Sir, - John Wijngaards (November 3rd) demonstrates nothing more than that he believes there is evidence to suggest that women were in the past commissioned for ministry in the Church. This is hardly news. They still are. However, he fails to identify conclusive proof of female ordination, which is not the same. I fear that there is more to ordination than laying on of hands, invocation of the Holy Spirit and even the excellent ritual panoply described by Mr Wijngaards. Indeed, I cannot think of any of the seven sacraments which does not in some way involve imposition of hands and epiclesis - as do very many non-sacramental blessings. Mr Wijngaards cannot base his claim on this.
An essential element in every sacrament is the intention to do what the Church intends to be done. Mr Wijngaards's assertions of peripheral ordination of women deacons, even were they true, would in fact merely prove that the Great Church of Nicaea as a whole did not ordain women deacons. The Church cannot be held to account for breakaway activities of which she herself disapproves. Women "ordained" by Montanist Christians in the third century were repudiated by the Catholic Church because it has never been her intention to go beyond what Christ himself did.
Despite laying on of hands and calling down the Spirit, those women and men "ordained" in the Anglican tradition today are not accepted either because, in addition to the rupture in apostolic succession with Elizabeth I's appointment of the unordained layman Matthew Parker to Canterbury, candidates are not explicitly conferred with the preReformation priesthood but with a novel office previously uninherited and unintended by the Church.
There were indeed deaconesses in the early Church. These, however, were not ordained in the modern sense of the word any more than were their contemporaries in the "order" of widows. Nor is a deaconess the counterpart of a deacon any more than an abbess is of an abbot (although perhaps the fact that abbesses carried croziers and gave blessings will convince Mr Wijngaards that they were bishops). Deaconesses were lay helpers, no doubt formally instituted and blessed, but not members of the clergy. Their existence testifies to the richness and continuity of the Church throughout the ages for deaconesses are still around today; we now call them extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist. - Yours, etc.,
Rev David O'Hanlon CC, Parochial House, Kentstown, Co Meath.