Why The Church Can’t Ordain Women

Why won’t the Catholic church just ordain women as priests? That is one of the most common questions that I as a Catholic get from non-Catholics, and I think it’s unsatisfying to them to hear the first part of the answer, which is that from a Catholic perspective, the church can’t ordain women as priests. Then John Paul II was completely clear about this point where he said that the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal tradition of the church and firmly taught by the magisterium in its more recent documents. And he says, this isn’t just a mere discipline like a church practice that could change where we do it this way. We don’t have to do it that way. That rather this is at the level of a dogma. And in fact, he throws his whole papal authority behind it and says that in virtue of his ministry of confirming the brethren, 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 churches faithful.

So notice that in this they’re treating Jesus just like, oh, you know how men were back in the day, but that’s just a bad argument. I like that they put it so clearly, but let’s just address reasons why it’s a bad argument. Jesus isn’t just a Jewish male of his day. He in fact is the God of the universe incarnated in the flesh and was striking about him several things. Number one, he’s never afraid of upsetting people by his inclusivity. And we can think about this in several examples, but I’m going to give just two now. You’ve got Jesus having dinner with tax collectors and sinners. You’ve got even well-known prostitutes eating with Jesus and the Pharisees and the scribe and the religious leaders of the day are shocked by this saying things like this man received sinners and eths with them. He’s not afraid of how first century culture is going to view him maybe even more radically in some way.

You’ve got things like the fact that he heals a leper by touching him. You weren’t allowed to touch lepers or even be near them. Jesus was not afraid in his love and service of others to include people in radical and socially unacceptable sort of ways. Two, Jesus freely incorporated women in particular in his ministry and he was not afraid of how the broader culture would receive it. In fact, you know who makes this point really well, the Women’s Ordination Conference in the very same document. Now this language is still there. They point out women including Mary Magdalene, Susanna Salima, Mary Bethany, and Mary, the wife of Clo Lopez played prominent roles in Jesus’s ministry. The women were the last estate at the foot of the cross in the first witness, the resurrection, Mary Magdalene is known as the apostle to the apostles for her role in telling the apostles that Jesus had risen from the dead.

Jesus modeled radical inclusivity of women. Amen? Well said. But surely that cuts against the argument that Jesus was just bound by the cultural blinders of his day or was afraid of upsetting the apple cart. He clearly wasn’t. He was happy to include women in the radical elements of preaching to the 12 in terms of announcing the news of the resurrection. And yet he didn’t make them priestesses, he didn’t make them apostles. So the mere fact that he was so willing to include them in every other area actually only highlights the fact that there’s this one area that he always treated as off limits to even the holiest of women, even to his own mother. So the third thing we should point out here is that female leaders wouldn’t have been that shocking had he decided to say the apostles are going to include men and women. This wouldn’t have been as radical or shocking to either Jewish or gentile believers of his day. So this is very clear from the Roman perspective. You have priestesses and plenty of the religious cults within the Roman empire, particularly in what we called the mystery religions. But you also have things like the Prophetess Anna for instance in Luke chapter two. And you have women like JL back in judges, you have Judith, you’ve

Got plenty of female leaders throughout the history of Israel. And yet the priesthood, both in the old and New Testament was always for men alone. So I just add one more thing here. Christianity, let’s not forget as radicals, all of this was at the end of the day, this is a religion promising that Jews and Gentiles can worship God side by side together in one religion. And that is far more radical than the idea that women might be leaders in the new religion or anything like this. So Jesus clearly is unafraid of overturning all the social conventions of the Judaism of his day, of the Roman culture of his day. And yet on this point he’s extremely traditional. Why is that? I’m going to offer a few possible answers. First, what does the male only priesthood reveal about priesthood? And I would suggest this, it reveals that priesthood is a vocation and not an occupation. Here’s what I mean. There are plenty of incredibly well-qualified women as scholars, as doctors, as lawyers, as every kind of professional you can imagine. And we even have great saints like St. Gianna Mollah who is a female Catholic doctor. So if priesthood is primarily an occupation, if it’s a job, then it’s something that should be open to women. I mean, jobs should be open to whoever’s qualified to do them. On the other hand, Gianna isn’t just a doctor, she’s also a mother.

That’s not an occupation, that’s a vocation. And there’s something inherently feminine about motherhood as there’s something inherently masculine about fatherhood. And so just as I can never be a mother like Gianna was, even if I were to become a doctor like she is or was so too Gianna can never become a father. What I mean to say here is the reason that only men can be priests is that priesthood is about fatherhood, not about a job. And fatherhood isn’t something that we should understand in occupational terms, but in relational and vocational terms. And so the intimacy and the radical commitment of priesthood are expressed in the fact that it is like fatherhood and motherhood something that is sexed in its inherent qualities. Second, what does the male only priesthood reveal about God? Now this point could be misunderstood. So I want to tread a little carefully here. But CS Lewis makes what I think is a very good argument. In an essay he has called priestesses in the church and he says The priest is for us a double representative. Now Lewis is an Anglican, but the points he’s making here, Catholics would agree on that the priest serves as a representative of the people to God and is God to the people.

And so this is expressed in what’s called at Oriental worship because at least traditionally the priest would turn his back on the people and face the East Liturgically east to face God as it were for the people. And then he would turn around and face the people on behalf of God. And so that you can see in the movements of the priest sometimes he’s speaking to the people on behalf of God. Sometimes he’s praying to God on behalf of the people. Now there’s no problem with a woman praying to God on behalf of the people, but there is a problem with her representing God to the congregation. But he says, well, why is this surely it’s not because a woman is necessarily or even probably less holy or less charitable or stupider than a man. I mean, think about the incredible reverence Catholics have for the Virgin Mary.

It’s not that we think women are inherently stupid and unholy or anything like this. A woman can be God-like in the sense of charity as much as a man can, but it is rather something else. Now he stops short of saying what that something else is, but instead points us in another direction. He says, okay, think about it this way. Suppose the reformer stop saying that a good woman may be like God and begin saying that God may be like a good woman. Suppose he says that we might just as well pray to our mother, which art in heaven rather than our Father because right that follows, right? If the argument is a woman can stand in persona, Christi in the technical sense in the person of Christ as much as a man can, then we seem to follow that. We can say, okay then masculinity and femininity don’t matter in our conception and articulation about God.

So why not stop saying our father who aren’t in heaven? And Sarton said, saying our mother who aren’t in heaven. Now some of you might think that’s a straw man. Some of you might say, well yeah, but of course it totally follows. Well as continue the poses reformer suggests that the incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form that is that the second person in the Trinity might just as well be called the daughter of God as the son of God, that Jesus’ masculinity then becomes irrelevant or something negotiable. It could have just as well become a woman. The post finally the mystical marriage were reversed that the church where the bridegroom and Christ was the bride. All this it seems to me is involved in the claim that a woman can represent God as a priest does. And then Lewis says, now it’s surely the case that if all these proposals were ever carried into effect, we’d be embarked on a different religion. Now, I would just point out as an aside that I think in Anglicanism you’re starting to see this different religion emerging after women’s ordination was accepted, Lewis says, goddesses have of course been worshiped, many religions have had priestesses, but they are religions quite different in character from Christianity. So I say all of this to say, I

Think Lewis is making a point that’s easy to overlook, that the question of women’s ordination to the priesthood is much more intimately tied up with our conception of God than we maybe realize at the outset because the priest is standing in the person of God, particularly in the person of Jesus Christ. But I think there’s a reasonable objection to this, which is of course God is not literally a man. As the catechism points out, we ought to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman. He is God. I find that language very funny because even as it’s saying God is neither man nor woman, it still says he is neither man nor woman. He is God. He also transcends human fatherhood and motherhood, although he is their origin and standard. No one is Father, is God is Father.

So then we’re ultimately left with the question, why do we call God father? Because that is going to be the ultimate question in understanding why the priesthood is male only. And at this we hit something of the limits of our understanding because one answer is just because this is how God reveals himself. He doesn’t reveal himself as mother never in the old and New Testament, even though maternal imagery is sometimes used, does he refer to himself in the feminine? He is always and thoroughly and unambiguously using the masculine. So it’s flippant to say we respect God’s pronouns, but rather that God’s choice to speak in this way about himself so consistently is revealing something of the nature of the truth of reality. And that nature of reality is not that God has male genetics or something like that, it’s something else. Benedict VII puts it like this in his volume, one of his trilogy, Jesus of Nazareth, he says, we can only tentatively seek to understand.

Of course, God is neither a man nor a woman, but simply God, the creator of man and woman. But then he says this, the mother deities that completely surrounded the people of Israel and the New Testament church created a picture of the relation between God and the world that is completely opposed to the biblical image of God. These deities always and probably inevitably imply some form of pantheism in which the difference between creator and creature disappears looked at in these terms, the being of things and of people cannot help looking like an emanation from the maternal womb of being, which in entering time takes shape in the multiplicity of existing things. Now that is confusing inger language. So let me unpack that. What he’s saying is goddess religions tend to be really like earth religions like Gaia. You’ve got Mother Earth and everything springs from the womb of the earth. And this makes perfect sense because the relationship of a child to a mother is this intimate one that you proceed from the mother and this incredible act where you’re united to the mom with the umbilical cord, we now know even share some of the same genetic material for

Years after the birth. All of that’s the case. There’s a radical otherness of the father in the baby. There’s a radical intimacy of the mother in the baby and that it’s natural that all of these goddess religions create this vision where creation and God basically blend into one. And we emerge from this like the womb of being and that the Judeo-Christian vision of God is radically other than that, as Inger puts it by contrast, the image of the Father was and is apt for expressing the otherness of creator and creature and the sovereignty of his creative act. Only by excluding the mother deities could the Old Testament bring its image of God, the pure transcendence of God to maturity. So it’s true there is an incredible intimacy with God and we don’t want to lose that. There’s an incredible eminence with God, a nearness with God, and we don’t want to lose that.

And that is often expressed in really feminine imagery, even in the Bible itself. And yet the thing that we’re never given permission to lose sight of is that at the end of the day, God is radically apart from creation. He’s not within creation, he’s the creator of it. He stands outside of it even though he brings himself into it. And in this way, he’s very much in the role of a father. And that’s expressed in all the masculine language and scripture about God as father, even at a time and place. And when feminine language about the gods was widespread, the Israelites and the early Christians were very clear about expressing the masculinity and the language of God, not in believing that God was literally a man, but in recognizing that something in this masculine imagery expressed the otherness and transcendence and sovereignty and kingship of God. And this is closely tied up with what is revealed in the male only nature of the priesthood. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.