WOMEN CAN BE PRIESTS
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Women and girls were not
allowed
to be singers in Church
Early History
The
synod which condemned Paul of Samosata, in 265 A.D., stated as one of the
charges against him, that he employed women as singers (Eusebius, History of
the Church VII.30).
Western Europe
The
Second Synod of Troyes, A.D 551, , forbade lay persons (including women) within
the chancel (Can. 4).
The
Synod of Auxerre, in its session of A.D. 578, prohibited girls to sing in
Church (573-603, MG. Conc. I, 179ffCan. 9,). See more prohibitions of the Synod
here.
The synodal statutes of St Boniface (d. 754) forbade women
to sing in church.
Pope Leo IV (847 - 855) forbade choirs of women to sing in
the churches.
In
the Eastern and the Gallican Church, singers continued as an order distinct
from that of readers, their duties being to sing the canticles, processional
anthem, offertory anthem, and the responses. Singers were, however, not
ordained by a bishop, but only admitted to office by a presbyter without any
solemn investiture, and their office was not included among the probationary
degrees for the presbyterate, doubtless because they were chosen for their
voices rather than their merits. On this ground they were forbidden at Rome to
discharge any of the deacon’s duties. The school of singers, which is
often mentioned at Rome after the seventh century, is really the school of
readers, who combined the singer’s duty of singing parts of the service
with the reader’s surviving duty of singing the Psalms.
Castrated boys
In the
past, castrated men choristers took the place of women.
‘ The castration of boys in order to preserve their
soprano or alto voices was practised in Italy, in particular, from the 16th to
the 18th centuries. There, in contrast to Germany and France, the earliest
castrati quickly gained admission to church choirs; under Clement VIII
(1592-1605) they took the place of falsetto sopranos in the Sistine Chapel,
though they failed to establish themselves as altos. They disappeared from
secular music at the beginning of the 19th century, but castrati were still
singing in the Sistine Chapel at the beginning of the 20th.’
Lexikon fur Theologie und Kirche, VI, 1961, p.
16.
Twentieth Century
Girls or women could not be members of any church choir (Sacred
Congregation for Liturgy, decree 17 Sept. 1897).
Pius X re-emphasised this prohibition on the ground that women were not
permitted to fulfil any liturgical function (Motu proprio ‘De musica
sacra’, 1903).
“Women should not be part of a choir; they belong to the ranks of
the laity. Separate women's choirs too are totally forbidden, except for
serious reasons and with permission of the bishop”
(Sacred
Congregation for Liturgy, decree 22 Nov. 1907).
“Any mixed choir of men and women, even if they stand far from
the sanctuary, is totally forbidden”
(Sacred Congregation for Liturgy,
decree 18 Dec. 1908).
Gradual Change
| Ph. Hartman, ‘Repertorium Rituum’ [= Handbook | Johannes Kley’s edition of the ‘Repertorium |
| ‘Only men of known piety and probity, who show themselves | “Only men of known piety and probity, who show themselves |
Pius XII cautiously sanctioned female choristers, though only
‘outside the presbytery or the altar precincts’ (‘Instructio
de musica sacra’, AAS 48 [1958] 658).
“Lay persons can fulfill the function of lector during liturgical
actions by temporary deputation; likewise all lay persons can fulfill the
functions of commentator or singer or other
functions, in accord with the norm of law” (Codex
of Church Law, 1983, Canon 230, §2.)
Read also: The
crumbling of the institutional Church prejudice against
women
John Wijngaards
Follow @JohnWijngaards
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