Hidden behind the altar?

Claims that the Vatican has whitewashed a history of women priests and bishops must be taken with a pinch of salt, writes Greg Daly

“It used to be said that facts speak for themselves,” observed the English historian E.H. Carr in his classic 1961 book What is History? “This is, of course, untrue,” he continued. “The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context.”

Aphorisms like the above, along with Hilaire Belloc’s dictum that truth lies in proportion, are worth bearing in mind whenever one is confronted any kinds of historical claims, perhaps especially whenever an argument is presented that purports to be somehow ‘earth-shattering’, as, for instance, in the case of claims put forward at a conference in Rome last week.

“There is ‘overwhelming evidence’ that women served as clergy in the early years of Christianity – and some of the evidence was deliberately hidden by the Vatican, according to ground-breaking new research,” began a report in the Irish Independent about arguments made by one Dr Ally Kateusz, a research associate at the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research.

Claims

Granted, one might expect such claims from the Wijngaards Institute, a London-based think tank that has consistent in calling for women priests since the publication of St John Paul’s Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in 1994, which spelled out how the Church did not have – and never had had – the ability to ordain women to the priesthood. That the claims have come from a predictable place is not really grounds, however, to dismiss them: they need to be listened to and interrogated properly.

Dr Kateusz, author of the recently-published Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership, had been speaking in Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University at the Society for Biblical Literature’s annual international meeting, where in two papers she argued that ancient artistic representations in important churches proved that women routinely served as clergy in the Church’s early history.

‘Old Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome as a Visualisation of the Anastasis in Jerusalem: Parallels in Women in the Liturgy’ was billed by the institute as answering Pope Francis’s call for historical evidence of women clergy, with further arguments being put forward in the following day’s paper entitled ‘Case Study of the Feminist Hermeneutics of Suspicion: The Woman at the Altar inside Old Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome’.

In these talks, Dr Kateusz discussed images carved on an ivory reliquary from St Peter’s Basilica and a sarcophagus from Hagia Sophia in what is now Istanbul, both of which dated to the early 5th Century and depicted, she said, women at the sanctuary, while dating from around 500AD, a round ivory pyx, used for holding the Eucharistic host and currently housed in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicts women incensing the altar in Jerusalem, she argued.

Mary was seen 
above and behind the altar as the chief officiant of the Eucharist”

Between the two talks, Dr Kateusz led a group to Rome’s Lateran Baptistry to reveal a ‘hidden mosaic’ that, she claimed, depicted Mary as a bishop. High up behind the Baroque reredos of the baptistery’s St Venantius Chapel is a 7th-Century mosaic in which Mary is depicted with her hands raised in prayer, flanked by Ss Peter and Paul and 14 other men.

“I don’t know exactly when the altarpiece came up,” Dr Kateusz says about this in a brief video on Twitter. “In 1916 the Vatican banned Mary in priestly vestments, so it would be nice if they would open it up so everyone could see Mary in priestly vestments today.”

The might seem an unlikely concept, but for Dr Kateusz there is – or at any rate once was – a rich tradition within the Church of women being depicted as clergy. “Christian women were present at church altars and the altars had crosses on them,” she said in one talk, with such depictions being evidence, she told Christopher Lamb of The Tablet, of “a gender-parallel liturgy”.

It’s worth bearing in mind, however, just how carefully historians of the ancient world have to handle what is known as ‘iconographic evidence’ – evidence based on images, whether those images might be vase paintings, sculptures, or mosaics, for example.

Sober
 scholars

It’s a commonplace of ancient Greek vases, for instance, to show soldiers in battle naked save for their helmets, but it would be a naïve viewer indeed who would think that there was anything more to these images than ‘heroic nudity’, a kind of artistic convention that reveals less about combat realities than Greek attitudes to the body more generally. Sober scholars to this day continue to argue about particular shields and helmets, attested to in art but absent from the archaeological record, all too aware that iconographic evidence alone cannot be taken at face value.

Allowing for this, it’s worth turning to how Dr Kateusz discusses the image of Mary in the St Venantius Chapel – Claire Giangravè of Cruxnow.com describes her as having “saved the best for last” when she led a small group into the baptistry on July 3 to show them what she regards as an image of Mary as a bishop celebrating the Mass, with this being clear to historical Church congregations.

“From the perspective of the laity in the nave, Mary was seen above and behind the altar as the chief officiant of the Eucharist,” she writes in Mary and Early Christian Worship: Hidden Leadership. “For the laity, Mary’s Eucharistic privilege would be signified by her raised arms, her episcopal pallium with its red cross, and by the subordinate position of the bishops who flanked her, as well as her own central position during the rite as mediator with the divine, standing directly beneath Christ, who himself appears to be blessing and authorising her.”

Alarm bells should be ringing for anyone familiar with Church art when faced with this battery of claims.

To begin with, bearing in mind how the various holy figures in the apse mosaic were positioned over the chapel’s altar, it’s quite the claim to believe that Christ is specifically “blessing and authorising” Mary rather than, say, the activity that would take place in the sanctuary more generally.

More importantly, while we may nowadays be familiar with priests raising their arms with palms facing Heaven while celebrating the Mass, this posture, the so-called ‘orans’ pose, was a standard way of praying in the early Church, and certainly not something distinctive to the Eucharist.

Indeed, just as this posture had previously been depicted in pagan Roman funerary art, so depictions in the tombs in the catacombs often show people praying to God in this position, showing that the prayers of the Church accompany those who have died. The position stayed common in prayer throughout Late Antiquity and into the Middle Ages, with there even being entire congregations who prayed this way as late as the 9th Century.

Common

The orans posture remains popular for both clergy and laity in Orthodox Christianity to this day, unlike in the west where the iconic posture of praying on our knees with our hands joined together started to become common in the feudal era – it was adopted from the classic position whereby feudal knight would do homage, kneeling and joining their hands between those of their lords, guaranteeing them service in return for lands or titles.

In any case, the orans pose was associated with various biblical figures through Late Antiquity and into the Middle Ages, becoming so closely associated with Mary that it would for centuries be a staple feature of Marian iconography, especially in the Orthodox and Eastern Catholic world. It may well be that here Mary is depicted simply as praying for sinners, perhaps as a figure of the Church itself.

As for the episcopal pallium, the white woollen strip embroidered with crosses worn by metropolitan archbishops to this day – how can Mary’s wearing of it be explained? Here an obvious question is whether she is indeed wearing a pallium: although the shape of the pallium has altered over the centuries, one staple of it over time has been that it was always worn draped over a prelate’s chasuble, and not worn underneath it, as, for instance, a priest’s stole is worn today.

As depicted in the baptistry mosaic, however, – and indeed in a mosaic in the 6th-Century Euphranasia Basilica in modern Croatia – Mary wears her ‘pallium’ under her shawl, rather than over it. The two earliest uncontested depictions of the episcopal pallium are from Ravenna at around the same period, and clearly show bishops wearing their palliums over their chasubles, visible over their shoulders. It’s worth remembering that the equivalent of the pallium in Orthodox Christianity and Eastern Catholicism is the omophorion, which literally means ‘borne on the shoulders’.

Dr Kateusz admits that the male and female garments are worn differently but brushes aside the significance of this, writing: “Most likely differences in how the episcopal pallium was worn reflected gender differences, or differences in styles between various communities.”

Given how the episcopal pallium and omophorion have always been visibly worn on the shoulders, the key question here seems to be not why Mary is depicted wearing her pallium under her shawl, but rather “what is it that Mary is wearing under her shawl that seems to resemble one end of a pallium?”

Theology can only begin with the actual, historical facts about revealed truth and attempt to understand them”

Perhaps the most startling of the claims around Dr Kateusz’s work are ones to the effect that the Church has sought to suppress the historical facts. In her book she goes so far as to describe the Lateran mosaic as “a visual metaphor” for this tendency.

“In a city where virtually every other ancient mosaic is on display for pilgrims and tourists, today a huge baroque altarpiece hides this mosaic of Mary,” she writes. “This altarpiece not only hides the episcopal Mary, it features a demure portrait of Mary holding her baby, and thus operates both to conceal and to replace the oriental image of Mary.”

From the back of the nave, she writes, one can see Jesus’ head above the top of the altarpiece, and one can see the men to the sides of it, but the “massive piece of furniture” completely hides Mary. “Her image is so well concealed that it took me multiple visits to this chapel searching for her before I finally noticed Christ’s head above the altar-piece, and realised that Mary was hidden behind it,” she writes.

To have a mosaic so thoroughly obscured is unusual, as historian Candida Moss remarks in an article for thedailybeast.com. “It is not, in principle, strange to find baroque furniture obscuring the decorative features of older medieval and late antique design,” she writes. “In fact, it is fairly common in European churches in general. Against this potential objection, Kateusz notes that nearly every other ancient mosaic in Rome is on full display. It is suggestive that a mosaic showing Mary as a bishop is concealed.”

Perhaps, but it’s worth looking at Dr Kateusz’s comments in full. Having described her trouble in finding the mosaic of Mary, the Wijngaards researcher makes some very curious comments about the dating of the altarpiece.

“In 1916 the Holy Office forbade depictions of Mary dressed in priestly vestments, and quite likely that was when the huge altarpiece was installed,” she writes. “Perhaps the red tesserae of the cross on Mary’s white pallium were removed at the same time. In any case, sometime before 1899, Giovanni Battista de Rossi painted an image of the mosaic with a full red cross on Mary’s pallium. All that remains of the red cross today are a few red tesserae. White tesserae have been installed where the red once were.”

Giovanni Battista de Rossi, the father of modern Christian archaeology, died in 1894, so it seems odd to say that he painted an image of the mosaic before 1899.

More to the point, perhaps, Dr Kateusz’s suggestion that the chapel’s baroque altarpiece was installed around 1916 in connection with a Vatican ban on images of Our Lady in priestly garb is a very strange one. The altarpiece, rather, as one might expect for a baroque altarpiece, seems to have been a creation of the baroque period, designed by Carlo Rainaldi in the late 17th Century.

***

The Vatican’s ban on images of Mary dressed as a priest was a response to excesses of Marian devotion in the late 19th Century, where emphases on the sacerdotal aspect of Mary’s mission created scope for confusion with the nature and duties of the ministerial priesthood. The ban clearly didn’t have the impact that might have been wished, as a similar one was issued in the late 1920s.

This doesn’t explain why a few small red tiles have been replaced with a few small white tiles, of course, but it’s a bit of a stretch to put this down to malice.

Repair
 jobs

There is a mosaic portrait of St Paul in Ravenna, for instance, where the white tiles that spelled out ‘PAU’ to one side of his head have been lost and replaced with blue ones matching the blue background, such that he appears to be named ‘LUS’. Damage happens, after all, and so too do imperfect repair jobs. If the Church had wanted to remove a red cross on a so-called pallium, it would have made more sense to replace the whole cross with white tiles than to remove some tiles and leave a peculiar and puzzling red shape.

Where does this all leave us? Allowing for necessary caution around iconographic evidences, the smaller images Dr Kateusz has highlighted do suggest that women may well have had a role in Church sanctuaries in Late Antiquity, and as such should be factored into discussions about deaconesses, but claims based on the Lateran mosaic need to be discounted.

And remembering too that truth lies in proportion, it must be stressed that regardless of what we might wish had been the case, there is no sense anywhere in our entire surviving body of early Christian writing that women priests were ever anything other than exotic rarities on the fringes of ancient Christianity.

As the late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini put it to Umberto Eco back in 1997: “Theology can only begin with the actual, historical facts about revealed truth and attempt to understand them…it is indisputable that Jesus Christ chose the 12 apostles, and beginning from that fact we must determine every other form of the Church’s apostolate. This isn’t a matter of trying to find a priori reasons, but rather accepting that God communicated in a specific way and through a specific history, whose particularity still determines what we do today.”