Sex, Body, and the Catholic Priesthood

**Excerpts from a recent letter to a friend**

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As for women priests... well that's a complex issue. On the one hand, I could reply that just as men can't become nuns, women can't become priests. But that doesn't really respond to the core question of the importance of sexual difference in the hierarchical ordering of the Church. I'll do my best to make the case as strongly (polemically?) as possible. I'm still struggling with this issue myself so I'll try to give voice to the strongest traditional arguments I have found.

In order to see why it makes sense for the Catholic church to maintain the ancient way of ordaining and consecrating its different kinds of ministers, one has to understand first that Catholicism is a fleshly religion. It proposes the idea that our bodies and souls are inseparably interconnected, and that the things of the flesh are meant to disclose the nature of God in all His glory. Bodies matter -- we will even have them eternally at the end of time. One's sex is important, regardless of whether 'gender' can be somewhat fluid. God the Creator chose to make sexual difference (He didn't have to, since He certainly has no actual sex or gender Himself) and as such we ought to respect it as we ought to respect the natural order in general -- as a mode of revelation and of a proper distribution of differences which maintain a delicate system of natural balance. Like biodiversity and the environment, sex difference ought to be understood as beautiful and necessary, not as something to be tampered with or exploited for our own gain of power or money or pleasure.

This difference emerges historically in the institution by Jesus of the office of the priesthood. Catholic priests work sacramentally 'in the person of Christ' (of course, God could have chosen for Jesus to be a woman, but He didn't), and in real history have not been women. It could have been otherwise, but it wasn't. We cannot go back and change the fact that Jesus had many amazing women as followers, and still chose not to give any women the powers that he gave to the Apostles. This of course doesn't mean that men are better than women, or that priests are better men than laypeople, just that physical difference serves as a real and persistent disclosure of some very important things about God and the various ways in which He has provided for the maintenance of the human community. The role of women in the Church and in human society in general is too complex for me to fully address here. Take a look at some of the resources on this page if you really want to learn more: http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~nmcenter/women.html

Now, the radical shift in typical ways of thinking about gender which has characterized the last 50 years or so is a really new phenomenon, so there is still much work to be done in articulating for this age what the best way of understanding the Church's unchanging position on gender might be. Each age requires a fresh encounter with the timeless doctrine of the Church. One interesting attempt to begin articulating in greater detail some of the basics to which I was gesturing above is here: http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9304/novak.html.

I'm not yet totally convinced that this is necessarily a core immutable doctrine of the Church, but Novak makes a strong case that, unlike the language of the Mass or other elements of practice which can be altered to fit one's circumstances, tinkering with the male priesthood would bring a host of other theological consequences which would pull apart the rational fabric of Catholicism.

Let me say also that the issue of power tends to be a key issue in this debate. [My fiancee], for example, finds it a little offensive that only men can wield the substantial power of the episcopal offices of her religion. It is easy to sympathize with this, and from one perspective the fact that I am male undermines anything I have to say about it. Rationally speaking, however, I think one might say that this understandable feeling is ultimately not a Christian attitude because all Christians, men and women, are called not to seek power, but only to use it justly when necessary.

Of course this seems a little crazy to modern Americans (myself included). In a democracy, this becomes rather problematic because everyone is obligated to serve at some level in the governing of our nation. But again, this is an obligation, a duty which one accepts, not a proper end in itself. Our whole political life is oriented around the concept of equal representation at all levels of civil and economic life. These are excellent political goals and have been commended countless times by the Vatican and by the American bishops.

But why should the Church be different? Ultimately, the Church does not organize itself according to the passing modes of the political cultures in which it finds itself. Some measure of political justice is possible in any number of political systems (tribal, feudal, socialist, democratic), and the Church has no ability to choose one as the best. It is ordered toward a different kind of goal than are political institutions. Its goal is the salvation of souls, not the acquisition of temporal power. Often, people need to relinquish all power in order to acquire this. Often, the temporal power of the Church has led to the corruption of those who have striven for it. The Church is under no obligation to make this temptation available to all. Its only power is to preserve the structures of authority that were established in it by Christ and the Apostles. We see that this structure is the one best oriented to the salvation of souls, regardless of its absurdity from the perspective of modern democratic ideologies. Thus, the very question of sex equality in ecclesiastical offices discloses a problematic way of thinking which seeks power, rather than seeking to relinquish it.

Certainly, this way of talking will seem like so much obfuscation or naivety when viewed through a secular political lens. It can easily be interpreted as a way for men to maintain power and keep it from the hands of women by feeding them a line about looking for salvation in the next world in exchange for oppression in this world. If one assumes ahead of time that power is all and that eternal salvation is a myth, then it only follows to think that Catholicism is a great patriarchal sham. But of course, one has to already have rejected the fundamental principles of Catholicism (that love, not power, is the proper ultimate goal of all things; that life in this world is not the end of our existence; the list goes on.).

And so we are back to the issue of fundamental axioms and the ways in which the faiths of various secular models of reality make most forms of Christianity seem quite irrational, while the fundamental axioms of Christianity make most secular models of reality seem equally irrational. Faith is a matter of where you lay your foundations. Reason is only possible when founded on non-logically accepted axioms. All thought encodes a leap of faith, as it were. The only difference is in where one is leaping.

I could talk more about why I find some axioms more appealing than others, but maybe that is the subject for another time -- assuming you haven't gone to sleep by this point!
Well... that's the best I can muster at this point. Do take a look at the Novak article and at some of the Catholic feminists at the other website. They can fill in lots of the blanks that I have had to leave unfilled.
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Best wishes,
pax
drg