Sr. Vassa: There's no ontological impediment to priestesses
Is the male-only priesthood a discipline or essential to the nature of being a priest? Sr. Vassa (again unflinchingly taking up a contentious topic by climbing up the ladder to the highest platform and then jumping into the deep end head first) dives right in and says there is no reason beyond personal preference to not have female clergy. You know, when people ask me about women in priesthood, they say, 'Sister, why can't women be priests?' And I say, 'Women CAN be priests. We don't WANT them to be priests.' Because you see, God can do anything, and the Church, by divine authority, uh, can do anything, but, the Church doesn't want to - and that's a legitimate reason. What I don't like is when we TRY to pretend that there are other reasons for this, because it's legitimate not to want something, and there are reasons not to want this - right? - but, we shouldn't pretent that there's some... reason, that, for example, the maleness...
Father, what do you know about these Old Ritualists? Their website indicates they are within the Moscow Patriarchate, but they serve the same Liturgy as the Old Believers?
ReplyDeleteThere are many groups of Old Believers/Ritualists in Russia and around the world, some in communion with the rest of Orthodoxy and some not (though I do not know anything about the sizes of each camp). From what I can gather, the English/Russian terms for each group are Old Believers (Starovery) and Old Ritualists (Staroobriadtsy), and only the latter are referred to as Edinoverie (Единоверие) and are in communion with Moscow. Among Orthodox in the West at least, "Old Ritualist" seems to have become the more polite usage for all the above since the differences are no longer seen to be 'schismatic' - I would assume that is not the opinion of those Old Believers not in communion with Moscow and the rest of Orthodoxy.
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