Where the Line Actually Falls

This position is the majority view within world Christianity by sheer number of adherents, and it is the settled teaching of the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox communions, and the Assyrian Church of the East, none of which regards ordination to the priesthood as an open question today. What the position restricts, precisely, is priesthood, and that precision matters, because the diaconate is a genuinely separate and still unsettled question inside several of these same churches. The Catholic Church has convened more than one commission to study whether women could be restored to a form of the diaconate that existed in the early church, without those studies being understood as reopening the question of priestly ordination itself, which Pope John Paul II had declared definitively closed in 1994. Eastern Orthodox theologians and some Orthodox jurisdictions have likewise revisited the ancient order of deaconess, historically exercised by women in the early church for specific pastoral and liturgical functions, as a distinct question from priesthood rather than a step toward it. So the settled position and the live debate exist inside the same churches at the same time, on two different ranks of ordained ministry, and treating the two as a single unresolved question misdescribes what is actually still open and what is not.