Vatican II and M / F seating

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27lw

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I’m wondering about the reforms after Vatican II, and the call to return to an earlier style of Christian worship. Just as some Church leaders wanted to return to Communion in the Hand as described by an early document (in times of persecution as described by St. Basil) would the early Church have had seating separated by sex? Men on one side, women on the other?
Would this be more in line with how the earliest Christians attended communal services?
Should we be thinking about returning to that as well?
What other accretions of the centuries could we reform after Vatican II?
 
This is the important difference between archeology and organic tradition.
 
27lw said:
would the early Church have had seating separated by sex? Men on one side, women on the other?
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That’s an interesting question. Synagogue worship was evidently segregated by sex, so it’s reasonable to suppose that the same practice was carried over into early Christian worship, though I don’t think I’ve ever seen this even mentioned in any history book. @billsherman?
 
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Imagine trying to do that right now though! Fitting everyone in on a socially distanced seating plan that was also segregated by gender😂
 
Maximian said:
This is the important difference between archeology and organic tradition.
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Could you please explain this more? Are you saying that the foisting of Communion in the hand was organic tradition, or not? It seems to me that the St. Basil quote is used to prop up what was already being done.
So I’m wondering how else an early Mass would have been different from one in the 1960s, and what other elements should be transformed into something more akin to the 3rd century.
Music, postures, artwork, etc?
 
Tis_Bearself said:
A lot of countries in Europe used to have a men’s side and a women’s side at church. The practice died out over time in most places.
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Well, I think it was more universal than just Europe.
Shouldn’t we revive more things like this that are like the worship style of the Early Church?
Communion in the hand “died out”, right, and it was brought back?
Ah! Look what I found:

 
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Well, first of all I recommend you read the excellent book by Dom Alcuin Reid called The Organic Development of the Liturgy.

Tradition is not static. It develops organically over time. This applies to both liturgy and doctrine. It has an origin in Christ and His apostles and continues via this development to the present.

The archeological approach is unsound because it means making a human assessment of what, based on potentially faulty or incomplete evidence, might have been an earlier practice. Subsequent discoveries may contradict such evidence - what then?

The communion in the hand is a case in point. We have one statement which does not enable us to know whether it was a universal practice, whether it was a temporary measure, or why or when it was abandoned. This was a very unsound basis for adopting it out of the blue in the1960s in the face of over a millenium of well tried practice.
 
From your link:

• I’ll let you read what St. John Chrysostom (c. AD 349–407) said about this. Although he was of the belief that men and women may not have been separated during worship when Christianity was first preached by the apostles, it later become necessary, especially considering the decline in modesty of how women dressed at his time.

“Men and women may not have been separated.” Does this mean he was in doubt?
 
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The early Church separated by sex but it was a cultural thing with context now lost. They also initially separated by what we’d now call “class” by St. Paul told them not to (when you go to the movies you don’t think “where are the people of my sex? now where is the seating for my class and status?”). It’s a neutral issue. We could do it, we could not.
 
I Corinthians 11 describes behavior for men and women who are praying and prophesying. This is evidence that men and women worshipped together. There are probably examples in Acts as well.

It was common however for men and women to be separated, particularly at meals, throughout the Roman Empire. There are instances where women joining the men for their discussion provoked violence, as was the case with Hypatia in the 4th century. I doubt there was any single practice used everywhere.

I believe the 1917 Code of Canon Law had it as a law that men and women be separated, so that was in effect until Vatican II. The code gathered together Church rules into a common code for the first time, so it may not have been obligatory; local custom could prevail in some circumstances. But I am pretty sure the separation by gender was on the books.
 
That’s how it worked (in the Bible at least) women and girls and male kids under a certain age in one place, the rest in another space. See for instance how the feeding of the 5000 is counted in the Gospels, “and those eating were about five thousand men, apart from women and children.” The feeding of them is not counted, who knows how many thousands more that was. Whether it is detrimental or not may just be a cultural thing
 
avemariagratiaplena said:
“and those eating were about five thousand men, apart from women and children."
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“Apart from” in this verse (Matt 14:21) is usually understood in the sense of “not counting” or “in addition to.” I don’t think it means the women and children were placed physically apart from the men, in separate fields or on a different hillside.
 
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That is true but combined with prevailing attitudes and other information of the time it is known that physical separation was a thing also (I am not saying this is bad at all, as it is closer to God’s time it might be better, idk)
 
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27lw said:
Well, I think it was more universal than just Europe.
Shouldn’t we revive more things like this that are like the worship style of the Early Church?
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Europe’s all I personally had knowledge of, so I answered wrt Europe.

As for reviving the practice in the current church, a problem with it (aside from adding another restriction on top of the social distancing right now) is that it would cause families to sit apart, and thus is not in keeping with the Church’s current long-time emphasis on family. Families should sit together.

Not sure what CITH has to do with the topic of genders sitting apart. Seems off topic to me so I’m not going to go there, particularly since we’ve already had hundreds of CITH threads already.
 
27lw said:
Are you saying that the foisting of Communion in the hand was organic tradition, or not?
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I have no idea what “organic tradition” means. However, since that is not the way the Church describes changes, that’s okay. What happened historically? Some people started receiving in the hand, then more did, even though it was not an approved indult, then it was an improved indult, then most common. The practice did, as a matter of fact, grow, meeting the literal definition of organic change.

If men and women started to sit separately, apart from any order or instruction, then it would be a similar change. At that time, one could call it an organic change. If the change was done by fiat, it would not be.
 
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BartholomewB said:
“Apart from” in this verse (Matt 14:21) is usually understood in the sense of “not counting” or “in addition to.” I don’t think it means the women and children were placed physically apart from the men, in separate fields or on a different hillside.
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That was my understanding also.

As a practical matter, the people were there to listen to Jesus speak, not to engage in “worship”; it’s likely a lot of them were merely curious and hadn’t yet converted, and just wanted to see in person this Jesus character who supposedly healed people and said all kinds of unusual things. If a man brought his wife and/or children down to see Jesus in a crowd that big, he wasn’t going to send his wife and daughters over to the next hill while he sat with his son elsewhere. He would worry about the safety of his wife and daughters and also just not want to get separated and lose each other in a giant crowd.
 
Nik said:
Imagine trying to do that right now though! Fitting everyone in on a socially distanced seating plan that was also segregated by gender😂
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When I was a child, my local church did that: men on one side, women on the other. I never heard any theology to justify it. It was just the custom. It seems to have just gradually faded away.
 
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