After the initial furore provoked by the Vatican Declaration nearly two years ago the discussion of women’s ordination in the Roman Catholic Church has come to a virtual standstill. The debate has stalled largely because both defence and criticism of the Declaration have not always been on target.

For one thing insufficient attention has been paid to the significant developments which this document embodied. For the first time the Catholic Church officially abandoned many of the standard theological arguments which had been used in the past to legitimate the traditional policy barring women from ordination. The Declaration conceded that the patristic and scholastic arguments, previously accorded such weight, were in large measure conditioned by prejudicial attitudes and beliefs about women’s alleged innate deficiencies as compared with men or their inborn aptitudes for domestic and nurturing roles. The traditional policy thus came to be defended for wrong or inadequate reasons.

In the Declaration’s central argument traditional claims about women’s inferiority and subordination to men, or their alleged incapacity for pastoral responsibility played no part. Moreover claims about the direct bearing of gender-specific traits on female/male role differentiation in society and the church were used to highlight rather than to demonstrate the propriety of the traditional policy. Such claims were combined with ecclesiological doctrines to yield an argument for the complementary distribution of male and female roles in the church, and with christological doctrines to yield an argument for the necessity of maleness for the priesthood’s representational function. But the Declaration carefully qualified the persuasive force to be accorded these arguments in its overall case by designating them as illustrative rather than demonstrative.