In certain Christian denominations, holy orders are the ordained ministries of bishop, priest (presbyter), and deacon, and the sacrament or rite by which candidates are ordained to those orders. Churches recognizing these orders include the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Anglican, Assyrian, Old Catholic, Independent Catholic and some Lutheran churches. Except for Lutherans and some Anglicans, these churches regard ordination as a sacrament.
The ordination of women to ministerial or priestly office is an increasingly common practice among some contemporary major religious groups. It remains a controversial issue in certain Christian traditions and in most denominations in which "ordination" was often a traditionally male dominated profession.
Roy Bourgeois is an American activist, a former Catholic priest, and the founder of the human rights group School of the Americas Watch. He is the 1994 recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award and the 2011 recipient of the American Peace Award and also has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger is a teacher and former Benedictine nun who was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church when she and six others were ordained as priests by an Independent Catholic bishop in 2002, she called herself a Roman Catholic priest, and she refused to recant. She was ordained a bishop in 2003 along with Gisela Forster; reportedly, the ordination was performed by Roman Catholic bishops whose identity remains a secret.
Ordinatio sacerdotalis is an apostolic letter issued by Pope John Paul II on 22 May 1994. In this document, John Paul II discussed the Catholic Church's position requiring "the reservation of priestly ordination to men alone" and wrote that "the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women". While the document states that it was written so "that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance", it has been contested by some Catholics, as to both the substance and in the authoritative nature of its teaching.
The priesthood is the office of the ministers of religion, who have been commissioned ("ordained") with the Holy orders of the Catholic Church. Technically, bishops are a priestly order as well; however, in layman's terms priest refers only to presbyters and pastors. The church's doctrine also sometimes refers to all baptised (lay) members as the "common priesthood", which can be confused with the ministerial priesthood of the consecrated clergy.
Clerical celibacy is the discipline within the Catholic Church by which only unmarried men are ordained to the episcopate, to the priesthood in the Latin Church (with some particular exception and in some autonomous particular Churches, and similarly to the diaconate. In other autonomous particular churches, the discipline applies only to the episcopate.
Roman Catholic Womenpriests (RCWP) is an independent international organization that claims a connection to the Roman Catholic Church. It is descended from the Danube Seven, a group of women who assert that they were ordained as priests in 2002 by Rómulo Antonio Braschi, before being excommunicated by the Vatican, and their request for a revocation of the excommunication denied, in Decree on the Attempted Ordination of Some Catholic Women. According to a book published by the organization, Women Find a Way: The Movement and Stories of Roman Catholic Womenpriests, at least two other unnamed bishops were involved in the ordination. In addition, the RCWP considers these bishops to be in good standing, and the RCWP says the bishops acted in full apostolic succession.
Marjorie Tuite, OP was a progressive activist on issues related to the Church and the larger world, such as racism, poverty, war and the ordination of women.
The post–Vatican II history of the Catholic Church is the recent history of the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965).
Leonard Paul Blair is an American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church, serving as archbishop of the Archdiocese of Hartford in Connecticut since December 16, 2013.
The Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) is one of two associations of the leaders of congregations of Catholic women religious in the United States. LCWR includes over 1300 members, who are members of 302 religious congregations that include 33,431 women religious in the United States as of 2018. Founded in 1956, the conference describes its charter as assisting its members to "collaboratively carry out their service of leadership to further the mission of the Gospel in today's world." The canonically-approved organization collaborates in the Catholic Church and in society to "influence systemic change, studying significant trends and issues within the church and society, utilizing our corporate voice in solidarity with people who experience any form of violence or oppression, and creating and offering resource materials on religious leadership skills." The conference serves as a resource both to its members and to the public who are seeking resources on leadership for religious life.
In the liturgical traditions of the Catholic Church, the term ordination refers to the means by which a person is included in one of the holy orders of bishops, priests or deacons. The teaching of the Catholic Church on ordination, as expressed in the 1983 Code of Canon Law, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the apostolic letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis, is that only a Catholic male validly receives ordination, and "that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful." In other words, the male priesthood is not considered by the church a matter of policy but an unalterable requirement of God. As with priests and bishops, the church ordains only men as deacons.
Women play significant roles in the life of the Catholic Church, although excluded from the Catholic hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons. In the history of the Catholic Church, the church often influenced social attitudes toward women. Influential Catholic women have included theologians, abbesses, monarchs, missionaries, mystics, martyrs, scientists, nurses, hospital administrators, educationalists, religious sisters, Doctors of the Church, and canonised saints. Women constitute the majority of members of consecrated life in the Catholic Church: in 2010, there were around 721,935 professed women religious. Motherhood and family are given an exalted status in Catholicism, with The Blessed Virgin Mary holding a special place of veneration.
Johannes Nicolaas Maria Wijngaards is a Catholic scripture scholar and a laicized priest.
The first Study Commission on the Women's Diaconate was established in August 2016 by Pope Francis to review the theology and history of the ministry of women deacons (deaconesses) in the Roman Catholic Church. The commission did not reach a general agreement. After the Amazonian synod, Pope Francis promised to re-open this commission. He established a second commission instead in April 2020.
Women's Ordination Worldwide (WOW) is an ecumenical network of groups whose primary mission is to allow Roman Catholic women admission to all ordained ministries. The WOW network includes organizations from Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Japan, Malta, Poland, Western Europe, and the United States.
Paul Dempsey is an Irish Roman Catholic prelate who has served as Bishop of Achonry since 2020.
Querida Amazonia is a 2020 post-synodal apostolic exhortation of Pope Francis, written in response to the Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon region held in Rome in October 2019. Focusing on the Amazon region of South America, it is addressed "to the people of God and to all persons of good will". The document is dated 2 February 2020, the liturgical feast of Candlemas, and was released by the Holy See Press Office at a press conference on 12 February.
The Synodal Way was a series of conferences of the Catholic Church in Germany to discuss a range of contemporary theological and organizational questions concerning the Catholic Church, as well as gender issues and possible reactions to the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church in Germany.
