a Christian Community Building Households of Faitha Christian Community Building Households of Faith
Today is July 9, 2008
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Fr. Steve Kuhlmann, OP Pastor Mr. John Weaver Deacon Location 1115 Locust Street Columbia, MO 65201 map Phone: (573) 443-3470 Fax: (573) 442-1082 Mass Schedule
Reconciliation Wednesday, 5:00-5:35 pm and by appointment 
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Women in the History of the ChurchDear CIOT Participants, At our last meeting before the summer break, we will discuss the enormously broad and important topic of women in the history of the church. The importance of the issue needs no commentary from me. About its breadth, however, I should say that the quantity, quality, and orientation of the available materials varies widely. The place to start, I think, is with a few reasonably objective, scholarly overviews of the topic, and I have given you three. Tina Beattie’s piece was written for the Encyclopedia of Religion, and is for this reason a decidely non-confessional history. That is not to say, however, that it does not have its own agenda, discernable already in the title which mentions “Gender” but not “Women,” although for the most part the latter term fits (There is no entry in this reference work on “Women and Christianity”!). The other two entries are taken from the New Catholic Encyclopedia, and one may therefore say that although they are written from a decidedly Catholic point of view, they are nonetheless written by quailified scholars.
Unfortunately, web-surfing for our topic has proven to be maddening for two reasons in particular: websites that offer related materials are rarely objective and often driven by some sort of agenda (whether you support that agenda or not); and there are actually very few or no sites that say much about the history of women in the church without limiting the material to the agenda in question, i.e., many discussion of women in the early church occur in the context of modern debates about female ordination, etc. So, I’ve tried to assemble some useful links, including some sites that will take you to other sites should you wish to explore them. Here are a few: About.com has a number of links on women in church history. The following link will take you to a section titled “Christianity and Women”, under which you’ll find articles pertaining to the early Church, the Medieval period, Catholicism, Protestantis, Orthodox, Women in the Bible, Female Ordination, and Feminist Theology:
Another is the site God’s Word to Women that includes, for example, a history of women in the early church and A Brief History of Some Women in Ministry (a series of ‘greatest hits’ paragraphs about influential women in the church since the first century, which kind of fizzles out in the twentieth century). The influence of St. Thomas Aquinus on the nature of women and their role in the church has been tremendous. Here are three brief discussions of this medieval theologian’s views:
Ida Raming published an important scholarly book on the medieval tradition and exclusion of women from the church, which was summarized by Gary Macy in the NCR (April 25, 2003): Finally, we’d do well to think about the Church, Women, and the immediate past. The most recent document issued by the Vatican on the role of women in the church came in 2004, titled On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World. Almost immediately thereafter, the National Catholc Reporter printed a summary by John Allen and several responses that include:
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