Women and Holy Orders

Being the Report of a Commission appointed by
the Archbishops of Canterbury and York
Published by the Church Information Office, London. Dec. 1966

CHAPTER VIII

Forms of Ministry for Women other than the Priesthood

The Commission’s task has been primarily to examine the question whether women may and should be ordained to the priesthood. Nevertheless, the wider issues of other forms of ministry in which women may or should serve are relevant. Whether or not the Church adopts the view that women should now or in the near future be admitted to the priesthood, it is still urgent to consider how in practice it may be possible to provide women with adequate opportunities of ministry. It is a recognised source of frustration to qualified women and a weakness to the Church that there has been reluctance to create any effective ministry for them.

80 Accordingly the Commission desires to commend to the Church for study the essay by the Dean of York (essay F, pp 123-128), which advocates a reconstructed diaconate in which men and women would minister on equal terms.

A NOTE ON THE ORDER OF DEACONESSES

81 Although not strictly within our terms of reference we have been asked to express an opinion about the position of the Order of Deaconesses within the ministry of the Church of England.

82 The evidence we have received leaves us in no doubt about the unsatisfactory position in which the Order is placed. The confusion about the nature of the Order dates from its revival in 1861. In retrospect this appears to have been a remarkable compromise between the forces of realism, prejudice and tradition, hallowed by antiquarian learning and episcopal benediction. The Tractarian revival produced a new quality of devotion to the Person of Our Lord. This, in turn, evoked a new quality of dedication in religious women, generous, uncalculating, reckless of popular regard, as in the women of the New Testament who followed Jesus and ministered to him. And this dedication found its most thorough expression in the revival of the Religious Life for women, complete with vows of celibacy. It is clear from the record of the Convocation debates of the time that many English Churchmen were suspicious of’ these ladies’ (as they called them); though with their devotion to Christ and the poor exemplified for all to see, especially during the cholera epidemics in Plymouth and London, they could not be gainsaid; they had come to stay. Yet, given the power of prejudice in that controversal age, they would have to stay on the fringe of the Church of England for a long time. For an equivalent form of service which could be ‘ central’ to the Church’s life, a model lay to hand in the German deaconesses at Kaiserwerth (there was much ecclesiastical intercommunication between England and Germany at this time); though they would have to be Anglicised, and, of course, justified by the then unassailable appeal to the practice of the Early Church. So the office of deaconess was established in the Church of England, and Miss Elizabeth Ferard first received episcopal ‘ dedication ‘ at the hands of Bishop Tait in 1861. The modern form of’ ordination ’ followed later. Nevertheless, the fact that the Order of Deaconesses was closely related at its inception with the revival of religious communities for women, that some of its members wear a dress not unlike the habit of a Religious, and that they have voluntarily accepted a rule of celibacy, has made it difficult for Churchmen to appreciate that what was ‘ revived ’ was an Order of Ministry and not a Religious Order in the sense of a Religious Community. Indeed, in the Deaconess Community of St Andrew the two sorts of ‘ order’ have been fused.

83 Recent developments have tended further to confuse the issues. It is not easy for the uninstructed to recognise the difference between the work of a deaconess and that of a licensed woman worker, since the latter appears to be able to perform all the duties which might be expected of a deaconess. This difficulty will be accentuated when women are capable of being admitted as Readers. Moreover, Bishops vary in the extent of the permission which they grant to Deaconesses. Some permit a Deaconess to baptise, administer the Chalice and perform Churching. Others do not.

82 But the most serious source of confusion is the uncertain voice with which the Church has spoken in its official pronouncements. Thus, the Lambeth Conference of 1920 stated:

‘ In our judgment the ordination of a Deaconess confers on her Holy Orders. In ordination she receives the ‘ character ‘ of a Deaconess in the Church of God; and therefore, the status of a woman ordained to the Diaconate has the permanence which belongs to Holy Orders. She dedicates herself to life-long service. . . .’

The Lambeth Conference of 1930 stated:

‘ It has been unfortunate that the Deaconess should be thought to be the female equivalent of the existing Deacon, i.e., identical in character and perhaps also in status with the Third Order of Ministry.

‘ We desire on the contrary to affirm that the Order of Deaconesses is an Order sui generis; the one Order of Ministry open to women, but an order which both from the solemnity of its ordination and the importance of its functions can satisfy the fullest desires of women to share in the official work of the Church.’

The new Canons on the Order of Deaconesses declare:

‘ The Order of Deaconesses is the one Order of Ministry in the Church of England to which women are admitted by prayer and the laying on of hands by the Bishop.’

85 In view of the equivocal nature of these pronouncements it can hardly be a matter of surprise that the deaconesses are uncertain about their standing. Those who were ordained between 1920 and 1930 assumed with reason that they had received Holy Orders and were ordained to a Ministry parallel to and of the same nature as that exercised by the male deacon. It was therefore a blow of a deeply hurtful kind when the next Lambeth Conference retreated from this position and asserted that Deaconesses are not ‘ in Holy Orders’ but in ‘ an Order sui generis’, and not therefore to be related to or confused with the Holy Orders to which men are ordained. The new Canons appear to confirm this latter view.

86 The confusion is deepened rather than relieved by the Resolution passed by both Convocations in 1939-41, and by the Form and Manner of Making of Deaconesses approved by the two Upper Houses in 1924. In the Resolution it is specifically stated that the Order of Deaconesses is ‘ the one existing ordained ministry for women ’. They are admitted to it by episcopal laying on of hands. They are thereby declared to receive the blessing of the Holy Spirit for the work of a deaconess. They are given a ‘ distinctive and permanent status in the Church and are dedicated to life-long service’ . They must produce the same documents before ordination as a man must produce before being made Deacon. The Form and Order bear close resemblance to that used for the making of a deacon. The words of ordination are precisely the same as those used for a man, with the substitution of the word ‘ Deaconess ‘ for ‘ Deacon ’.

87 It seems that the confusion over the status of a deaconess arises from the careless use of words which have not been defined. A deaconess is ‘ ordained ’. She receives ‘ character ’. She is dedicated to a ‘ life-long service ’. She is a member of an ordained ministry. She is in ‘ a Holy Order’. But she is not in ‘ Holy Orders’.

88 Here again the puzzle is of historical making. The phrase ‘ (clerk) in Holy Orders ’ is a technical one, adequately understood at law, and therefore necessarily exclusive as well as inclusive. In terms of the English ecclesiastical law it developed not only in contradistinction to the legal status of unordained men, laymen, but also to clerks in minor orders; and the distinction had practical significance. In late medieval practice, for which there is abundant evidence in the episcopal registers, clerks were admitted to minor orders with little more solemnity than children today are confirmed; often with less; and their names were simply listed in the registers as ‘ tonsured ’ or ‘ acolytes ’. For the sub-diaconate, the diaconate and the presbyterate, however, a title to a benefice or other means of support was required, and the title was recorded against each name, in the register. These were the ‘ holy orders ’ proper, for which letters dimissory also would be issued to a clerk already in minor orders who wished to seek further orders from another bishop. It is important to observe, however, that the word ‘ ordained ’ was applied to both ‘ minor orders ’ and ‘ holy orders ’ without distinction: all the groups of names are listed under a general heading,‘ Orders celebrated by the Lord Bishop at (such a place) on (such a day) ‘.

89 At the Reformation, the sub-diaconate and all below it was cut away; ‘ ordination ’ and ‘ holy orders ’ were thus confined to deacons and priests, and, of course, to bishops elevated by consecration from among them. Now: granted the antiquarian cast of mind of the Church in the mid-nineteenth century, clothing its experiments respectably in historical forms, there was ample precedent for applying the term ‘ ordination ’ otherwise than to ‘ deacons ’and ‘ priests ’, and so to the admission of a deaconess; it has been applied to the admission of men to minor orders for centuries. What did not follow, and what no ecclesiastical lawyer could allow to follow, was that the deaconess was thereby admitted into Holy Orders as that term was known to the law, and known to comprise bishops, priests and deacons and these alone.

90 It would be quite unhistorical to blame the Church of the nineteenth century for what it did. At a time when no professional life was open to women, the Church, needing their service, had to create a status for them; and that status, as we have seen, was cast in historic moulds. Nevertheless the later use of such a phrase as ‘ an Order sui generis ’, without defining its meaning or its relationship to what is normally termed ‘ Holy Orders ’, has resulted in a state of uncertainty which both for the good name of the Church as well as to relieve the minds of deaconesses, should be once and for all removed. It must not be left as it is.

91 When the social conditions which occasioned the service of deaconesses in the early Church had passed, they passed away with them; and the religious orders offered an alternative vocation for women who wished so to dedicate or profess themselves. So the Church today may decide that, the social conditions which occasioned the revival of deaconesses in the nineteenth century having passed, and been replaced by a society which offers women adequate status in many professions and other forms of service, the order of deaconess has no longer a raison d’etre in the Church of England; to prolong it as an anachronism might be to discredit it.

92 Again, in the light of the historical fact that whereas the Religious Life has shown a boundless capacity to adapt itself to meet new demands, in century after century, in contradistinction to the rigidity of the structure of ministerial ‘ Holy Orders ’, it may be that those who seek some ecclesiastical status to enrich their professional status will find it through new forms of the Religious Life. The Roman Catholic Church has shown great genius in its recognition of the spiritual power which is to be derived from membership of religious communities, and in ‘ laicising’ these communities in a way hardly begun, as yet, in the Church of England. Ample evidence of this exists from Europe in the later middle ages, from the time of the Counter-Reformation, and from the mission-field in modern times. In England we came near it, in our own way, in the Religious Societies which did much to invigorate the life of the Church at home, and to speed it on its mission abroad, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Modern Anglican religious communities have their third orders also for lay and clerical associates. What is envisaged here is a development of the principle of associating in some specific ways in community: not simply an extension of the present forms of organisation, with, for example, a common residence and distinctive habit, in which that principle has been embodied. Deaconesses themselves, in the Community of St Andrew, have shown the value of a Community as a means of grace, in addition to that given by admission to Orders. Similarly, the Church worker of the future, whose status would derive from her standing in the profession, which ever it might be, to which she belonged, might look to a Community of some sort (should she feel so called) for whatever grace might be vouchsafed to her through it. In this way we might envisage distinctive Christian ‘ character’ of various sorts for professional work undertaken in the service of the Church. Out of the living stock of the Religious Life there might yet shoot new strains in which the Church and the world could be served by dedicated lives, celibate or married, but lay.

93 Again, it may be that if, in the course of time, the Church reforms the Order of Deacon so that it becomes the Holy Order of service to which men and women are admitted on equal terms, then the Order of Deaconesses will become redundant. Meanwhile, we make the following recommendations:

(a) That the next Lambeth Conference be asked to reconsider its previous pronouncements on the subject (possibly in the context of a wider consideration of the relevance of the Christian ministry), and to state positively what is the status of a Deaconess.

(b) That functions at present assignable at the discretion of individual Bishops (such as Churchings and Baptism in Church) should be considered by the Bishops and, when agreed upon, made of general application.

(c) That the duties of a deaconess set out in Canon D. 1 Clause 2 be extended to apply to the whole congregation.1

(d) That it should be decided whether the deaconess may, by virtue of her office, administer the Chalice and read the Epistle.

(e) that the restriction in Canon D.I Clause 3a, ‘in case of need’, be removed.1

On behalf of the Commission GERALD CESTR:

Chairman.

1 The text of Canon D.I reads: Of the Order of Deaconesses

1. The Order of Deaconesses is the one Order of Ministry in the Church of England to which women are admitted by prayer and the laying on of hands by the Bishop.

2. It belongs to the office of a Deaconess, in the place where she is licensed to serve, to exercise a pastoral care especially over women, young people, and children, to visit the sick and the whole, to instruct the people in the faith, and to prepare them for the reception of the sacraments.

3. The Bishop may permit a Deaconess in any Church or Chapel within his jurisdiction at the invitation of the Minister thereof:

(a) To read in case of need the services of Morning and Evening Prayer and the Litany, except those portions reserved to the Priest, and to lead in prayer.

(b) To instruct and preach except during the service of Holy Communion.

4. The Order of Deaconess is not one of the Holy Orders of the Church of England, and accordingly Deaconesses may accept membership of any Lay Assembly of the Church of England without prejudice to the standing of their Order.

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