Documentation research

One of the main tasks we undertake is to research important documents which explain the situation the Church finds itself in today. We also make them accessible to everyone through carefully crafted educational websites.

The Vatican library

Finding ancient evidence

This implies retrieving documents or illustrations that have not been published in print before. It required research in libraries and archives.

Examples are:

the original texts of the ordination rites for women deacons found in manuscripts; these were found in libraries of 18 cities in Europe and the Middle East.
inscriptions on first-millennium tombstones to confirm the status of women deacons; documented in archeological publications.
paintings depicting Mary wearing priestly garments; found in churches of Italy, Germany, Spain, France.
early Christian frescoes depicting women functioning as bishops or priests.
original texts in Latin about women’s ordination in manuscripts by 29 medieval scholars.

Sue Pratt, a team member in our central office

Processing the documents

To begin with, ancient texts need to be scanned in or transcribed to transfer them to electronic format. In the case of text on parchment or images, they need to be recorded in good-quality photocopies.

A good rendering of texts needs to be made in readable English.

Permission to publish the material on one of our websites need to be obtained from the right authority. Such permissions are then recorded in a file for proof in case of future enquiries.

At the same time, finding solid documentation often leads to the discovery of other useful sources that should be explored. The information is passed on to team members who focus on the finding of evidence.

Team members in our central office dealing with the presentation of our documents

Presenting the material

All of our educational websites deal with pressing issues facing today’s Church. The documentation discovered and processed is given its appropriate position in the corresponding website.

Our websites with specific targets are organised in clusters:

Women’s ordination. equalityforwomen.org; equalityforcatholicwomen.org; womenpriests.org; womendeacons.org.
Artificial contraception. catholicsandcontraception.com; familysynod2015.com; thebodyissacred.org.
Church governance. churchauthority.org.
Understanding Scripture. interpretingscripturecorrectly.com; interpretingscripturecourse.org.
God in the modern world. mysteryandbeyond.org.
Homosexuality. ishomosexualitynatural.com; natural-law-and-conscience.org.

Our Swedish translator Therese Björnström (left) at prayer session visiting us from Uppsala

Translation

To widen our outreach we present our documents in the major languages of the world. This applies especially to our flagship website womenpriests.org. Apart from its huge 2000 document collection in English, it presents many of these documents in multiple languages.

International languages. English, French, Portuguese, Spanish.
European languages. Catalan, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish.
African languages. Chichewa (Malawi), Igbo (Nigeria), Swahili (Kenya, Tanzania).
Asian languages. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Malay (Indonesia, Malaysia), Malayalam (India), Tagalog (Philippines) and Urdu (Pakistan, India).

The translations have been made by more than a hundred volunteers from 40 countries.

Database management preserves documents in components, like a stain-glass window.

Conversion to WordPress

In the past websites were built from coding that presented elements of a document in formats defined in so-called stylesheets.

Modern websites use database management. Stylesheets are still used, but elements of a document are stored in an online database. This both enhances preservation of the material and the potential of presenting them as required in new shapes and formats.

We adopted WordPress as our database management system. Following the advice of experts we gradually converted all our websites into WordPress format.

Adapting womenpriests.org presents the biggest challenge. It is a project that is still being executed.