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benh's avatar

One of the errors of the post-conciliar era has been a sort of Indiana Jones approach to the Church's past: instead of dealing with the actual tradition which has come down to us from our direct ancestors, we look for some document in the long history of the Church which, if we squint real hard, confirms our contemporary prejudices of what "we" want the Church to look like now.

Of course any such office as "deaconess" has not existed in an modern time, so this is not a "tradition" with any relevance toward us. It's looking at material from a different cultural context and trying to jam it into the present.

Also, not everything in the early Church was perfect. If you read the desert fathers, for example, there are me(n) who left their wives and children to go to be monks in the desert and this seems to be something that is approved of in certain places as "fleeing from the world." Of course, we don't know the specific situations where this occurred, but the general principle of leaving your state in life, with its responsibilities, is something that is something that is clearly seen as wrong in later later times and which spiritual writers warn is a temptation. The understanding of the sacrament of marriage has matured since that time. We have to look at the past with prudence and not blindly accept everything from the ancient Church.

- edited to fix typo

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Garth, OPL's avatar

'Still' no room. Implying there might be room someday? Ugh.

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