Consecrated Virgins in the Eastern Churches

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SiempreFiel

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Are there consecrated virgins in the Eastern Catholic Churches, or is this peculiar to the Roman Church?
 
Woodstock said:
Isn’t that about what deaconesses amounted to? 😃
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No. Many deaconesses were consecrated virgins, while many more were widows of clerics. It varied by time and location.

But the restriction to deaconesses being 40 years of age or older… makes for few consecrated virgins becoming deaconesses, but many deaconesses having been consecrated virgins.

Deaconesses we know to have had a role in baptism.

There are hints that they had a liturgical role in the Divine Liturgy, which may have been similar to deacons, or may not; the evidence is pictorial, for the most part. The remaining evidence is in the canons of the early church… which states they stand between the deacons and the subdeacons… but doesn’t delineate what any of them do.

Modern Greek Orthodox deaconesses are pretty much deacons.
Moder Coptic Orthodox deaconesses are essentially consecrated monastic women in outside ministries.
At present, I am unaware of other apostolic churches with modern deaconesses
 
At present, I am unaware of other apostolic churches with modern deaconesses

Mother Protodeaconess Rhipsime functions in the Armenican Church.
 
SiempreFiel said:
Are there consecrated virgins in the Eastern Catholic Churches, or is this peculiar to the Roman Church?
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Not exactly the same but essentially very similar in function are the Greek widows and Russian babbas that as one of my Russian professors liked to say with a smile “travel in packs and keep you in line!”. He has an amusing story of one babba at a museum coat room berating him for the fact that the loop one uses to hang a coat on a peg had become frayed in broken. He got an earful from her for a minute. And then she pointed out that she sewed it back properly AND sewed a missing button onto the coat using the extra one sewn to the inside!

Their informal service to the Church and community is essential in some areas where by social convention they take on a good deal of the work of support of parishes from scrubbing the place up and down and back again, to gardening, looking after orphans…

St. Elizabeth the New Martyr of Russia similarly belonged to a community of sisters that were not strictly of the cloistered variety with a distinctive seperate habit. I believe they served as nurses.
 
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