My Favorite Argument Against the Female Priesthood

In this episode Trent reveals an intuitive argument he finds helpful in making the case for an all-male priesthood.

Transcription:

Trent:

On Tuesday, president Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance attended a prayer service at the National Cathedral where an Episcopalian female bishop proceeded to lecture them about immigration and people who pretend to be men or women, which makes sense because she is pretending to be an actual priest. Liberals praised her speech even though they’d moan and complain if this were a real priest telling Kamala Harris to remember unborn children. But this incident also raises the larger issue of the problem with female priests in general, which is why in today’s episode I’ll share my favorite argument against the female priesthood. But before I do that though, two things. First, I am getting sick, so please bear with me in my voice. And number two, I want to thank the women and men who make the Council of Trent possible. And if you want to help us grow and reach more people and stay sponsor free, please support us at trenthornpodcast.com.

For as little as $5 a month or $50 a year, you get access to all kinds of bonus content and even more importantly, you’ll make my day. So go and check that out. Now, I want to say that at the outset my favorite argument against the female priesthood, it’s not the best formal argument or case against the female priesthood or for a male only priesthood, and it’s not the official reason the church gives for why it reserves the priesthood to men. The primary theological reason is that Christ only chose men to be apostles even though he was countercultural enough to choose women if he desired women to serve the church in this way. What this means is that it is not the case that the church won’t ordain women to the priesthood, but that it cannot ordain them to the priesthood. Pope Saint John Paul II put it this way in his apostolic letter or Nazi satis, I declare that the church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the church’s faithful.

But some people aren’t moved by this argument from the authority of tradition. So they might cite scripture verses like one Timothy two 12, which says, I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men. She’s to keep silent. But this isn’t a strong argument because critics could say this is a cultural convention of St. Paul’s time, like when he says in one Corinthians 11 about the requirement for women to wear veils. Many Christians see nothing wrong with theologically Orthodox female seminary professors like Janet Smith or Mary Healy who teach men. Since the verse doesn’t speak about the office of the priesthood specifically, it isn’t decisive when it comes to disproving the female priesthood. Instead, the argument I often share is more intuitive and faithful Christians who hear it often say, yeah, that makes sense. Specifically it’s the buy their fruits. You shall know them.

Argument in the Sermon on the Mount, our Lord said the following, beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits Are grapes gathered from thorns or figs from thistles? So every sound tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears evil fruit. A sound tree cannot bear evil fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits. This argument provides strong support for the claim that the movement to ordained women to the priesthood is a movement from a false prophet. It is not something that God willed for the church because of the bad fruits that these female priests preach. I have never not once found a woman who publicly portrays herself as a priest who also taught that abortion homosexual acts and contraception were sinful every time without exception.

These women preach all kinds of evils and it is by those fruits of bad teaching, you can know their movement is not of God. This is not to say that women are morally inferior to men or anything like that. Rather what I’m saying is that this particular movement, the teachings that have sprung from it, show that it is not of God. Mary Daley, a radical feminist theologian said Women have suffered both mentally and physically from this deity in whose name they have been informed that birth control and abortion are unequivocally wrong, that they must be present as rituals and services in which men have all the leadership roles. Now, this argument won’t be convincing to someone who thinks contraception and abortion are not evil, but that just means this person has bigger problems to fix. However, for someone who just thinks the male priesthood is unfair and they otherwise love Christ in his church, this argument can help them see the dangers of the movement to ordained women to the priesthood. And it’s not hard to find examples of female priests saying theologically and morally bonkers stuff. Here’s a few examples brought to you by the protest yet account,

CLIP:

I do not like the concept of Christ the King Sunday, and I really don’t want to preach on it. And the reason is that it has traditionally gotten preached as a kind of a triumphal list victory overall, our enemy’s militaristic kind of thing, that kind of militaristic has absolutely no place in church

Creator. You create in your image and we thank you for creating outside of the binaries, cis, trans male, female, intersex, gender fluid and non-binary. We are all your creation creator. We give you things for animals that express the multiplicity of genders like earthworms, clownfish, cardinals, butterflies, and frogs. Now,

Even now, even in 2024, there’s something controversial about being gay, about being a lesbian, about being pansexual or polyamorous or asexual or any of the other beautiful God-given shades of the rainbow.

We’ve also tried to encapsulate Jesus into this one unmovable, unchangeable thing, but Jesus didn’t come just as full God walking around amongst Jesus came to be fully human. So I look to this scripture not for Jesus’s divinity, but for his humanity.

Trent:

Reserving the priesthood to men is not a case of bigoted discrimination like reserving the priesthood only to certain races or applying that rule to religious life. When that has happened in isolated instances, the victims of this real discrimination like Father Augustus Tolton and St. Martin depos did not promote evil in response to that injustice. They instead suffered evil as Christ did and remained faithful to the church in spite of that suffering. You can find holy priests of all races, but I have yet to find a holy female priest, one who does not promote grave evils. And when I say female priest, I’m not talking about a woman who merely feels like she could be a good priest. When people hear the bad fruit argument, they often quote Saint, theres of leue as an example of female priesthood bearing good fruit. This can be seen in this webpage@womenpriests.org, which quote St.

Theres as writing the following in her autobiography to be betroth to you, Jesus, to be a karma, light to become through my union with you, a mother of souls. Surely that ought to be enough for anybody, but somehow not for me. I seem to have so many other vocations as well. I feel as if I were called to be a fighter, a priest, an apostle, a doctor, a martyr. I want to be a priest. Notice however that there are ellipses that show some of the texts in the autobiography has been removed. The missing text reveals St. Teresa’s desire was more of a whimsical fondness than a serious calling to the priesthood. She writes the following, I feel as if I were called to be a fighter, a priest, an apostle, a doctor, a martyr, as if I could never satisfy the needs of my nature without performing for your sake every kind of heroic action at once.

I feel as if I’d got the courage to be a crusader, Pont dying on the battlefield in defense of the church, and at the same time I want to be a priest. How lovingly I would carry you in my hands when you came down from heaven at my call, how lovingly I’d bestow you on men’s souls. And yet, with all this desire to be a priest, I have nothing but admiration and envy for the humility of St. Francis. I would willingly imitate him in refusing the honor of the priesthood. Such contradictions, how can they be reconciled? I long to bring light to souls like the prophets and doctors to go to the ends of the earth, to preach your name, to plant your glorious cross, my beloved on pagan shores, one mission field alone would never be enough. All the world, even its remotest islands must be my mission field, nor would my mission last a few short years, but from the beginning of the world to the end of time, St.

Theres was so full of joy, the Lord that she wanted to do everything for God, which is good if you don’t literally try to be a crusader, a soldier, a priest, a martyr who dies for Christ and someone who preaches until Christ returns. I’m talking about women who unlike santerre, leue practiced disobedience to God and put on clerical garb to pretend to be priests and preach many other grave errors in the process. There may be exceptions that prove the rule. I mean it’s hard to prove universal negative, but so far all I see is rotten fruit in this movement. I also want to take a moment to point out where by their fruits argument can go wrong First. It’s sometime used to say good effects prove a religion or a doctrine is true. Like how some people say the fruits of the Holy Spirit like love and joy in people who have not received baptism shows that baptism is not the ordinary means for spiritual regeneration, but you can find all kinds of people who seem to have the fruits of the spirit who become apostates later in life.

And there are many non-Christians like Mormons that seem to have these fruits as well, but they don’t have the Holy Spirit in spiritual regeneration. This argument can also be used sometimes to show that something is false because of its bad effects. Brandon Robertson made this argument in our conversation a few years ago on homosexuality when he said the alleged elevated risk of suicide for people who identify as LGBT is bad fruit that disproves the alleged bad tree of teaching against certain actions like sodomy. But this argument doesn’t take into account other factors that can contribute to things like suicide rates or the fact that those rates are elevated in even supposedly LGBT friendly countries and communities. In both of these cases, I would say the buy their fruits argument becomes too broad. If you are saying that good or bad effect Y proves good or bad teaching x, a better way to use this principle would be to say good or bad teaching.

Y proves good or bad effect x. One way to interpret Jesus’s saying is that you can tell the false prophets from the true prophets by their teachings. You shouldn’t follow someone just because he’s charismatic. Judge that person by their fruits, judge them by what they actually teach. The good teaching will reveal if they are a good tree or a good prophet, and the bad teaching will reveal if they’re a bad tree or a bad prophet. In fact, the movement to ordain women to the priesthood expresses teachings that are so bad. They would lead to cutting down the entire tree of the Catholic church itself because the church stands against everything that they believe. For example, Mary Daley said of the priesthood, I don’t think it will be any panacea to go out and ordain women for daily. In similar radical feminist theologians swapping out women for men as priests doesn’t change the patriarchal underpinnings of the God that priests represent as an altar priestess another Christ.

Look at someone like Father Ann, a woman who encouraged other women to go on strike during Lent last year to support the cause of ordain women to the priesthood. These women want to be called Father because they’re not allowed to have that title, but that implies they aren’t good enough to be priests unless they pretend to be men. And for some feminist theologians, even the concept of priests as mediators between God and man is too oppressive. This can be seen in a 2021 Common Wheel article by Mary Kate Holman entitled Priesthood Reimagined. Holman notes that while women priests proclaim their resistance to clericalism at every turn and nonetheless remains a serious challenge for their ministry, if women priests claim an indelible essential transformation, they fall into the clerical power trap they seek to avoid. If they do not claim a transformation, they may lose some of their ordained authenticity.

And Mary Daley even said of God himself, there is no way to remove male masculine imagery from God. Thus when writing speaking anthropomorphically of ultimate reality of the divine spark of being, I now choose to write ly. I do so because God represents the necrophilia of patriarchy, whereas goddess affirms the life loving being of women in nature. If patriarchy is an evil thing that literally subjugates women, then dissenters who want to be female, priests are like 19th century women who wanted an equal right with men to own slaves. The only way they can have the church that they want is to destroy the only church that exists and replace it with a counterfeit, which would basically be like a hippie feminist drum circle. Instead, we can only understand the church Christ gave us. If we abandon the presumption that the church is egalitarian and democratic, it’s not.

We have to get over the modern idea that the priesthood is a job or a gig. It is a vocation that all the ladies, Sharon, because we are all called to pray for others and lead them to Christ. That’s why St. Peter said, you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light once you were no people, but now you are God’s people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. This echoes Exodus 19 where God says, you shall be my own possession among all peoples. For all the earth is mine and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. But among the Israelites, there was a hierarchy, a sacred order, ROS Arcos, where the ministerial priests serve the people and they in turn followed the high priest.

The LA still take part today in the universal priesthood and they follow Christ. Our final high priest who offers himself to the Father, but they are served, the laity are served by the ministerial priests who have apostolic authority to offer the one sacrifice of Christ, our high priest that takes away the sins of the world. The church has a sacred order. Ros arkos, a hierarchy instituted by God to lead God’s people to salvation, and it is God who tells us the fundamental nature of this order, not man. When we start taking lessons from man, only ruin can be the result. Thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day. I.