The Vatican’s latest refusal to contemplate female ordination is compromising Pope Francis’s modernising mission

The Bible offers tantalising glimpses of the influential role played by women in the early Christian church. In Romans 16, for example, St Paul vouches for the credentials of “our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church of Cenchreae”, who appears to have travelled from Greece to Rome on some kind of mission. Elsewhere, the names of Priscilla, Chloe, Lydia and Apphia are noted as leaders of the house churches that were scattered throughout the Roman empire. Women, themselves excluded from the public square in a patriarchal culture, were pivotal to the development of a persecuted faith which also had to keep a low profile.

Such equality did not last, of course, as women were sidelined from the ecclesiastical roles and formal hierarchies that became established over the centuries. But fascinating scholarship, much of it driven by a wave of feminist historians and theologians from the 1960s onwards, has succeeded in writing this dimension of Christianity’s beginnings back into history. Sadly, even faced with the contemporary crisis of emptying pews and a dearth of male vocations, the world’s largest Christian body still refuses to contemplate the prospect of a modern Phoebe.