Transcript

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.

Saint John Paul II was completely clear about this point when 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, you know, like a church practice that could change, where we're, We do it this way, but we don't have to do it that way, but 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 Church's faithful.

So as a Catholic, you actually have to believe that the Church cannot ordain women.

Now, that doesn't answer the question though.

Well, why?

Why has it been the 2,000-year teaching of the Catholic Church that the Catholic Church not only doesn't ordain women, but in fact can't ordain women?

Now, before I get into that, I want to make one thing really clear.

He's kind of gone all in, to use the poker term.

If the Church were tomorrow to declare women's ordination is valid, it would be declaring itself no longer the Church of Jesus Christ.

It'd be declaring the 2,000 years of tradition invalid.

It would be denying something taught infallibly.

And so we know that the future does not include a female priesthood in the Catholic Church.

No matter how much it boggles people's mind, where they imagine just around the corner we must be getting women's ordination in the next year or the next generation or the next pope, it's never gonna happen.

But why?

Why can't the Catholic Church ordain women?

And the simplest answer to that is because Jesus doesn't give us a mixed-gender priesthood.

In the Old Testament, the priesthood was reserved to men alone.

When Jesus founds the New Testament priesthood, beginning with the apostles, he chooses men alone.

This is a pretty clear, deliberate act, and we take it as a binding practice.

Now, there's an obvious counter to this.

How do we know that Jesus intends it to be a binding practice?

And so, I like the way the Women's Ordination Conference puts the argument.

This is actually no longer language that they use on their website, but this is an older version of their document, Why Ordination?

They say, The decision not to include women among His Twelve Apostles says nothing about women as priests, except that Jesus, as a Jewish male of His time, knew that the custom and tradition of His day did not allow women to assume leadership roles.

By following the prevailing custom, Jesus was not precluding a time when women, along with men, could be ordained.

So notice that in this, they're treating Jesus just like, Oh, you know.

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 incarnate in the flesh, and what's striking about Him is 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 gonna 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 scribes and the religious leaders of the day are shocked by this, saying things like, This man receives sinners and eats with them.

He's not afraid of how first-century culture's gonna 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, Salome, Mary of Bethany, and Mary the wife of Clopas, played prominent roles in Jesus' ministry.

The women were the last to stay at the foot of the cross and the first to 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, like, preaching to the Di- twelve, uh, 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, uh, believers of His day.

So this is very clear from the Roman perspective.

You have priestesses in plenty of the religious cults within the Roman Empire, particularly in what were called the mystery religions.

But you also have things like the prophetess Anna, for instance, in Luke Chapter 2, and you have women like Jael, 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'll just add one more thing here.

Christianity, let's not forget, as radical as 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 is extremely traditional.

Why is that?

I'm gonna 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 Saint Gianna Molla who was 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, and 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 C.S.

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 as God to the people.

And so this is expressed in a- what's called adoriatum 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's can You, 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 godlike in the sense of charity as much as a man can.

But it is rather something else.

Now, he stopped 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 stops 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 it would 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 art in heaven,' and start instead saying, 'Our Mother who art in heaven'?

Now some of you might think that's a straw man.

Some of you might say, Well, yeah, that Of course, that, that totally follows.

Well, let's continue.

The Posist reformer suggests that the incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form, that is, that the second person of the Trinity might just as well be called the Daughter of God as the Son of God, that Jesus's masculinity then becomes irrelevant or something negotiable.

It could have just as well become a woman.

Suppose finally that the mystical marriage were reversed, that the church were 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 is surely the case that if all these supposals were ever carried into effect, we'd be embarked on a different religion.

And I would just point out as a kind of 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 worshipped.

Many religions have had priestesses, but they are religions quite dis- 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 r-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 as 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 not just 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 XVI puts it like this, in his, y- 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 c- 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 Ratzinger language, so let me unpack that.

What he's saying is goddess religions tend to be really like earth religions, like Gaia.

You know, 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 in this incredible act where you're united to the mom with the umbilical cord.

You, we now know even share some of the same genetic material e- 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 Ratzinger 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 imminence 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 s- 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 what's expressed in all the masculine language in scripture about God as Father.

Even at a time and place in which 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 Heschmair.

God bless you.