See for a start – on the issue of women priests - the last two paragraphs of my July 19 posting on the Swedish high church. It would be wrong to limit the diagnosis of the Swedish/Danish problem to women priests, which is as much a symptom as the real root cause. There is more to it than that, including some serious questions which we Orthodox also need to address, but if you want I can come back later.
Added information: In Denmark, women priests came in, I think, in 1948. There Parliament had (? still has) almost total control of the Church. Someone asked 'why not?' and Parliament said, 'indeed, why not?', and the first woman priest was ordained. The Swedish story is a longer and more bitter one, not least because Sweden had, for most of the last century, very competent Lutheran theologians, who incidentally also dialogued quite intensively with the Orthodox, and were not at all in favour of women's ordination.
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See for a start – on the issue of women priests - the last two paragraphs of my July 19 posting on the Swedish high church. It would be wrong to limit the diagnosis of the Swedish/Danish problem to women priests, which is as much a symptom as the real root cause. There is more to it than that, including some serious questions which we Orthodox also need to address, but if you want I can come back later.
Added information: In Denmark, women priests came in, I think, in 1948. There Parliament had (? still has) almost total control of the Church. Someone asked 'why not?' and Parliament said, 'indeed, why not?', and the first woman priest was ordained. The Swedish story is a longer and more bitter one, not least because Sweden had, for most of the last century, very competent Lutheran theologians, who incidentally also dialogued quite intensively with the Orthodox, and were not at all in favour of women's ordination.