Research Paper
THEO 100
04/21/2017
Ordination of Women in the Catholic Church
For years the issue of allowing for equality between men and women has been a controversial topic that resides on both the female gender and male gender. Since entering the 21st century, the increase of advocacy for women’s rights and equality has been shifted to the top of the list that America has to begin working on bettering the nation. One particular issue has been the ordination of women in the Catholic Church. While it seems as if it would be obvious to some theologians that ordination should be only prohibited to women, this happens to appear extremely unjust to other. From a religious perspective, many find that allowing for the …show more content…
Women have obtained roles from the beginning of times according the Bible and to this day have taken on much more than what they would have back then. Looking at it in a broad perspective, each duration of time had a different outlook on how they saw women. In the Old Testament, society was very much male-dominated, more so than what it is now. Their status at this time has often been compared to children’s subservience today. Although women took on more of a subservient role, a numerous amount of them were still spoken about by prophets and leaders. One of the most famous leader’s being Miriam, the prophetess that praised God with her vocals. From a religious perspective, God has always appointed certain women to do certain tasks for him, with others not questioning his decisions. As for the New Testament, women were not taking on positions in the actual church, but in the Bible, things seemed to be different. They were not necessarily given the privilege of serving as higher positioned leaders. While those privileges were not attainable for women in church, there were however, many women that were mentioned in the New Testament who did have leadership positions. Although these women are mentioned briefly, they do serve as actual biblical precedents that call to question the belief that the Bible supports the church only allowing male leaders. When Jesus was resurrected, he easily could have chosen to make himself present to a man first, but found himself appearing to a woman and relied on her to pass along his word to a group of men (Matt. 28:8-10). This meant it was up to the men to follow the woman’s instructions. A bit later in the early church, women were included among the disciples that had been chosen. With the church growing, the number of women and men grew allowing for them to see they were much more alike than different. This issue