Women Priests and Equality
I don’t usually do requests, but every so often I’ll entertain one.
The issue of women’s ordination briefly came up in a conversation I got into on twitter, with an atheistic tweep (hey, don’t look at me…that’s apparently the technical term) firing off a couple of tweets at me commenting on the intransigence of the Catholic Church on this issue. I’m not sure what it is about this issue that some atheists find attractive or useful — are they declaring that they would convert and become religious in a heartbeat, if only they could have a female pastor? — but it came up all the same.
And I’ve actually addressed this issue before, though not in an article exactly. I did, however, address it in a comment once, when talking with The Barefoot Bum. Which makes this a bit of ancient history.
Let’s start with the statement from Barefoot that actually precipitated the discussion, what say?
The Babylonians did actually have laws limiting male sexuality –- penalties for rape, and adultery, child support rights for wives, inheritance rights for daughters (and even concubines). These laws were not perfect — nor were they put into perfect effect — but they were quite enlightened for the time with respect to women’s rights. I guess I could deride your ignorance at this point but Monty Python didn’t make many jokes about Babylonians.
Unfortunately, they did not — Barefoot is right. Shall I count that, though, as an admission that his own “knowledge” of Catholic teaching comes from said comic troupe?
Anyhow, on the the point: the Babylonians did have some legal recognition for the status of women…but at the same time, other aspects of their legal reality were very much against women (the wife could, through the marriage contract, become an indentured servant to other, older women in the man’s life, for example; wives could taken as payment of pre-marital debts of the husband; a bad wife could be stripped of her dowry and, if she was unable to prove that her ‘badness’ — what constitutes ‘bad’ is nebulously defined — was the result of neglect or cruelty on the part of her husband, she might be drowned for it).
Babylonian law also allowed marital infidelity in limited contexts, although any children that resulted from that union were to be left with the father; they were taken away from the mother.
And let’s not even get in to the comparison and contrast between the Babylonian, property-based view of children and the Church’s teaching, which states the opposite: children may never be considered to be the property of a parent.
So in a sense, Barefoot is right — the Babylonians were a bit more progressive, in their laws, than some of their Ancient Near Eastern counterpart cultures…but that still isn’t saying much. Truly unique teaching on Family and sexuality emerged from an otherwise insignificant Hebrew nation to the west of Babylon.
Barefoot continued:
So says the male orthodox Catholic. It appears women in both your and Peter’s life disagree – have you considered that they just might be onto something?
This got back, actually, to a notion I discussed previously in that same comment thread, about the difference between equality and equivalence. I discuss it below, for the reader’s benefit. And while I’ve no doubt that Barefoot probably dismissed it as arrogance when I said, as I will now, that yes, the women (and men) who have articulated their opinion that the Church is being sexist are ignorant and know not of what they speak, that is in fact the case. Ultimately, it’s an issue of truth — I can come to no other conclusion than that they are wrong and that they misunderstand the issue.
And indeed they do. It’s not an issue of “rights” at all, which is the first mistake they make.
Now, since I can’t count on the possibility that Barefoot read the article I linked him to regarding this issue, let me cite a part of it here that is relevant:
One need not seek far to find rhetoric like this:
“The prohibition against women priests is based on the ancient idea of the inferiority of women. But we are all created in God’s image and have the same rights; and the fact that Jesus was male does nothing to negate this. That, along with the fact that all the Apostles were male, is the only thing upon which the Church bases its male-only priesthood. But in the days when Jesus was on earth, it would have been unthinkable for him to select women for his ministry. Not because women weren’t capable, but because they would not have been accepted.”
The first difficulty here is that ordination, like all sacraments, is not a “right”, but a gift. Nobody has the “right” to baptism or Eucharist, much less Priesthood. Trying to apply “rights talk” to sacraments is like threatening to sue Heaven for the free gift of salvation. If God gave us humans what we deserved according to strict justice, we would all be damned. Christ came to save us from, not give us, what we deserve.
And yet, aren’t we are all “equal” in the sense that “God is no respecter of persons.” Yes. And Paul knew better then anybody in antiquity that male and female were “equal” in Christ in the sense of having identical dignity before God. It was he, after all, who said, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). Paul saw nothing inferior about woman’s dignity. But he, like the other apostles, did see something which kept him from ordaining women.
“Right,” says the modern critic. “He saw blinkers. Like Jesus, he was prohibited by his culture from doing something that no ancient would accept. But now times have changed. Now we know women are competent to pastor and preach, so they should be made priests.”
This common objection is founded on a number of misconceptions about what the sacrament of ordination is and what Jesus and the apostles did. First, it is simply unhistorical to say that Jesus was worried about “what everybody would think.” Jesus did and said lots of shocking things. He horrified his hearers by saying, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53). He prompted his fellow Jews to form a lynch mob by declaring “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). He touched lepers, ate with whores, and excoriated the ruling class in Jerusalem. He challenged conventional wisdom in a thousand ways. His message (and that of the apostles) was indeed, so conciliatory to his contemporaries that they welcomed him with crucifixion and hailed his disciples with stonings, beatings, and assassination attempts. Bottom line: If Jesus had wanted woman priests he would have ordained them, public opinion or no. The “Jesus was hamstrung and/or blinded by his culture” thesis is utterly lame. And this is doubly so because Greco-Roman culture had oodles of women priests. So let’s forget this ahistorical appeal to poor Jesus’ jitters at offending.
Similarly, appeals to women’s pastoral and rhetorical competence are quite beside the point. The Church has in her tradition abbesses, theologians, doctors of the Church and teachers aplenty in skirts and habits. The question revolves, not around pastors and preachers, but around the priestly office. Anybody can do pastoral, teaching, preaching, or administrative work. But that is not the essence of the priesthood. The essence of the priestly office is celebration of Christ’s Sacrifice in the Mass.
And that is why all such arguments are not addressing the issue, for the issue is the nature of the sacrament. What is a sacrament? It is a thing which not only does what it symbolizes but symbolizes what it does. In Baptism, the obvious symbol of cleansing, drowning and new life is water, not wine. And so wine, for all its admirable qualities, is not the right “matter” for the sacrament of Baptism. Likewise, in Holy Eucharist, wine — the blood of the crushed fruit — is the obvious symbol which signifies the blood of Christ, who was crushed for our iniquities. Like the blood of Christ, wine invigorates, inebriates, and reminds us of the tang of death and new life. Here again, water, despite being the right matter for Baptism and not in the least “inferior” to wine, is the wrong matter for the sacrament of the Eucharist. In short, certain things are natural images. It’s not a question of “equality” but of fittingness.
Now, Christ is, as he himself teaches, the “Bridegroom” to the Church’s “Bride” in the great eschatological Marriage Feast of the Kingdom (Matthew 25:1-13). Gender has, in Christ’s teaching, a real meaning and is not simply an accident of nature. And he ought to know, since he designed the human person and made it a participant in the mystery of maleness and femaleness. And so, every mass is a local “Marriage Feast of the Lamb” whereby we enter into the self-sacrificial love of that Cosmic Bridegroom for his Bride.
And that gets us right back to the question of symbols. For as with water in Baptism and wine in Eucharist, it is not that a man is “superior” to a woman in being “matter” for the priesthood. It is that man is a fitting symbol of the Bridegroom and woman is not. The priest is an “alter Christus” to the Bride in the mystery of the mass. He signifies. He does not primarily “administrate” or preach or pastor.
Ordination, then, is not a right. It’s a gift. It’s a sacrament that does what it symbolizes and symbolizes what it does, like all sacraments. Symbols therefore matter (particularly those which Christ himself has instituted) and the Church has no power to alter such symbols in their fundamentals. Christ and the apostles revealed what the “matter” of ordination should be just as they revealed what the matter of Baptism and Eucharist should be. The Church merely obeys. That is why the Pope says, “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.”
* Let’s be clear — the priest signifies the bridegroom, Christ, in complement to the Church as the bride of the Lord. It is precisely the specific gender of the priest that is the symbol. And women are no less equal to men even though Christ does not, in the teachings of the Church, make provision for their ordination, because equality is not achieved on the basis of role.
Aside: When we state that men and women are “equal”, what basis absent the divine can we found that claim on? Oh, we can say that men and women are equal “before the law”, but laws are fickle and can be changed by successive governments. We enshrined equal rights for women into Canadian law about a century ago, but a century from now some later government would still have the ability to strip those legislations out again.
So secular law is not a good basis on which to found the notion of equality. And while we can state that both men and women are human — in an attempt to appeal to naturalistic categories — the naturalistic view quickly breaks down as well: men and women have several key physiological differences, our bodies mature in different ways, and disparities emerge between genders in things like average physical strength, average body mass, and so forth. Also, men and women are ‘wired’ differently, think differently, look at the world differently, reason differently, and use both reason and emotion in wholly different ways and wholly different quantities.
So the naturalistic perspective is also not a good basis on which to found the notion of equality.
And so it goes — pick any other category that does not involve a notion of external divinity, and it will become rapidly apparent that the category in question is an insufficient basis upon which to base the notion that men and women are “equal”. Take it one step further, and begin adding different secular categories together, and still you will not have adequate foundation for the notion of equality.
Ultimately, the only category which gives any credence, foundation, or strength to the notion of male/female equality is the one that invokes an external divinity: men and women are equal in the economy of salvation, equal before the Lord, equal in God’s eyes. And any appeal to the notion of male/female equality must therefore necessarily be an appeal to some conception of divinity, because there is nothing that exists only in this world that can sufficiently justify and serve to defend said notion.
And here’s the point that needs to be stressed: just as, in salvation, works are meaningless, so too is it the case that in male and female equality, works are meaningless. By which I mean: true equality is equality of personal dignity which comes from the Lord. True equality is not the entitlement to perform the same roles. Nor should it be.
Men and women play different roles in many aspects of life outside of their faith — why wouldn’t they play different roles in God’s plan for humanity, in the economy of salvation, and in the life of the Church? That’s the second error that the various objectors that I know make; they erroneously assume male/female equality to mean equivalence, which it does not.
This is not the Church’s decision, in the end — this is a part of the ongoing revelation of the Spirit that the Church humbles herself to.
