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.