Perspectief 2014-26

2014-26 27 The Ordination of Women To be male is less important than it seems to be Catholicity and Gender focussing on: the Ordination of Women dr. Margriet Gosker Door dr. Margriet Gosker Catholicity is no uniformity. Catholicity creates free space for all Christian believers worldwide and asks respect for all denominations. Catholicity is binding all Christians together and is accepting them all in their otherness. To be male is less important than it seems to be. Introduction In this article I want to discuss why catholicity should not exclude women from the altar. All what I will say in the following pages could also be valid for other gender issues (like homosexuality), but I choose for focussing on the ordination of women. It is clear to me that catholicity is such a comprehensive notion, that all fundamental ecumenical problems and differences are in a way connected to it. 1 Ordination of women is really not only a problem connected to catholicity, but it certainly is one of the issues to be discussed on this occasion of Societas Oecumenica’s gathering in Budapest 2014. This is at least what the Standing Committee assured me in an E-mail. But I was still hesitating to take up the issue and it took a long time before I finally decided to prepare a workshop on the subject. Why? Well, my focus is the ordination of women and this is rather barbed wire in the ecumenical discussion. Nearly everything has already been said and all the arguments have been shared over and over again. What I really don’t want to do is flogging a dead horse. 1 H. Berkhof, De katholiciteit der kerk , Callenbach, Nijkerk,1962, p. 7.