Question Corner: Do Catholics have a theological problem with a woman being the Archbishop of Canterbury?

Q: The Anglican church is elevating its first woman to the role of archbishop of Canterbury, the chief diocese of the Church of England. Theologically, do we as Catholics see this as a problem?

A: I think the answer here could be either “yes” or “no,” depending on how we approach the question.

Of course, for Catholics it would be a problem if someone were to propose that the Catholic Church should ordain women as bishops, since this goes against our well-established doctrine on the nature and purpose of the sacrament of holy orders.

As St. John Paul II recounted in his 1994 apostolic letter “Ordinatio Sacerdotalis,” on reserving priestly ordination to men alone:

“When the question of the ordination of women arose in the Anglican Communion, Pope Paul VI, out of fidelity to his office of safeguarding the Apostolic Tradition, and also with a view to removing a new obstacle placed in the way of Christian unity, reminded Anglicans of the position of the Catholic Church: ‘She (the Catholic Church) holds that it is not admissible to ordain women to the priesthood, for very fundamental reasons. These reasons include: the example recorded in the Sacred Scriptures of Christ choosing his Apostles only from among men; the constant practice of the Church, which has imitated Christ in choosing only men; and her living teaching authority which has consistently held that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is in accordance with God’s plan for his Church.'”

Extending this into a more big-picture point of view, the Catholic Church would disagree with any Christian theology in support of women’s ordination, since it undermines the concept of “apostolic succession.” Apostolic succession refers to our teaching that every bishop — along with the priests who participate in their bishops’ pastoral ministry — was ordained by an older bishop who was in turn ordained by a bishop himself, forming an unbroken chain through which the power to administer the sacraments was “handed down” from the original Twelve Apostles.

But along these lines, a female archbishop of Canterbury would not be a new or especially pressing problem for us, since branches of the Anglican Communion have already had “ordained” women, including women bishops, since the late 20th century. And furthermore, the Catholic Church believes that there have not been valid Anglican ordinations at all since shortly after the Reformation era.

Historically, the Church of England (the original church of the Anglican Communion, which includes branches such as the Church of Ireland and the Episcopal Church in the United States) began in 1534 when, for political reasons, King Henry VIII decided that the church in his country should be independent of the Holy Father in Rome. And so at the beginning, all the bishops of the Church of England had been validly ordained Catholic bishops.

But as Pope Leo XIII observed in his 1896 apostolic letter “Apostolicae Curae” (“On the Nullity of Anglican Orders”), during the reign of King Edward VI, the son of Henry VIII, a new ordination ritual for the Church of England was created. The wording of this new ritual departed from our traditional Catholic sacramental understanding of the priesthood. Thus, Leo XIII clarified that Anglican ordinations since that time are “absolutely null and utterly void.”

Because of this, Catholics see Anglican priests and bishops as being more like Protestant ministers, who can lead services and teach the faith in a non-sacramental sense, and less like Orthodox priests who, while separated from full communion with the Catholic Church, are nevertheless still ordained with apostolic succession and can therefore celebrate valid sacraments.

Insofar as some Anglicans might indeed see themselves as “ministers” rather than sacramental “priests,” in a certain sense we might even “agree” with them about a female archbishop of Canterbury, since the Catholic Church has always acknowledged that women are capable of non-sacramental teaching and leadership.

Yet as St. Paul VI was aware even in the 1970s, the ordination of women in the Anglican Communion does present an additional obstacle to Christian unity, and this by itself will always be a problem.

Jenna Marie Cooper, who holds a licentiate in canon law, is a consecrated virgin and a canonist whose column appears weekly at OSV News. Send your questions to CatholicQA@osv.com.

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