Did the Church ever ordain women?

[mom26sofar]

At my friend’s RCIA class, the priest said that during some period of time that I can’t remember that there were not enough men in the Church and women were ordained. It was supposed to have been during a war and when the men came back the women were asked to not practice their ordination. Is this true?

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

There have been some reports that during the Communist era in Eastern Europe one bishop did attempt to ordain women to serve women who had been imprisoned. Although we may hope that the bishop did so without malice and only with the hope of providing the sacraments to imprisoned women – and please note that this occurred at a time when the Church had not dealt with the problem of women’s ordination in many centuries – any ordinations that may have been attempted were objectively invalid because women cannot validly receive the sacrament of holy orders. Since that time, the Church has made this teaching plain in its documents Inter Insigniores and Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.

If you are interested in reading more about the reports to which your priest was likely to be referring, please see John L. Allen Jr.'s book Pope Benedict XVI. Please be aware that this book should not be confused with Allen’s later book The Rise of Benedict XVI and that Allen himself now admits that his earlier biography of Pope Benedict was flawed by liberal bias.

Recommended reading:

Women and the Priesthood