ordinare

Latin ordinare means "to put in order, to arrange, to regulate"—from ordo, "row, rank, series." Roman military officers were arranged in ordines—ranks. To ordain someone was to assign them to their proper rank. The word carried no religious meaning in classical Latin. It was administrative vocabulary.

The early church adopted ordinare for the ritual of appointing bishops, priests, and deacons. The concept of ranking translated naturally: the ordained person was placed into a specific ordo within the church hierarchy. The Apostolic Tradition, attributed to Hippolytus of Rome around 215 CE, describes ordination by the laying on of hands—a practice still observed across Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican traditions.

English absorbed both senses. "Ordain" meant to appoint someone to religious office and to decree or command that something shall be. The U.S. Constitution opens: "We the People... do ordain and establish this Constitution." The same verb that makes a priest makes a nation's founding law. Both senses preserve the Latin root: to set something into its proper order.

The question of who can be ordained has been among the most contested in Christian history. The Catholic Church restricts ordination to men. The Church of England ordained its first women priests in 1994. The first openly gay bishop in a major Christian denomination, Gene Robinson, was ordained in the Episcopal Church in 2003. Each expansion of ordination is a redrawing of who belongs in the ordo.