Pope Francis and ‘Feminine Pollution’
‘Pope Francis has changed Catholic church law to allow women to perform more tasks during mass, granting them access to the most sacred place on the alter. Francis amended the church law to institutionalise changes so that women can installed as lectors, read scripture, and serve on the alter as eucharistic ministers. In many places, women performing these tasks is already common practice — the Pope’s changes merely make it formal. It is the first time the Vatican has explicitly, through canon law, allowed women to access the altar. In a letter corresponding to the decree announcing the change, Pope Francis said he would like to recognise the “precious contribution” women make to the church. But Pope Francis reaffirmed that the Vatican will continue to reserve the priesthood solely for men, and also noted the distinction between “ordained” ministries, like priesthood and diaconate, and ministries open to qualified lay people…’ (Madeline Hislop, ‘Pope Francis changes law to formalise women’s roles at Mass,’ in Women’s Agenda, January 11, 2021.)
It is, in fact, “the first time the Vatican has explicitly, through canon law, allowed women to access the altar” since the 4th century CE. Up until the 4th century, women were equal within the Church and Christendom, with female prayer leaders, called Orants, functioning as priests in every regard. Even after this point, the Christian Byzantine empress Theodora had herself portrayed as co-leader of the Church, administering the Eucharist in full regalia, alongside her husband Justinian. The all-male participants of the 4th century Council of Nicea, ordered by the first Christian Roman emperor, the brutal apostate Constantine, have a lot to answer for in terms of destroying the integrity of what was originally an egalitarian, ecstatic, revealed Mystery religion. Basically the whole concept has been so profaned by corruption, greed and atrocious abuse of the vulnerable and dependent that I actually think the Church should be razed and the metaphorical, theological and ideological grounds sewn with salt.
It is the female fact of menstruation which sealed the Church’s rationalisation of women’s exclusion from the roles of abbess, deaconess, priest — or even server at the altar. Menstruating women were not permitted to touch the altar, holy relics or regalia — just as in Orthodox Judaism they are not permitted to touch the Holy Torah. This prohibition came to include all women, at any time of their cycle or of their lives. “At the root of the defamation of women in the Church lies the notion that women are unclean and as such, stand in opposition to the holy.” The 4th-century Apostolic Constitutions which decreed that women must not take Communion unless veiled were upgraded in the sixth century to state: “A woman must not approach the Eucharist with bare hands.” The survivals of this are seen in Church women “taking the veil” and lay women wearing hats (often with veils) and gloves to Church.
Even women’s voices were not to approach the altar. Vocal prohibitions against women on account of menstruation effectively meant that women were barred from church choirs until the twentieth century and even nuns should pray inaudibly. Cyril of Jerusalem declared in his fourth century catechism: “The virgins should silently read the psalms.. They should speak only with their lips… Women should do just this. When they pray they are to move their lips, but their voices should not be heard.” Social ramifications of these prohibitions include the formation of corps of altar boys, choir boys, and labouring orders of lay brothers.
Theodore of Balsamon wrote that, “At one time deaconesses used to be ordained in keeping with the laws of the Church. They were allowed to approach the altar, but because of their monthly impurity they were ousted from their place in the liturgy and from the holy altar. In the honourable Church of Constantinople deaconesses are still selected, but they no longer have access to the altar.”
Male nature, on the other hand, was decreed to be wholly virtuous with the exception of one unruly organ, the ‘disobedient’ male member. As Plato (and Neo-Platonist/Aristotelian Augustine, Augustinians St. Thomas Aquinas, Hugh of St. Victor, et al) claimed, the penis was excluded from the general ‘virtue’ (“manliness” from Latin ‘vir’ for ‘male’) of the general ruck of menfolks. Hugh of St. Victor documented the doctrine of the renegade penis in De sacramentis, crediting Man with the possession of one “disobedient” member, an organ he describes as, “removed from the power of the soul,” the one delinquent element of an otherwise felicitous masculine nature; this insubordinate flesh, “that often moves when the soul does not will it.” The idea is found still earlier in Plato’s Timaeus, where he explains: “Wherefore also in men the organ of generation becoming rebellious and masterful, like an animal disobedient to reason, and maddened with the sting of lust, seeks to gain absolute sway.”
It would appear that Francis has made this most recent move as to the Church’s authorization of the relative ‘virtues’ of the sexes, granting women permission to not only approach the altar but even to touch sacred altar objects and priestly regalia, in order to assimilate something that’s already happening in many places within the Church, prevent a schism, and bring the anti-doctrinaire inclusive practitioners into the fold. He should put his money where his mouth is and admit women into the priesthood, declare that Mary has divine status like her husband and son, and that in fact deity has a feminine aspect at least as often as It bears a masculine one — and that Christ, if he historically existed, was a prophet or a sage perhaps, but basically just a man with an aspect of the divine, just like the Marys of the Christological narrative, just like all the rest of us.
