Women, Priesthood and Same-Sex Relationships

Ware wrote against the ordination of women in 1978, revised the essay two decades later, and by 2000 was pleading that Orthodox “should regard the matter as an essentially open question” — a shift that has been claimed by both sides of the argument and accurately represented by neither. In 2018 he wrote a five-page foreword to an issue of The Wheel on sexuality which named three “anomalies” in the Church’s pastoral treatment of homosexual persons, while stating that Orthodox teaching on same-sex acts is clear and that he was not proposing to set it aside. Both interventions drew substantial published criticism. This file quotes the primary texts at length, names the critics, and adjudicates nothing.

Tradition: Orthodox (Britain; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

Part I — Women and the Priesthood

The 1978 Essay

“Man, Woman and the Priesthood of Christ” was first published in Peter Moore, ed., Man, Woman, and Priesthood (London: SPCK, 1978), 68–90 — a volume produced in the middle of the Anglican debate over women’s ordination, to which Ware contributed the Orthodox voice.

The 1978 position was negative. Ware argued that women possess distinctive spiritual gifts fitted to particular ecclesial roles rather than to the ministerial priesthood, and closed with two illustrations of women’s indispensable place in the Church’s life — a scene of Greek village worship and Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Easter procession in Soviet Moscow. His constructive proposals were two: the cultivation of “spiritual motherhood,” and the revival of the ancient order of deaconesses. His model of the Christian woman’s role was the Virgin at the Annunciation — “passive, not subordinate, but resolute and creative” (Ware, “Man, Woman and the Priesthood of Christ,” in Moore, ed., Man, Woman, and Priesthood, 1978, 68–90; see Deaconess History and Theotokos).

The essay was reprinted in Thomas Hopko, ed., Women and the Priesthood (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983), and became the standard Orthodox statement in English of the case against.

The 1999 Revision and the 2000 Formulation

Ware revised the essay for the new edition of Hopko’s Women and the Priesthood (SVS Press, 1999), and the revised version is generally described as marking a real change: he had moved from treating women’s ordination as an impossibility to treating it as a question the Orthodox Church has not in fact closed.

[Disputed: the exact wording of the 1999 revision, and its pagination. Secondary sources place Ware's revised essay at pp. 5–53 of the 1999 edition and at a different range in the 1983 edition; these figures could not be checked against the printed volumes for this file, and no verbatim quotation from the 1999 revision is offered here for that reason. Readers needing Ware's precise 1999 language must consult the book. What is well attested is the direction of the change, reported consistently across sources sympathetic and hostile.]

The clearest attested statement of the later position comes from the following year. In Elisabeth Behr-Sigel and Bishop Kallistos Ware, The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2000), Ware set out a carefully layered position which Brandon Gallaher summarizes and quotes: Ware was not persuaded by the arguments for women’s ordination; but the arguments against it which he had formerly accepted now “seemed less conclusive”; and therefore “we Orthodox should regard the matter as an essentially open question” (Gallaher, “True Man,” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022, quoting Ware).

That three-part structure is the whole of the matter and is routinely collapsed in both directions. Ware did not advocate the ordination of women. He did not affirm that it is possible. What he claimed is that the Orthodox Church has not conciliarly settled the question, and that the standard arguments deployed against it are weaker than he had once thought — so that the question is one for genuine theological inquiry rather than for reflexive refusal.

[Disputed: how far the WCC represented Ware's position accurately. In December 1998 the WCC's general secretary, Konrad Raiser, told a press conference and Ecumenical News International 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 Patapios, "A Traditionalist Critique"). This is a stronger claim than any formulation of Ware's located for this file: Ware's own published position states that he is not convinced by the arguments in favor and asks only that the question be treated as open. The ENI/Raiser paraphrase should not be cited as Ware's position. Whether Ware publicly corrected it is not established here.]

Reception and Criticism

The reaction among Orthodox was, in the main, to treat the position as a personal opinion carrying no ecclesial weight. The characterization that recurs is that Ware’s views on the matter “are nothing more than personal opinions and do not represent any ‘current trend’ in Orthodox Christianity,” and that he was in any case “not in favor of women’s ordination” but attempting to provoke a genuinely Orthodox response rather than a reflexive echo of Western polemics.

Traditionalist critics treated it more sharply, and as of a piece with his ecumenical work: Patapios’s critique of The Orthodox Church notes Ware’s report that Patriarch Parthenios III of Alexandria was “intellectually one of the more adventurous of Orthodox Church leaders” who had expressed himself “in favour of the ordination of women priests,” and treats the sympathetic framing as evidence of the direction of Ware’s own thought (Patapios, “A Traditionalist Critique of The Orthodox Church,” Orthodox Tradition XVI, no. 1, 39–72).

From the other side, Ware’s position has been claimed as an opening. 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.

The Diaconate, Which Is a Different Question

It should not be lost that Ware’s positive proposal on this front, from 1978 onward, was the restoration of the order of deaconesses — an order the Orthodox Church historically possessed and whose revival has been discussed at the highest levels of several autocephalous Churches. He returned to the subject repeatedly in later interviews. This is a distinct question from the priesthood, with a distinct history and a distinct set of arguments, and conflating the two — in either direction — misrepresents both him and the tradition (see Deaconess History and Women in Orthodoxy).

A Note from 2008

Asked in August 2008 about the Lambeth Conference and the Anglican Communion’s divisions, Ware said that “The Anglican Communion cannot settle this without bearing in mind its bonds with the wider communion of the Church,” that the Anglican innovations at issue “are departures from Church order and from accepted moral teaching of basic importance,” and — the sentence his critics fastened on — that “It could be argued that perhaps the Anglican Communion was guided by the Holy Spirit to lead other Christians into new paths” (interview with Fr George Westhaver, VirtueOnline, 2 August 2008, as reproduced by OrthodoxyToday). His critics read the third sentence as an insinuation; his defenders read it as the conditional statement of a position he goes on not to hold. The three sentences are given together here because they are almost never quoted together.

Part II — The 2018 Foreword on Same-Sex Relationships

What He Actually Wrote

In Spring/Summer 2018 The Wheel, an independent journal of Orthodox theology, devoted a double issue (13/14) to “Being Human: Embodiment and Anthropology,” guest-edited by Fr Andrew Louth. Metropolitan Kallistos contributed the Foreword, five pages long, at pages 6–10.

Because the foreword has been summarized in mutually contradictory ways, the substance is set out here from the printed text.

The frame is anthropological, not sexual. Ware opens with Turgenev — “The heart of another is a dark forest” — and applies it to the self: “There are profundities within each one of us which we have yet to plumb.” He quotes Clement of Alexandria on knowing oneself, and states three principles that structure the piece: that anthropology is “integrally linked to Christology,” Christ being “the first genuine human being”; that human personhood is “not just a ‘given’… but a project, an as yet uncompleted task”; and that personhood is relational — “Una persona, nulla persona: one person, subsisting alone… is not a real person” (Ware, “Foreword,” The Wheel 13/14 [Spring/Summer 2018], 6–7).

He then argues from the marriage service, and the argument is traditional. Ware regrets that the volume gives insufficient weight to the liturgical rite of marriage, and states the reason in a strikingly high-traditional register: “in the course of the last thousand years it has been used on millions of occasions, and so it carries far greater weight than the opinions of individual thinkers” (ibid., 7). He then reads the rite: the service for a first marriage names two purposes, mutual love (including bodily union) and the procreation of children, with neither subordinated to the other; and it conspicuously omits any notion of marriage as a remedy against lust — an omission thrown into relief by the penitential character of the service for a second marriage, with its “Grant them the tears of the prostitute” (ibid., 7–8; see The Holy Mysteries).

He states the Church’s teaching, twice, without qualification. “Homosexual orientation, we would say, is indeed contrary to God’s plan for humankind, being one of the consequences of the fall” (ibid., 8–9). And: “The Orthodox tradition teaches clearly that sexual acts between persons of the same sex are not permitted” (ibid., 9).

He then names three anomalies. These are the substance of the controversy.

Orientation and the burden of celibacy. Orthodox writers now distinguish orientation from action: persons “are not personally guilty of their orientation, because this is not something they have chosen; they only become guilty if by deliberate choice they decide to live out this orientation in their actions. They can choose to be celibate.” But, Ware continues, “This argument, however, places us in difficulty,” since heterosexual persons have the option of marriage. Quoting Vasileios Thermos — “A homosexual subject is called to lead a celibate life without feeling a vocation for it” — he asks: “Are we right to impose this heavy burden on the homosexual?” (ibid., 9).
An inconsistency in confession. Ware describes two penitents: one promiscuous, who repents, is absolved and communes, relapses, repents again — “So the cycle continues”; and one in a faithful monogamous relationship who declines to end it or to abstain, and whom the priest therefore “may well feel that he cannot bless… to receive the sacrament.” His conclusion: “The homosexual committed to a stable and loving relationship is treated more harshly than the homosexual who is casual and promiscuous, and who is seeking not true love but passing pleasure. Something has gone wrong here” (ibid., 9). He adds, parenthetically, “(Yet I have known homosexuals who have indeed transformed their relationship in this way.)”
The focus on genital acts. Noting that the tradition recognizes “authentic spiritual value in deep friendships between such persons, even passionate friendships,” he asks: “Why do we put so great an emphasis upon genital sex? Why do we seek to enquire what adult persons of the same sex are doing in the privacy of their bedrooms? Trying to gaze through the keyhole is never a dignified posture.” And then, immediately, the sentence that governs the whole passage: “I am not suggesting here that we should bluntly set aside the traditional Orthodox teaching, but we do need to enquire more rigorously into the reasons that lie behind it” (ibid., 9–10).

He distances himself from the volume’s contributors. “Without accepting everything that is said by the three authors of the text ‘Jesus Christ and Same-Sex Marriage,’ I fully recognise that they are dealing with genuine problems” (ibid., 8). And in closing: “While not agreeing with all that is said in this volume — indeed, the contributors do not always agree among themselves — nevertheless I welcome this issue of The Wheel. I welcome it precisely because it does not claim to offer a systematic and definitive treatment of sexuality, but because its aim is to ‘initiate discussion,’ as the guest editor, Father Andrew Louth, notes” (ibid., 10). He quotes with approval Brandon Gallaher’s “To ascertain the truth we must experiment” and Thermos’s plea for “loving compassion,” and ends: “Let us acknowledge, moreover, the variety of paths that God calls us human beings to follow” (ibid., 10).

The Criticism

The foreword produced a rapid and substantial reaction in the Anglophone Orthodox world, essentially all of it negative and much of it from clergy. The published responses located for this file are:

Hieromonk Herman (Majkrzak), “The Church and Homosexuality: A Meditation,” Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy (Ancient Faith Blogs), 13 June 2018.
Dr Edith M. Humphrey, “Ambiguity Serves No One,” Orthodox Life, 15 June 2018 — arguing that the foreword withholds clarity at a moment when the faithful need it; that Ware’s two confessional scenarios are unfairly drawn, presenting the promiscuous penitent as repentant-though-weak and the other as resistant to the Church’s teaching; that celibacy is not the peculiar burden Ware makes it, being embraced by many Christians in many circumstances; and that “calls to pastoral clemency frequently end in unexamined shifts in ethical and social practice.”
Fr John Cox, “Anatomy of a Foreword: Metr. Kallistos on Sexual Morality,” Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy (Ancient Faith Blogs), 16 June 2018 — arguing that the foreword privileges subjective experience and fairness over objective doctrine; that by asking whether celibacy is unfair to homosexual persons without asking the same of celibate heterosexuals Ware constructs a dilemma with only one exit, namely “to recognize monogamous homosexual relations as permissible within the Church”; and that Ware separates liturgical practice from dogmatic truth.
Fr Juvenaly Repass, “Met. Kallistos Clearly Implies that the Church Should Bless Committed Same-Sex Relationships,” OrthodoxNet Blog, June 2018.
Fr Lawrence Farley, “Metropolitan Kallistos and The Wheel,” No Other Foundation (Ancient Faith Blogs), 2018.
Reader Dr Alfred Kentigern Siewers, “The Unbearable Essentializing of Being: Metropolitan Kallistos Ware’s Sorrowful Joy of Sex,” AOIUSA, 2018.

The shared charge, as summarized by the aggregating site that collected them, is that the foreword “conflates promiscuity with homosexuality, manipulates readers into accepting monogamous same-sex relationships, [and] undermines Orthodox teaching on sexual morality” (OrthodoxyToday, “Orthodox Priests Challenge Met. Kallistos Ware’s Views of Monogamous Homosexual Relationships,” July 2018). Headlines went further than the articles: one read “Met. Kallistos Ware Comes Out for Homosexual ‘Marriage’” (OrthodoxyToday, June 2018).

The Defense

Ware’s defenders — and the editors of The Wheel — made three points.

He affirmed the teaching. The foreword states that same-sex acts are not permitted and that homosexual orientation is contrary to God’s plan and a consequence of the fall, and it expressly disclaims any proposal to set the traditional teaching aside. Gallaher’s obituary summarizes the position as a call for “pastoral compassion towards homosexual persons” while affirming traditional teaching (Gallaher, “True Man,” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022).

He asked questions rather than proposing answers. The three anomalies are put as questions, and the volume’s stated purpose, which Ware endorses, was to “initiate discussion.”

The pastoral inconsistency he identifies is real. Whatever the right resolution, the observation that a penitent in a stable relationship may in practice fare worse at confession than one in serial casual encounters is an observation about pastoral practice, not a doctrinal proposal — and the critics largely dispute Ware’s framing of the two cases rather than denying that pastoral inconsistency exists.

What Is and Is Not Established

[Disputed: whether Ware endorsed the blessing of same-sex unions. The most widely circulated headlines assert that he did. His printed text of 2018 does not: it states that Orthodox teaching forbids same-sex acts and expressly declines to propose setting that teaching aside. His critics argue that the *logic* of the foreword permits no other conclusion — Fr John Cox's argument is precisely that the dilemma as posed has one exit — and that a bishop's questions function as permissions. This is a dispute about implication, not about the text. The collection records what the text says, records that competent readers drew the further inference, and does not adjudicate whether the inference is warranted.]

[Disputed: a claimed foreword by Ware to "For I Am Wonderfully Made": Texts on Eastern Orthodoxy and LGBT Inclusion, ed. Misha Cherniak, Olga Gerassimenko and Michael Brinkschröder (Esuberanza, 2016/2017). No confirmation of Ware's authorship of a foreword to that volume was found in the sources consulted, and the claim is not asserted here. The documented 2018 foreword is to The Wheel 13/14, a different publication.]

[Disputed: any statement by Ware on these questions after 2018. He died on 24 August 2022; the posthumous Reminiscences and Recollections (SVS Press, 2025) is based on sessions recorded 2011–2016 and has not been examined for this file. Whether it contains further material on either question is unknown here.]

The §4.1 Line

Per METHODOLOGY §4.1, the Orthodox Church’s teaching on marriage, on the male priesthood, and on sexual acts outside the marriage of a man and a woman is not revised, qualified or adjudicated by this collection. It is the Church’s, and the Church has stated it. What is reported here is what one bishop and theologian wrote, what he explicitly declined to say, and what other Orthodox said in response. Readers seeking the Church’s teaching itself should go to the repository’s doctrinal files and to their own hierarchs, not to a study of a contested modern author (see Women in Orthodoxy, Social Ethics, and The Holy Mysteries).

References

Ware, Kallistos. “Man, Woman and the Priesthood of Christ.” In Peter Moore, ed., Man, Woman, and Priesthood. London: SPCK, 1978, 68–90. Reprinted in Thomas Hopko, ed., Women and the Priesthood. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983; revised for the new edition of the same volume, SVS Press, 1999.
Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth, and Bishop Kallistos Ware. The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church. Geneva: WCC Publications, 2000. (ISBN 2-8254-1336-4.)
Ware, Kallistos, Metropolitan of Diokleia. “Foreword.” The Wheel 13/14, “Being Human: Embodiment and Anthropology,” guest ed. Andrew Louth (Spring/Summer 2018), 6–10. (All quotations in Part II are from this text as printed.)
Gallaher, Brandon. “True Man: Kallistos of Oxford as Orthodoxy’s First Universal Teacher of the Global Age.” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022. (Quotes Ware’s “essentially open question”; summarizes his position on sexuality.)
Humphrey, Edith M. “Ambiguity Serves No One.” Orthodox Life, 15 June 2018.
Cox, John, Fr. “Anatomy of a Foreword: Metr. Kallistos on Sexual Morality.” Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, Ancient Faith Blogs, 16 June 2018.
Majkrzak, Hieromonk Herman. “The Church and Homosexuality: A Meditation.” Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, Ancient Faith Blogs, 13 June 2018.
Repass, Juvenaly, Fr. “Met. Kallistos Clearly Implies that the Church Should Bless Committed Same-Sex Relationships.” OrthodoxNet Blog, June 2018.
Farley, Lawrence, Fr. “Metropolitan Kallistos and The Wheel.” No Other Foundation, Ancient Faith Blogs, 2018.
Siewers, Alfred Kentigern. “The Unbearable Essentializing of Being: Metropolitan Kallistos Ware’s Sorrowful Joy of Sex.” AOIUSA, 2018.
OrthodoxyToday. “Orthodox Priests Challenge Met. Kallistos Ware’s Views of Monogamous Homosexual Relationships,” July 2018; and “Met. Kallistos Ware on the Ordination of Women and Blessing of Same-Sex Marriages,” June 2018 (reproducing the 2 August 2008 VirtueOnline interview with Fr George Westhaver).
Patapios, Hieromonk. “A Traditionalist Critique of The Orthodox Church.” Orthodox Tradition XVI, no. 1, 39–72, with the webmaster’s notes reproducing Ecumenical News International, 17 December 1998, “WCC Official Raises Possibility of Women’s Ordination in Orthodox Churches.”