Excerpts from this article are from the book,
Women Priests & Other Fantasies, by Fr. Vincent Miceli, S.J. This article first appeared in
Homiletic & Pastoral Review, August-September 1976...
Although this article is over 30 years old, it retains its relevance, particularly with the events that continue to this day.
Woman and the Priesthood
In the present exaltation of total liberation, the class struggle is perverting even the natural distinction between the sexes. Understandably, women's liberation movements have operated successfully in the politico-economic sphere to throw off their supposed "inferiority" so as to gain social power and equality with men. Success in the secular sphere has spurred these women groups to fight another alleged "inferiority," that is, their exclusion from priestly positions in the ecclesiastical power structure. Such groups see the Church as a religious power structure similar to the State as a political power structure. According to them, the Church places religious power exclusively in the hands of a male clergy even as once the State placed political power exclusively in the hands of male statesmen. But the time has come to force the Church to advance to the level of progress made by the State. Liberated in secular society with an opportunity to attain all State positions, women now seek liberation in the Church, with an opportunity to attain ordination in all degrees of the priesthood.
The tragic truth at the heart of this view of the Church is that it is a surrender to secularism, the philosophy that rinses reality of God and religion. The Church, however one views her, is not a purely natural society. She cannot be reduced to the secular categories suitable to describe the State. For, like her Divine Founder, her Gospel, her sacraments, the Church is an ineffable mystery precisely because she and they are graces of God's infinitely gratuitous love for man. Applying a priori concepts to the Church - like democracy, civil rights, equality, power-structure, etc. - is an attack on her very essence.
Such ideas mutilate her sacramental nature, her power, glory, beauty. They destroy her supernatural truth; they dissolve her transcendence before men's eyes, for they politicize her. Yet the truth is that the Church, in her essence, sacraments and structure, depends upon God's eternal Will, not on man's capricious desires. That is why this article hopes to convince the reader that the nonordination of women to the priesthood has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with any "inferiority" man or woman can imagine or concoct, no matter how plausible or pleasing the face of this falsehood may appear.
Fr Miceli then proceeds to trace the plan of God for the ministry of the priesthood in salvation history using Sacred Scripture. I could include excerpts of this at a later date if anyone is interested.
Certainly from our soundings in Holy Scripture we can safely say that women are not called by God to the ministry of the priesthood. The entire Old and New Testaments are weighted against a female priesthood. Yet Catholics know that the Protestant principle sola scriptura, i.e., that the doctrinal sufficiency for the faith comes solely from scripture, is a false, indeed dangerous and often bankrupt principle.
For Scripture must be interpreted by the living tradition of the ever-present teaching authority of the Church. Only then will it lead men to God in the fullness of truth and holiness. Now the Church has always seen the priesthood of Christ to be incarnational, representative and redemptive. The only begotten Son of the Father took on a physical particular human nature from Mary. That nature is male. He chose, ordained and sent out as his successors in the priesthood Apostles, all men. The Catholic Church, following the will and example of her Divine Founder, in a constant, clear, irreversible tradition, has chosen only men successors to these Apostles; every priest and bishop chosen by her for 2,000 years has been a man, representing and serving mankind before God.
And again, we will be reminded that the no one has a "right" to the priesthood, despite the claims that some continue to make:
There is no question here of worthiness or unworthiness, of inferiority or superiority. We are in the presence of divine mysteries, of God's sovereign pleasure and inscrutable counsels. We are dealing here with grace, a pure gift of God. In the realm of salvation, in the Church everything is grace. And man's salvation from first to last is the gift, the grace par excellence of God.
Changing God's plan to call woman priest and bishop can never be a matter of personal rights, human justice and equality. No one has any rights before God. And no one has a right to be a priest. The priesthood is not a profession left to one's option,; it is a vocation freely bestowed by God and ratified by his Church. Moreover, God's choice of men for the priesthood was no accident any more than his decision to send his Son to become man and save each person was an accident. God does not act from whim or caprice.
His choice of bread and wine at the Last Supper was no accident either. Accidents happen only to those who neither know nor can control all causes. But God knows and controls all causes...
Man is chosen to become a priest because man as head and source of the human race, is a natural symbol of Christ, head and source of all creation. Woman is chosen to be God-Bearer because woman as mother of all the living is the natural symbol of Mary, Mother of the Church an of the Church which begets all men in Christ. The special public vocation of man in the Church is to represent the Head, Christ. The special public vocation of woman in the Church is to represent the Church herself as Bride of Christ.
Some, who have been readers of this, or other blogs, will recall a statement by His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, when he was the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Some may even have purchased items from the
Cardinal Ratzinger Fan Club. The saying to which I refer is,
"Truth is not determined by a majority vote." In a similar way, Fr. Miceli tells us that opinion polls do not change the facts:
Socrates warns seekers of truth to beware of those who have "more zeal than knowledge." Now in an age that is intellectually out of tune and morally off its hinges, rational arguments will not persuade irrational and emotionally exalted persons.
This is certainly true. Many times we might feel as if we would be more successful in convincing an inanimate object of some objective reality and truth than we could by trying to have a rational discussion with some unreasonable fanatic.
Some women groups have already given fair warning that they will not be argued out of becoming priests. "We reject out of hand any arguments or efforts on theological or historical grounds," proclaimed the members of a Task Force chosen to study the status of women in a diocese in Pennsylvania.
The intelligent Christian answers the arguments of marching masses by calmly, firmly reiterating the truth in love, trusting in the power of the living Lord and the efficacy of his revealed word as taught by the Church. For theological arguments founded on propaganda and slogans must be answered theologically lest such specious reasoning seduce simple spirits. Moreover, no polls, no mere vote-taking, can change salvation facts already decided by God. Such statistics have no theological decisional value whatsoever, though they may indicate the extent of the profound disorder in faith among Christians.
In the cacophony of confused arguments hurled about in this age of global revolution, it has been stated that Jesus was victimized by the customs and prejudices against women prevalent in his first-century society. Culturally conditioned as he was, Jesus bowed to iron-clad social pressures in choosing only men for the priesthood. In another age, under more liberal conditions, he would have also chosen women for the ministerial priesthood. Hence, Jesus would be all for women priests today. Their hour has arrived.
Can this possible be true? Were Jesus' decisions or actions really culturally conditioned as so many have tried to lead us to believe?
This argument is founded on a fanciful, when not invidious, fallacy, namely that Our Lord was a peaceful conformist. Moreover, the advocates of this shaky view, while absolutely convinced that they understand past "cultures," seem to be totally innocent of their own cultural "conditioning," of their own surrender to the "culture of liberation, class struggle and egalitarianism." They forget too that, since Christ appeared in the "fullness of time," the appropriate age chosen by God - to the embarrassment of the twentieth century which considers itself the standard-setter for all times - they are presumptuous to assume that the conditions of a different age would have caused God to change his plans for the salvation of men.
The fact is that Christ often violently broke through the conventions of his surroundings. He vigorously cleansed the temple of accepted commercial conventions; he revoked the convenient custom of easy divorce, returning marriage to its pristine binding force; he scandalized many by speaking to Samaritans and especially the Samaritan women; he invited women to work with his band of disciples, something the Pharisees never allowed. Indeed the Pharisees themselves testified that Christ was no respecter of persons. They even accused Christ of breaking law upon Levitical law, for Christ despised their legalistic customs. In the end they claimed they crucified him as a law-breaker.
Was Christ unaware of women priests?
In his time priestesses were far more common in idolatrous Semitic and Greek religions than they are today. It is unreasonable to pretend, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that Jesus' choice of only men as priests was the one instance in his entire life when he committed an injustice for the sake of cultural expediency. The Rev. Dr. E. L. Mascall, commenting on this argument, writes:
"If the supporters of women priests are right, then Our Lord in instituting an exclusively male apostolate, was doing something which has deprived half the members of the Church from their legitimate rights for nearly 2,000 years. And it would be difficult in that case to feel very confident of either his moral or his intellectual integrity. And then it is difficult to see why we should attribute any authority to him at all."
Fr Miceli then proceeds to a discussion of St. Paul, who some suggest was the "Prince of Polarization." Some refer to the thoughts and writings of St Paul as the "time-conditioned, archaic, narrow-minded prejudices of a sexual neurotic." But as we know, many will distort the Scriptures to their own ends.
In his theology of women Paul bases his teaching on the dignity and role of woman in God's plan of salvation not on the account of the Fall, but on that of Creation: "Man did not emanate from woman, but woman from man. Man was not created for woman, but woman for man"...
What St. Paul's profound insights teach us is that sex is not an accidental characteristic of man and woman. A human person without sex is a strange abstraction. Sex entails the very identity of each person; sex plunges to the deepest mystery of each human person. St. Paul indicates this reality when he affirms that sexual sins involve persons up to the depth of their beings. He makes a sharp distinction between sins committed outside the body, i.e., outside the depth of one's being, and those committed against one's body, i.e., against what is destined for union with God as his temple and for resurrection and glorification with Christ. Hence the sexes, and the vocations pertaining thereto, are not interchangeable. Each person is called to serve God and his fellowman, accepting gladly the sex with which one is endowed and the vocation attached to that sex...
What St. Paul makes clear is that it is not in spite of nor without reference to their sexes that persons are called to serve God. Rather by accepting joyfully their very masculinity and femininity as an essential dimension of God's particular Providence, they attain their vocation to become saints and to bring others with them to sainthood.
Lest we forget, there is a complementarity in the fulfillment of God's plan for the salvation of the human family.
A final insight garnered from a reflective perusal of the New Testament's theology of woman gives a deeper appreciation of the significance and seriousness of masculinity and femininity. Despite its divinization of men and women through baptism which confers the common priesthood on all the faithful, the New Testament never grants women the graces of the ministry of the Holy Sacrifice, of the preaching of the word or of the discipline in the Church. These graces are reserved exclusively for men. Never is a woman chosen to be in public an authorized representative of Christ or his Church. To no woman does Christ ever make the promise to ratify in heaven what she has bound or loosed on earth. No woman is given the power of the keys. No woman is commissioned to perform the ministry of public preaching. Christ does not entrust the administration of the sacraments to women; neither does he commit the care of his flock to them. To no woman did Christ ever say: "He who hears you hears me and he who despises you despises me."
The New Testament clearly demonstrates the special importance women received from God and the accounts of the Resurrection are perfect for our understanding - for women the faithful women were the last to leave the tomb and the first to return. And Jesus first appears to them, not the Apostles. But Jesus tells them to go inform the Apostles, not the world.
Those Apostles, often rebuked by Christ as "men of little faith," they alone, and their male successors, are officially commissioned by Jesus to announce publicly to the world all he had done and taught and to make converts of all nations.
The agitation for women to be ordained priests is a sterile venture, an exercise in futility. Why?
Because, as we have seen, this project is of men, not of God. It will inevitably fail for its devotees are fighting even against God. The spirit behind the movement is one of prideful rebellion, of sitting in judgment on the ways of God. Such human self-centeredness founded on self-exaltation arises also from a naive, almost childish conviction that every revolutionary movement in Christian culture justifies a radical jettisoning of the entire Christian tradition.
For today every novel trend, it seems, has to develop a corresponding novel trend theology. The theology for women priests is the logical conclusion of the theology of revolution, of liberation, of violence. Its spirit is one of coarseness and vulgarity, an affront to Christian courtesy and piety.
Worse still, it is the diabolical fruit of the theology of "Christian Marxism." It can only destroy its enthusiasts, divide Christians and effectively kill charitable dialogue...
Do we know why God chose men only?
If the bearer, the icon, the minister of this unique priesthood is man and not woman, it is because Christ came as a man and not as a woman. Why man? In the last analysis no culture, no sociology, no political philosophy, no theology and, certainly, no ideology can give an adequate answer. Only an ardent faith in the revelation of God's intimate love for his Creation, his Chosen People and his Church will render men ready to accept his Providence for salvation joyfully and unquestioningly.
Final thoughts?
...it should be remembered that the Church is not called upon to comply with any age in its fashionable prejudices; she is called upon to be faithful to the deposit of the truth possessed by her in her teachings and living traditions. It is not a question of progressive adaptation or reactionary obstinacy to ordain or refuse to ordain women. It is simply a question of obedience or disobedience to God's ordinances revealed in Scripture and the living traditions. The Church will remain faithful to God's ordinances for she is guided by the Holy Spirit.
Hence in the Roman Catholic Church women will never be ordained priests. In the context of all the agitation over this question Our Lord's words, commenting on a similar trivial commotion, apply most appropriately here: "Martha, Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about many things; and yet only one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the best part, and it will not be taken away from her."
Excerpts from Women Priests & Other Fantasies
by Fr. Vincent P. Miceli, S.J. (© 1985)
for Bishop Sheridan!
