Where the traditions land

Population figures are each tradition's own most recent published count. Eligibility is set against the World Christian Database, the standard reference for global denominational data.

Why the disagreement

The Catholic and Orthodox position isn't framed as one interpretation of Scripture among others — Rome's own language is that the Church lacks the authority to change it at all, tying the restriction to Christ's own choice of twelve male apostles and unbroken practice since. That treats the question as already settled by history, not open to a fresh reading of a disputed verse.

Among the traditions building their answer from Scripture alone, the divide comes down to how two Pauline passages get read — 1 Timothy 2:12 and 1 Corinthians 14:34. Southern Baptist and Adventist teaching read them as timeless, a creation-ordered distinction no cultural change loosens. Assemblies of God and Methodist teaching read the same verses as addressed to specific first-century problems, not universal rules — a reading that doesn't track with either denomination's overall politics: the Global Methodist Church split from the UMC over sexuality and kept ordaining women without hesitation, and Pentecostalism has ordained women since its earliest revivals, well before it was a mainstream position anywhere.

Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed bodies show that same interpretive fork running inside single historic traditions rather than between them — sister denominations reading the identical verses and landing on opposite sides. Seventh-day Adventist teaching is a related but different case: the global church voted against ordaining women in 2015, yet several of its own regional conferences have ordained women anyway — not a split between separate bodies, but one denomination whose practice doesn't match its own stated policy.

Solving the disagreement

The Protestant interpretive fork is a real textual question: whether 1 Timothy 2:12 states a timeless principle rooted in creation order, or corrects a specific problem in first-century Ephesus that doesn't generalize. That's a question historical-critical scholarship can inform — what was actually happening in Ephesus, what other early-church evidence says about women's roles — even if it can't fully settle how binding a first-century correction should be today, which is itself a values commitment rather than a fact to discover.

The Catholic position doesn't resolve this way at all, by its own account: Ordinatio Sacerdotalis doesn't argue from disputed texts so much as declare the question closed by the Church's own teaching authority, which by Catholic ecclesiology isn't something further argument could reopen.

LDS teaching offers the one case in this format with a real precedent for change: priesthood eligibility was restricted by race until 1978, when a revelation to President Spencer W. Kimball lifted that restriction. Nothing in that history suggests the gender restriction is expected to follow the same path, but it does mean the mechanism for such a change — a claimed revelation to the sitting prophet — already exists inside LDS doctrine, unlike a text-interpretation dispute a future scholar could resolve.

Sources

Same standing source per tradition on every post, not hunted per question.

• Catholic — Catechism of the Catholic Church
• Eastern Orthodox — Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (binding across all jurisdictions); The Longer Catechism of St. Philaret of Moscow (widely used, not binding on every jurisdiction)
• Oriental Orthodox — Catechism of the Coptic Orthodox Church, Fr. Tadros Y. Malaty (Amazon — no full free text found)
• Anglican — Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion
• Lutheran — Book of Concord
• Reformed/Presbyterian — Westminster Confession of Faith
• Methodist/Wesleyan — Articles of Religion
• Southern Baptist Convention — Baptist Faith & Message 2000
• Pentecostal (Trinitarian) — Assemblies of God Statement of Fundamental Truths
• Seventh-day Adventist — 28 Fundamental Beliefs
• LDS — Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants
• Jehovah's Witnesses — What Does the Bible Really Teach?