Summary of online lecture
Aggeliki Tzouvali-Kariotoglou
THE PRESENCE OF WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY CHURCH LIFE
The inaugurating lecture of the fifth online series “Time for Action”, organized by the Volos Academy for Theological Studies, took place on Thursday, January 16, 2025. The lecture, under the title “The presence of women in contemporary Church life” was given by Aggeliki Tzouvali-Kariotoglou (teacher of religious education, PhD in Philosophy and author), while the moderation of the event was held by Magdalini Thoma (author, PhD in Philology). The lecture, given in Greek and French, was also part of the “Liturgy after the Liturgy” series, organized by the Holy Metropolis of France and the Vicariate of French-Speaking Parishes of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, in collaboration with the Volos Academy. It is available on the YouTube channel of the Academy, at https://youtu.be/I3qNHZpjuqs (Greek version) and https://youtu.be/x0Ihjq0hh2k (French version), while it will soon be available on the Vicariate’s channel too, at https://www.youtube.com/c/lalettreduvicariat.
Starting from her personal experiences of deficient representation of women in the Church, Angeliki Kariotoglou outlined the problem of the degraded position of women, who are treated as auxiliary personnel, far from equality and from the possibility of assuming essential roles in contemporary church life. Mentioning that the treatment of women in the early Christian Church was totally different, the speaker highlighted the fact that the current attitude of the Church towards women is the fruit of a pre-Christian status quo, which bears no relation to Christian teaching but is reinforced by the narcissistic and arrogant practicing of power by many monks and senior clergy, with the victims being the laity, men and women alike, who often seek and accept a passive, servile role. Moving on, the speaker referred to the importance that the public image of the priestly couple should have in the parish, along with the active presence of the priest’s wife, underlining the fact that the priest’s wife is frequently supposed to abstain from the public sphere. “The point is not to question whether women should play an important role in parish communities, the point is that it should be taken for granted, beyond discussion.” She emphasized that both the laymen and the clergy, as all the Christians, are called to participate in the work of the Church and therefore, the participation of women in bodies such as church councils is not debatable or decorative, but essentially mandatory. She spoke about the derogatory language against women that often appears in church prayers, and emphasized that, unfortunately, “for the institutional church, respect for the female gender ends in the person of the Virgin Mary, instead of taking the Holy Virgin as a starting point for developing respect for the female nature”; however, as the speaker noted, “the feminine quality [of the Virgin Mary] is a real point of reception of the other and indeed of the ultimate Other; it is the beginning of the new humanity, in which God is incarnated.”
In the discussion that followed, there were questions regarding the shaping of the problematic position of women in the Church by social and cultural factors, the differences between Greece and the Orthodox communities of the West, as well as questions and proposals regarding ordination and the potential role of women. It should be noted that after the speech, the event’s panel received an impressively large number of congratulatory messages.
