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About six or seven years ago I entered famous Judson Church in New York City to attend the ordination of a Roman Catholic woman priest. The event, which took place in a large sanctuary, was well-attended. As I entered, however, I noticed, that some people were being directed to a cordoned-off seating area to the right of (facing it) the altar. Curious, I inquired. It was an area reserved for those who wanted (needed) to be sure they weren’t photographed. I later spoke with a Catholic priest friend about the ordination Mass. He was quite interested. “I’d like to go to one, but I’d have had to wear my Groucho Marx (mustache and glasses) disguise.”A majority of Catholics, clerics among them, are in favor of ordaining women. Many nuns in the United States worship in communities led by women priests. A priest who rapes a child can remain a priest for decades, but a Catholic priest who publicly supports the ordination of women can lose his frock almost immediately. A priest who supports the ordination of a woman commits a far more grievous offense, in the eyes of the the institutional hierarchy of the Catholic Church, than a child rapist does, because the latter is not a heresy and does not challenge any fundamental teaching.
When, in 2012, the CDF (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, once called the Office of the Inquisition) dispatched a team to conduct an “apostolic visitation” of convents, many nuns thought they ere looking for women’s ordination …”cells.” (My word.) The report following the probe cited such grave offenses as practicing Yoga and studying Reiki. It may be that the hierarchy’s jittery fervor to police progressive-minded Catholic women is the best indicator of how healthy of the Roman Catholic women’s ordination movement truly is.
I do not expect the Vatican to ordain a woman any time soon, but Catholicism is in big trouble in the United States (where I live). COVID led many Catholics to realize they might not need Sunday Mass as they once knew it. An avalanche of clergy sex abuses is just up ahead in the United States. I believe we will see more and more Catholics who thought they never would, seek out worship communities led by women priests as the schisms hit and patriarchy withers.
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Why doesn’t the Vatican ordain women?
The short answer: A. money, B. misogyny.
1. The Canon Code requires that a priest be a man because Jesus was a man. As in: a priest must resemble Jesus anatomically. If a priest must look like Jesus, why then do we not limit ordination to Palestinian Jews? Are anatomical man parts required for this work? Why must the “alter Christus” or “persona Christus” principlesapply to men alone?
Why can’t a woman or non-binary person be a semblance of Christ? What does it mean to insist that a male/female binary be applied to a Christ who sits at the center of Christians’ faith in great part because he was ontologically non-binary? God and man, divinity/mortal fluid. Not to mention the Galatians 3: 38, and Paul’s “neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, man nor woman” idea.
No. “The priest must be a man” rule exists to the reinforce the economic structure of an institutional Catholic Church that relies on its own misogyny to keep the its organization operational. Women are needed for other work.
2. Jesus is said to have ordained only men at the Last Supper. Did Jesus actually “ordain” anyone at the Last Supper? Maybe. I guess it depends on one’s definition of “ordain.” Even if the first Eucharist was an ordination, it is foolish, to expect complete accuracy from 2000-year old accounts written by people living under the famously patriarchal, enduring and militaristic Roman occupation, who were not even in attendance, long after the Pesach meal took place. Whatever accounts we do have were fragmented, edited, translated and re-translated before they even found a place in Bibles. The men who made this rule, themselves ordained, designed it to subjugate women and to preserve the patriarchy. The men who embrace it today want to do the same.
3. The Catholic Church is a bride so only men can be her “bridegroom.” On one hand, this argument sounds ridiculous. It’s a metaphor, an image. I think of it as being related to the idea of the Jewish Shabbos as a bride. In many ways it’s a lovely mage and vision of devotion. Citing this “nuptial mystery” as a reason for failing to honor the vocation of women called to the priesthood is foolish. It’s a push, a ploy.
On the other hand, those who point to this with a straight face are telling Catholic women (Catholics) something we do need to hear. Strict construction of this metaphor raises important questions. The “nuptial mystery” argument takes the bride of the Church thing seriously. So, just how literally are we all supposed to take this metaphor? How many men does Mother Church have, if all the priests are her bridegrooms? Is this an argument for polygamy? What is said in our Christian scripture about the woman who takes many spouses? We know Jesus in John 4 gets quite testy about the woman with many husbands at the well. If the “Church as bride,” is a figure of speech, the figurative encapsulation of a mystical conception, an image, a metaphor, what mystical force does it have if it is not entirely capable of transcending earthly (Cis) gender?
What this “Church as bride” rationale really is a reaffirmation of complementarity, a way of emphasizing that no matter what else falls away, the complementarity divide must remain as intact. Under complementarity; women have women’s gifts, talents, vocations, and anatomical parts. And men have men’s. Remove the linchpin of complementarity and much of the Catholic Church teaching on gender/sexuality, on which the economic structure of the Vatican/institutional Catholic Church depends, becomes shaky. The prohibition against use of artificial contraception, the characterization of LGBTQ+ people as “disordered,” and the imperative of increasing the fold all rely heavily on Catholics’ readiness to embrace complementarity. And complementary is necessary for economic reasons because it is through complementarity that the institutional church increases its fold.
4. The Catholic Church has never ordained women. This is often offered as a reason, but, obviously, it is not a reason. It’s a description. Let us pretend, for a moment, that the men who say the Catholic Church “lacks the authority” to ordain women know this to be true. How do they know it? They might say they know it through divine revelation. What is “divine revelation”? Hard to explain in a sentence but essentially, it’s the truth God reveals to special human beings. Proponents of all-male priesthood insist that God has made this idea of an all-male priesthood clear to them.
I’m not a church historian, but my sense, after doing quite a lot of reading on the matter of women’s ordination is that it may be that the Catholic Church may never have officially ordained women. I neither insist that there have been women Roman Catholic priests, nor that there never were any. I do insist, however, that it is unlikely anyone knows for sure.
We know that canonical documents we have been able to obtain and preserve were scrubbed and edited. We know the ancient Christian Church came into being under Roman rule. We know quite a lot about imperial Roman rule, religion, law dispositions toward women and people held as slaves.
Most Catholics who care about any of this pretty much agree that there were women deaconesses and likely women deacons. (Not the same thing.) Lots of documentary evidence and artifacts support this. Some sculptures in Hagia Sophia, depict women serving on altars alongside men. I have seen the ancient mosaic in the Basilica of Santa Prassede — one of the oldest churches in the City of Rome — depicting a woman labeled/captioned with the word “episcopa.” How much else has been lost, purged, erased by men in positions of power in the Catholic Church, since the fall of Rome and thereafter?
How much evidence got lost or was paved over in the course of the centuries of “it’s our ball, our game” Christianity? How much hooey have the “divine revelation” boys with God whispering in their ears passed of as “God’s honest truth” for their own gains? How many men in positions of power in the Roman Catholic Church would, today, have us believe that God is for sexism and misogyny? Lots. these are the men who argue that opposing the ordination of women is not an expression of misogyny or sexism. It just looks like sexism. My mother had a disgusting expression she occasionally used. Though I never heard her apply it to church, it applies: “They’re trying to feed us shit and telling is it’s ice cream.”
Even contemporary traditional Catholics don’t like to cop to the misogyny involved in supporting or tolerating all-male priesthood. Being a bigot is out of fashion in most Catholic circles. Yet over and over again, everywhere we look in Catholic reporting and scholarship, we encounter a kind of “Yes, it looks like misogyny, but it’s not.” We hear that priestly vocations are not about power, yet in every Catholic direction we look, we see a prelates wielding power maniacally, tyrannically. The true call to ordination is not should not be chiefly about power, but there is power in it. In the case of Catholic clerics, especially ones on track to become bishops, political power is often entailed. It is not humble to aspire to become an alter Christus.
Often even “liberal” men who are content enough to abide the institutional misogyny of the Catholic Church are quick to characterize the desire of women called to priesthood for ordination as a somehow selfish power grab. Catholic-world is rife with “lens louse” priests, priests selling books, and priests hosting podcasts and television programs and stocking their war chests. I consumer a lot of Catholic content and news, and have for many years, yet I can not remember even once, ever, reading about any man called to ordination being accused of entering seminary because he wasn’t humble enough. How often have men who live in mansions, wear foot-high miters, brocade gowns and bling prelate-splained to women the folly and arrogance of seeking equality in the institutional Catholic Church?
5. The Canon Code and Catechism of the Catholic Church each stipulate that a priest must be a man. Requirements and prohibitions inscribed in the Catechism and Canon Law always have the look of being immutable, and that’s by design. The Canon Code has its roots in feudal law. Much of Canon Law was designed to protect property. Like secular law, the Canon Code can be amended — or sometimes a workaround is found. According to Can. 1042, for example, “The following are simply impeded from receiving orders: 1/ a man who has a wife, unless he is legitimately destined to the permanent diaconate.” This law pertaining to ordination has already been tampered with to allow for the Roman Catholic ordination of married Episcopal convert priests.
6. “The Catholic Church does not have the authority to ordain women.” This doesn’t mean anything. How do we know that the Catholic Church has the authority to ordain men? Because the ordained men told us so? Popes have a tradition of non-intervention in policies set forth by their immediate predecessors. In 1997, the so-called “pope saint” decided to clamp down on pro-women’s ordination activists within and without the College of Cardinals, proclaiming that the matter was settled and should no longer be seen in Catholic academic context as a legitimate subject for debate. Benedict XVI liked this idea and reaffirmed it. Popes don’t usually go against their predecessor popes. Except when they do, as Pope Francis did two days ago.
To the chagrin to many feminists who perhaps hoped her would turn out to not to be a proponent of sexism and misogyny, Pope Francis reaffirmed the bigotry expressed via the fool contention that the “Catholic Church does not not have authority to ordain women.” It’s interesting to be writing this piece today (on July 17th) because Pope Francis just stepped on the toes of the so-called “pope saint” and Benedict XVI by issuing a Motu Proprio in which he clamped down, though only somewhat, on the practice of celebrating Tridentine (Latin) Masses. A bold Vatican Optics move indeed! And a clapback against all of the orthodox throwback prelates who’ve been sticking it to him over the past few years. (Take that, Vigano!)
Does the Catholic Church have the authority to ordain women? Only if it has the authority to ordain men.
The rest is gaslighting. Jesus didn’t design the quasi-military structure of the institutional church. Jesus didn’t dispatch the Jesuits to put Jews on racks. Jesus didn’t commission the Medici family, or design the ecclesiastical costumes. The institutional Roman Catholic Church did that. The institutional church invented itself. It has found within itself the authority to ordain murderers, rapists, thieves and the freshly and forcibly converted.
When they say they have no authority to ordain women — we know what the man-children in miters are they are saying. They are telling women that they are inferior. They are telling women that what they experience is not real. They are feeding women shit and asking them to believe it’s ice cream. Connected to the authority question is the question of whether Jesus called women “apostles.” Maybe he did. No one knows.
Paul did call women “apostles.” Women were leaders in the early church whatever they were called. Even male trad Catholic scholars don’t really deny that women served as “deaconesses.” (I think we will soon see a big push out of the Vatican to create “deaconesses” — not the same as deacons — by the way. Look for this Vatican Optics development at the end of the summer or start of fall.)
Even if there had never been a single woman deaconess, or a single woman clandestinely ordained into the apostolic succession, the truth, that the vocations of women deserve be honored, would be clear. Women do much of the work of priests, all over the world, every day. Indeed many Catholics believe women may be better suited to priesthood than men.
Bigotry is a sin. Sexism is a form of bigotry. To call sexism “complementarity” is to put lipstick on a pig.
The real truth is that they are terrified of (us) women.
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Some people — Catholics even — are surprised to know that Roman Catholic women priests exist. Not only do Roman Catholic women priests exist, but many are supported in their journey toward ordination by canonical male priests. The call to honor the (Catholic) vocations of women by ordaining them – I’m speaking generally here—arose out of the reforms of the second vatican council (1960s).
In 2002, a German bishop ordained two women into what is called “the apostolic succession.” (According to Catholic teaching, Peter was the first pope; the apostolic succession started with him.) When Catholics talk today about the apostolic succession, they generally mean to point to the (putatively) unbroken line of popes that starts with Peter and extends, unbroken, to the present day. According to Roman Catholic law, Roman Catholic priests must be ordained into the apostolic succession, which is not unbroken, and which does not reach back to Peter. Only the succession is not unbroken. They just say it is.
That Roman Catholic Women priests serving throughout the United States and western Europe have been ordained by bishops who were themselves ordained into the apostolic succession does add a measure of pomp! But these women priests are doing the work humbly. They minister, presiding over sacraments, proclaim the Gospel, preach, and marry and bury. They teach and serving as chaplains. The Roman Catholic woman priest I know, and the few I track are more learned about scripture, theology and politics/news than the average parish priest.
Their numbers are growing. Not only are they growing. They are growing in the way the early Christian church grew — in homes, underground, and with women leading the way.
Roman Catholic opponents of the ordination of women have tended to cast women preparing for ministry as well-intentioned, if rogue, holy women or lunatic fringe. But they are growing, growing the way the early Christian church grew. Roman Catholic opponents of the ordination of women often cast Roman Catholic women priest as batty, Jesus-loving but naive church ladies who “play church” the way some Catholic children do. Even otherwise “progressive” or “liberal” Catholics do this. One all-male priesthood apologist recently called their efforts humbling.
The real truth is that they are terrified of (us) women.
How is it that Catholics who identify as feminists, and claim to oppose bigotry justify and consent to raising daughters in a church that thus indoctrinates them? A church that teaches little girls that they and all women are unfit to administer sacraments, proclaim the Gospel, and preach? Why do we consent to this?Why do progressive minded women still support the Catholic hierarchy financially and otherwise? Why don’t progressive women stop supporting the misogynist Roman Catholic hierarchy? Really. Why?
One answer to these questions might have to do with the fact that until quite recently it was not so clear as it is today that the Roman Catholic hierarchy is unlikely to ordain women any time soon. I believe “liberal” and progressive Catholics “dropped the ball” on women’s ordination, and that some element of shame is the result of our failure to act.
Francis will never ordain a woman. If it’s not going to happen under him, it’s unlikely to happen during the life anyone old enough to read this commentary.
What we see in the United States now, is a push to rebrand the misogyny. The “bitches” are restless. The Vatican has to do something. Watch: they’ll throw a few bones at the girls: create a commission, maybe toss the girls a synodal vote or two. The “deaconess” thing will be huge. It will keep a lot of “liberal” Catholics in the pews.
The manchildren in miters will get creative. They’ll invent new ways to mollify women. They’ll make a few Vatican “girl bosses.” We’ll hear lots of cant talk about the special charism of women in “the church,” especially in the United States, as the clergy sex crime scandal makes news here and in Europe.
But we’ll still continue to put our girls in bridal dresses at the age of seven, at which time their formation will be fully under way, through which they learn that they are essentially, ontologically unfit to be persona christus. “The bishops aren't the church,” they’ll learn to say. “We’re the church,” they’ll say. Like their (our) mothers and foremothers some will continue to stake the bagmen in miters. Hail to the women who refuse.
But here’s the thing. The institutional Roman Catholic Church is not ours. It’s theirs. We just work for them. We’re tenants and they’re the landlord. It’s their church. We just bankroll it. We pay them to dress up and perform. We pay them to condition our our children, to teach them that bigotry is acceptable so long as a guy in a biretta signs off on it. And if that guy in a biretta happens to be one of the degenerates, we look away. And we teach our children to look away. We Catholic women are good at looking away. When do when get good at walking away, and forcing a cleansing of the temple?
July 16, 2021, NYC
Revised, July 17, 2021, NYC
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