It contains numerous new prayers, endless
rubrical instructions (five times lengthier than those of the Roman Missal) and an all-inclusive language which has banned male nouns and pronouns throughout ("We will obey God rather than man" becomes "We will obey God rather than human authority".
For instance, with respect to the first and third differences noted above, Bradshaw has suggested that both the female ordinand's kneeling before the bishop and her receiving a kiss from him may have been considered inappropriate actions within Byzantine society; even a late Byzantine canonist, Matthew Blastares, saw nothing substantive in the female deacon's failure to kneel, instead assigning the
rubrical difference to the deaconess' "weakness." (161) As has already been made evident in other areas of deaconesses' historical liturgical participation, such as baptism and receiving the Eucharist at home, propriety has played an important role both in excluding women and including them in various ways.
