An open post to the Tablet this week:

I am currently researching the background to the Church's traditional ban on the ordination of women. The basis for it lies in the teachings of the Church fathers, the early canonists who drafted the first versions of canon law, and in the scholastic theologians, based mainly in Paris in the 12th and 13th century. Many of the arguments used throughout this period are based not on the person of Christ, or on the function and role of the priest but on women's inadequacies, on their emotional and intellectual instability, on their imperfect nature as human beings, on woman's greater guilt for sin because of Eve, on women's perceived sexual promiscuity as well as on men's greater susceptibility to the distraction offered by women - not to mention the uncleanness of women because of menstruation and childbirth. We can dismiss all these attitudes as being outdated, irrelevant, 'mediaeval', and so they are, they are of their time. But we still live with the effects of these attitudes.
Joanna Waller