`Grant Her Your Spirit’

America (americamagazine.org)
Vol. 192, No. 4
February 7, 2005

By Phyllis Zagano

The Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church of Greece voted in Athens on Oct.
8, 2004, to restore the female diaconate. All the members of the Holy
Synod – 125 metropolitans and bishops and Archbishop Christodoulos, the
head of the church of Greece – had considered the topic. The decision does
not directly affect the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, which is
an eparchy of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. The Greek
ecclesiastical provinces of the Ecumenical Patriarchate received their
independence from Constantinople in 1850 and were proclaimed the
Autocephalous Church of Greece.

While women deacons had virtually disappeared by the ninth century, the
facts of their existence were well known, and discussion of the
restoration of the female diaconate in Orthodoxy began in the latter
half of the 20th century. Two books on the topic by Evangelos Theodorou,
Heroines of Love: Deaconesses Through the Ages (1949) and The
`Ordination’ or `Appointment’ of Deaconesses (1954), documented the
sacramental ordination of women in the early church. His work was
complemented in the Catholic Church by an article published by Cipriano
Vagaggini, a Camaldolese monk, in Orientalia Christiana Periodica in
1974. The most significant scholarship on the topic agrees that women
were sacramentally ordained to the diaconate, inside the iconostasis at
the altar, by bishops in the early church. Women deacons received the
diaconal stole and Communion at their ordinations, which shared the same
Pentecostal quality as the ordination of a bishop, priest or male deacon.

Despite the decline of the order of deaconesses in the early Middle
Ages, Orthodoxy never prohibited it. In 1907 a Russian Orthodox Church
commission reported the presence of deaconesses in every Georgian
parish; the popular 20th-century Orthodox saint Nektarios (1846-1920)
ordained two women deacons in 1911; and up to the 1950’s a few Greek
Orthodox nuns became monastic deaconesses. In 1986 Christodoulos, then
metropolitan of Demetrias and now archbishop of Athens and all of
Greece, ordained a woman deacon according to the `ritual of St.
Nektarios’ – the ancient Byzantine text St. Nektarios used.

Multiple inter-Orthodox conferences called for the restoration of the
order, including the Interorthodox Symposium at Rhodes, Greece, in 1988,
which plainly stated, `The apostolic order of deaconess should be
revived.’ The symposium noted that `the revival of this ancient order
should be envisaged on the basis of the ancient prototypes testified to
in many sources and with the prayers found in the Apostolic
Constitutions and the ancient Byzantine liturgical books.’

At the Holy Synod meeting in Athens in 2004, Metropolitan Chrysostom of
Chalkidos initiated discussion on the subject of the role of women in
the Church of Greece and the rejuvenation of the order of female
deacons. In the ensuing discussion, some older bishops apparently
disagreed with the complete restoration of the order. Anthimos, bishop
of Thessaloniki, later remarked to the Kathimerini English Daily, `As
far as I know, the induction of women into the police and the army was a
failure, and we want to return to this old matter?’

While the social-service aspect of the female diaconate is well known,
the Holy Synod decided that women could be promoted to the diaconate
only in remote monasteries and at the discretion of individual bishops.
The limiting decision to restore only the monastic female diaconate did
not please some synod members. The Athens News Agency reported that
Chrysostomos, bishop of Peristeri, said, `The role of female deacons
must be in society and not in the monasteries.’ Other members of the
Holy Synod agreed and stressed that the role of deaconesses should be
social – for example, the conferring of last rites on the sick.

The vote of the Holy Synod to restore the female diaconate under limited
circumstances may be the most progressive idea the Orthodox Church can
bring to the world. The document does not use the word ordination, but
specifically allows bishops to consecrate (kathosiosi) senior nuns in
monasteries of their eparchies. But bishops who choose to promote women
to the diaconate have only the ancient Byzantine liturgy that performs
the same cheirotonia, laying on of hands, for deaconesses as in each
major order: bishop, priest and deacon. Even so, some (mostly Western)
scholars have argued that the historical ordination of women deacons was
not a cheirotonia, or ordination to major orders, but a cheirothesia, a
blessing that signifies installation to a minor order. The confusion is
understandable, since the two terms were sometimes used interchangeably,
but other scholars are equally convinced that women were ordained to the
major order of the diaconate. The proof will be in the liturgy the
bishops actually use. At present there is only one liturgy and one
tradition by which to create a woman deacon in the Byzantine rite, and
it is demonstrably a ritual of ordination for the `servant who is to be
ordained to the office of a deaconess.’

Even the document on the diaconate issued by the Vatican’s International
Theological Commission in 2002 admits that `Canon 15 of the Council of
Chalcedon (451) seems to confirm the fact that deaconesses really were
`ordained’ by the imposition of hands (cheirotonia).’ Despite the
pejorative use of quotation marks here and elsewhere in the document
when historical ordinations of women deacons are mentioned, this Vatican
commission seems unwilling to deny the history to which the Church of
Greece has now newly returned. Further, the Vatican document points out
that the practice of ordaining women deacons according to the Byzantine
liturgy lasted at least into the eighth century. It does not review
Orthodox practice after 1054.

The rejuvenation of the order of deaconess in the Church of Greece is
expected to begin during the winter of 2004-5. The contemporary
ordination (cheirotonia) of women provides even more evidence and
support for the restoration of the female diaconate in the Catholic
Church, which has acknowledged the validity of Orthodox sacraments and
orders. Despite the distinction in Canon 1024 – `A baptized male alone
receives sacred ordination validly’ – one can presume the possibility of a
derogation from the law, as suggested by the Canon Law Society of
America in 1995, to allow for diaconal ordination of women. (The history
of Canon 1024 is clearly one of attempts to restrict women from
priesthood, not from the diaconate.)

In fact, the Catholic Church has already indirectly acknowledged valid
ordinations of women by the Armenian Apostolic Church, one of the
churches of the East that ordains women deacons. There are two recent
declarations of unity – agreements of mutual recognition of the validity
of sacraments and of orders – between Rome and the Armenian Church, one
signed by Paul VI and Catholicos Vasken I in 1970, another between John
Paul II and Catholicos Karekin I in 1996.

These agreements are significant, for the Armenian Apostolic Church has
retained the female diaconate into modern times. The Armenian
Catholicossate of Cilicia has at least four ordained women. One, Sister
Hrip’sime, who lives in Istanbul, is listed in the official church
calendar published by the Armenian Patriarchate of Turkey as follows:
`Mother Hrip’sime Proto-deacon Sasunian, born in Soghukoluk, Antioch, in
1928; became a nun in 1953; Proto-deacon in 1984; Mother Superior in
1998. Member of the Kalfayian Order.’ Mother Hrip’sime has worked to
restore the female diaconate as an active social ministry, and for many
years was the general director of Bird’s Nest, a combined orphanage,
school and social service center near Beiruit, Lebanon. Her diaconate,
and that of the three other women deacons, is far from monastic.

The future Catholic response to the documented past and the changing
present promises to be interesting. The tone of the International
Theological Commission document reveals an attempt to rule out women
deacons, but the question is left remarkably open: `It pertains to the
ministry of discernment which the Lord established in his church to
pronounce authoritatively on this question.’

It is becoming increasingly clear that despite the Catholic Church’s
unwillingness to say yes to the restoration of the female diaconate as
an ordained ministry of the Catholic Church, it cannot say no.

Prayer for the Ordination of a Woman Deacon

O Eternal God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Creator of man
and of woman, who replenished with the Spirit Miriam, and Deborah, and
Anna, and Huldah; who did not disdain that your only-begotten Son should
be born of a woman; who also in the tabernacle of the testimony, and in
the temple, did ordain women to be keepers of your holy gates – look down
now upon this your servant who is to be ordained to the office of a
deaconess, and grant her your Holy Spirit, that she may worthily
discharge the work which is committed to her to your glory, and the
praise of your Christ, with whom glory and adoration be to you and the
Holy Spirit for ever. Amen.’

– Apostolic Constitutions, No. 8 (late fourth century)

Phyllis Zagano is adjunct associate professor of philosophy and
religious studies at Hofstra University, Hempstead, N.Y., and author of
Holy Saturday: An Argument for the Restoration of the Female Diaconate
in the Catholic Church (Crossroad, 2000).

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress