Risk Book Series; three chapters from L’ordination des femmes dans l’Église orthodoxe, Paris: Cerf, 1998); Ware’s chapter previously in Thomas Hopko, ed., Women and the Priesthood, rev. ed., SVS Press, 1999.
Women in Orthodoxy — ../../orthodoxy/12-church-and-world/women-in-orthodoxy.md. (“It should be stressed that even Behr-Sigel framed the priesthood question as one to be examined”; the St. Phoebe Center’s advocacy for the diaconate and not the priesthood.)
Farley, Lawrence, Fr. “Women, Lived Orthodoxy, and Ordination.” orthochristian.com.
Hinlicky Wilson, Sarah. Interview, Eastern Christian Books, November 2013. (Nothing published on women before 1976.)
Orthodox Church in America. “In Memoriam: Madame Elizabeth Behr-Sigal.” oca.org, December 2005.
St. Phoebe Center for the Deaconess (orthodoxdeaconess.org).