The priesthood is not about power
Which is the key point these women still don’t understand.
A few weeks ago, a group called Roman Catholic Womenpriests staged what it called an ordination, vesting three Boston-area women in white chasubles and red stoles. It told the local papers that the ordinations were valid, despite the Catholic Church’s teaching to the contrary; it even asserted episcopal approval from a rogue bishop whose name it won’t reveal.
This, of course, required clarification.
But, as a statement from the Archdiocese of Boston put it: “Catholics who attempt to confer a sacred order on a woman, and the women who attempt to receive a sacred order, are by their own actions separating themselves from the Church.” In other words: The ordinations were not Catholic.
These women rail against the hierarchy of the Church, intent on reshaping it according to the cultural relativism that defines equality with power-sharing.
Mother Assumpta Long, a statuesque, media-savvy Dominican sister in Ann Arbor, Mich., says that the Catholic Church already recognizes the equality of women — and that the dissenters confuse equality with identical opportunity. “All people are created by God equal in that we each possess an immortal and individual soul. [But] we are each unique in our talents. . . . Women are called upon to be mothers (spiritually and, for many in marriage, physically as well); whereas men are called upon to be fathers (spiritually and, for many in marriage, physically as well).” These sound like roles in a healthy family — not the artifact of a stifling, misogynistic patriarchy.
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I have never understood the Catholic church’s refusal to ordain women. In many respects the Church’s position seems more based upon an outdated anthropology or metaphysic of male and female. It is true that Jesus never called women to be apostles, though the word “apostolos” means only “one who is sent” or “messenger”. How could we expect Jesus to do what most first century male Jews probably wouldn’t do:put women is position of real authority? He was, in all respects, like us yet only without sin, no? Maybe today he would ordain women, but not then. He was human, right..truly human?
To say that the Church cannot ordain women because Jesus did not choose women 2000 years ago leads one to conclude that the Church should only ordain Jewish males, or men with beards and only 12 for that matter. It seems to that sex, number, and personality or physical attributes are only accidental and not essentially to being women or man.
Finally, for an outsider, of which I am, to hear the Church cotinually repeat that it cannot ordain women because Jesus, or God, has not given the church the power to do so is an position with which one cannot debate or enter into argument with. It ends all conversation, I mean, who can debate the ALL That Is, right. As such, such a argument for not ordaining women because terribly nonrational and seen finally as the last argument of an Old Boy’s Club that can’t envision any other way of doing business.