The debate over female ordination inside the Catholic Church hinges on the role of women in early Christianity. When he addressed the question of women deacons, the Pope said a commission he set up to look at the historical origins of deaconesses, could not agree over whether they had received sacramental ordination or not.

He told a group of leaders of religious sisters last month: “I cannot make a sacramental decree without a theological, historical foundation.”
How much emphasis can be given to art or artefacts from the early church?

Dr Ally Kateusz, a research associate at the Wijngaards Institute and a historian, believes there is plenty of evidence to show women were present at the altars. She was in Rome to present her case at the Pontifical Gregorian University in a lecture and to discuss the findings in her book “Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership,” published this year by Palgrave Macmillan.

In this book, Dr Kateusz examines fifth-century artefacts from Old Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome, and the Hagia Sophia, Constantinople which appear to depict women in liturgical roles.

“They show the early Christian liturgy as it was performed at that time,” she told me while she was in Rome. “A gender parallel liturgy – men and women at the altar.”

“The overarching theology for the liturgy would have been ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, because both Jew and Greek were leaders in the ecclesia; there is neither free nor slave, because both were leaders in the ecclesia; and there is neither male nor female, and both were leaders in the ecclesia’,” she says.

A much-watched migrant vessel finally docked at an Italian island on June 29 , following two weeks at sea. The captain of the “Sea Watch 3” divided public opinion in Europe when she defied Italy’s populist leader by bringing 40 immigrants to shore, but the Catholic Church is standing firmly by her side.

“I think that human life must be preserved in any way. This must be the North Star that guides us, everything else is secondary,” said Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, in a June 29 press conference.

The Sea Watch 3 NGO migrant vessel spent over two weeks in the Mediterranean Sea carrying more than 40 immigrants and 20 staff members, before German Captain Carola Rackete decided the ship couldn’t wait any longer and docked at Lampedusa, an island off the coast of Sicily, in the early hours of June 29.

The leader of Italy’s ruling right-wing populist party, Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, has ordered all Italian ports to close their doors to vessels carrying immigrants in an effort he says to reduce migration flows into the peninsula and to combat human trafficking.

On June 26, Salvini said the Sea Watch’s attempt to approach the Italian coast was a “hostile act” and vowed to compel other European countries to take in the immigrants. While the vessel flies the Dutch flag, it’s run by a German NGO.

“I had to dock. I feared that some migrants might commit suicide,” said Rackete in a June 30 video interview with local daily Il Corriere Della Sera, adding that some passengers had tried to cause themselves harm.

“I was afraid. We were taking turns for days, even at night, out of fear that someone might throw themselves into the sea. For those who don’t know how to swim, it means suicide. I feared the worst,” she said.

After ramming patrol boats and docking, Rackete was arrested by Italian police  and she faces an investigation for favoring illegal immigration. She also risks a fine and the impounding of the vessel, but she said she will own up to the legal consequences of her “act of disobedience and not violence.”

More than one-fifth of all church buildings in the Nether-lands have now been converted into libraries, apartments, offices or other functions in line with the growing secularisation in the country, according to an inquiry by the Protestant daily ‘Trouw.’

Of the 6,900 Dutch church buildings, one-fifth of those built before 1800 –which makes them national monuments – have been secularised. Of those built since then, almost one-quarter have been given over to other uses.

Catholic Churches are less likely to be transformed than Protestant ones because of the different meanings the buildings have for the two communities, Trouw said.

“For Roman Catholics the church is sacred, for Protestants the church is useful. As a result, Roman Catholics are more reluctant to give their churches a different function,” it wrote.

That meant only about 15% of Catholic Churches have been desacralised compared to the one-quarter of Protestant Churches that are now serving other functions.

Defeat of California’s attempt to break seal of confession a victory for religious liberty.

Kathleen Domingo is Senior Director for the Office of Life, Justice and Peace and Director of Government Relations for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. She helped to organize the opposition to a California bill that would have required priests to break the sacramental seal of confession in certain cases.

“SB 360, authored by Senator Jerry Hill, sought to strengthen reporting requirements for child abuse, a goal we share. However, to achieve that goal, it removed the privacy protection for the sacrament of confession in instances of child abuse. Even after the bill was amended, priests and lay people, like me, who work at the same location as priests, would be denied the privacy protection in the sacrament” said  Kathleen Domingo

“I want to practice my religion the way that I want to, and I want you to be able to do the same.”

After months of legislative meetings and grassroots organizing of Catholics throughout California, we prepared a show of force for the Assembly Public Safety Committee hearing, that would have been held on July 9. We delivered 140,000 signed letters to Assembly members and sent close to 17,000 emails from parishioners in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles alone.”

Pope Francis’ plan for the reform of the Roman Curia will change the names of several offices and merge a few of them, but the biggest change it hopes to spark is one of attitude.

The last major reorganization of the Curia came with St John Paul II’s apostolic constitution, “Pastor Bonus” (The Good Shepherd) in 1988, which — in its very first sentence — spoke of Jesus entrusting the apostles with “the mission of making disciples in all nations and of preaching the Gospel to every creature.”

To facilitate that mission in the modern world, St John Paul had said, the church needs a structure to promote “communion,” which “glues the whole church together.”

Pope Francis’ successor document to “Pastor Bonus” is tentatively called “Praedicate Evangelium” (Preach the Gospel), and drafts of it were sent to bishops and a variety of experts for comment in the spring.

Of course, promoting the communion of the church and preaching the Gospel are essential tasks for the Popes. For Catholics they are inextricably bound together, and one makes little sense without the other. But when one is emphasized more than the other, priorities change. The energy of the Curia can be directed to promoting unity, offering direction and gathering suggestions and ideas, a some what inward gaze that could increase the perceived authority of curial officials. The risk is a tendency toward uniformity and thinking that the closer one is to the centre, the more authority he has.

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the third most senior active cardinal in the worldwide Church, has called on bishops and other Catholic officials to better engage in listening to victims of clergy sex abuse.

At a lecture last month in the Austrian capital of Vienna, where he has been archbishop since 1995, Schönborn said listening to victims was essential to breaking the “spiral of silence” that has allowed such abuse to continue for so long.

“The victims have to overcome an enormously high threshold even to begin talking,” the 74-year-old cardinal said at a conference on “Sex & Crime” at the Religiosity in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Institute at Vienna University.

He shared his own experience of what he described as the Austrian Church’s “25-year-long painful learning process” of clerical sexual abuse.

Schönborn, a Dominican theologian who became an auxiliary bishop of Vienna Archdiocese in 1991, recalled how it was not until he had actually met with and listened to victims that he was able to overcome his initial defensive reflexes, correct his wrong assumptions and completely change his awareness of clerical sexual abuse. But he said it was extremely difficult to get victims to talk about the abuse they had experienced. The cardinal said a number of victims had told him, “if only I hadn’t begun (talking about the abuse),” telling him they believed suppressing the memory of the painful trauma might spare them even greater suffering.