On Women’s Ordination

On Women’s Ordination

Michael Novak’s article “Women, Ordination, and Angels” (April) represents the essence of your fine journal. We sometimes need prompting to think about the thorny issues facing the Church, and Mr. Novak’s article made me do precisely that. His piece and many others in First Things contain an underlying theme: What, if anything, is ailing the Church and organized religion in our time? The question of ordination of women, while provocative, may not be the central issue. The degeneration of curricula at various seminaries and schools of theology may be the reason that the Church no longer attracts the best and brightest of each generation. The free-to-be-you-and-me ethos is not spiritually inspiring. And attending courses in “Pro-Active Listening” filled with trendy psychobabble hardly constitutes an intellectual challenge. This sort of thing does, however, create an atmosphere to encourage the proliferation of sociopaths, con artists, and incompetents. These of course have always been with us (we’ve all read Tartuffe) but I suspect their number is increasing. . . .

It has occurred to me that at any one time on this planet there is only a tiny percentage of human beings with “the right stuff,” spiritually, worthy of the priesthood. Some of these might be women. After all is said and done, what the Church wants, really, is a “few good souls” with moral courage who are able to meet the difficult, wondrous, mysterious challenge that is being part of the priesthood. . . .

Do I think women should be in the priesthood? I don’t know. A woman who would become a priest for feminist, as opposed to religious, reasons is every bit as ignoble as those men who went into the priesthood only to escape the draft.

Mr. Novak’s writing has made me think more deeply about the issue than anything I have ever read. . . .

Charlotte Smith
Toledo, OH

I deeply appreciated Mr. Novak’s beautifully written article and had hoped to find some reason therein to accept his statements regarding a male-only priesthood. However, Mr. Novak writes from his academic understanding and undoubtedly from his own experience. The difficulty with that point of view is that it falls so pitifully short of understanding the needs of women. . . . Most pitiful of all is Mr. Novak’s need to [polemicize] against feminism rather than asking how it came about.

In 1986, I completed a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology at Antioch University in Santa Barbara, California. During my training I had a three-year internship with the Rape Crisis Center. I also co-facilitated a survivor group at Calm House for adults abused as children. In both contexts, I was astounded to encounter woman after woman who had been abused by fathers, uncles, grandfathers, priests, and pastors. . . . I knew that I had to find language to communicate to these young women a love that existed in a father that would never abuse them. . . .

There is a group called WOMEN-CHURCH which met in Albuquerque, New Mexico this spring. I did not attend. There was dancing, offerings to the “Goddess,” whoever that is, lesbian ceremonies, and various rituals that broken women participated in because the male church has not had the health, the foresight, or just plain love to extend a hand to women so the hurt can begin to be healed. I don’t participate because Jesus is nowhere in sight and I know from my own personal experience that He is the way, truth, and life.

Broken women need women priests . . . women priests who know Jesus, not goddesses and resurrected pagan excuses for ritualized foolishness. Men are too toxic for the badly damaged woman. Women need to see Jesus in other women. . . .

Mr. Novak says that the priesthood is a profound mystery. I couldn’t agree more. It is as much privilege as penance. I personally don’t believe that women deserve this particular penance, but I do believe that Christ in His wisdom is creating women priests to minister to women. I hope that men lose their huge attachment to this “male” tradition and find enough heart to invite women into a needed ministry.

Jan Curtis
Andover, MA

Please accept herewith a footnote to Michael Novak’s most interesting and informative article. Not least among the fleshly attributes of human beings is genetic makeup. It is well known that men carry both the X (“feminine”) and Y (“masculine”) chromosomes, whereas women carry only the X. So in a certain sense a man represents both male and female, but a woman does not. The myth of Adam’s rib will not work the other way: Adam could not be created from Eve’s rib. It seems to me that the biological facts stress the importance of a male God, a male Savior, and a male priesthood. . . .

Robert C. Tompkins
Towson, MD

I was disappointed in Michael Novak’s rambling and sometimes obscure article against women’s ordination. I remember his writings from the late 1960s, when he seemed to be on the cutting edge of reform and renewal. Now he seems to be on the blunt edge of tradition and stagnation.

As I understood his article, he seemed to make three major arguments against women’s ordination. First, he seemed to be saying that gender differentiation is built into God’s revelation to humans and His continuing presence in the eucharistic sacrifice. Furthermore, a male redeemer and priesthood has a greater appeal to and a leavening effect upon men than would be the case if Christ and priests were female. However, this is really a nonargument. As Novak himself points out, God could not appear as “a Person”; He had to be either male or female. Had He been incarnated as a woman, the same case could have been made in reverse, thus rendering a gender-specific priesthood necessary. It is far more parsimonious to view the relationship of Christ and His Church as husband and wife as metaphorical, couched in language that would be easily grasped. In addition, the supposedly masculine appeal of a male redeemer and male priests isn’t really a theological argument at all; it is merely sociological. In any event, it doesn’t seem to have worked. In many parts of the world Christianity is seen as a religion for women and children.

Mr. Novak’s second argument seems to be that if women’s ordination were desirable, it would already have been done. This “logic” would foreclose all change; by the same reasoning, the ending of the Friday fast (which likewise had centuries of tradition behind it) should not have been made.

His third argument seems to be that if women were to be ordained now, it would imply that the Catholic Church has been sexist and oppressive all along. The implications of this are quite simply incredible! Should any organization (or person) be afraid to admit an error? Should the Church have continued its condemnation of Galileo on the grounds that admitting the earth revolved around the sun would cause people to lose faith in its teachings? Institutions and individuals demonstrate a greater maturity and integrity by admitting error than by stubbornly clinging to an outdated epistemology.

I appreciate Mr. Novak’s attempt to find theological reasons for the continuation of the all-male priesthood. I just don’t think he has done it. His reasons in the end seem to be sociological and political, with a theological veneer.

E. Thomas Dowd
Akron, OH

Mr. Novak doesn’t have “fundamental theological reasons” for his argument that women shouldn’t be ordained, though one could agree with many of his lesser points. The Catholic Church has already shown a willingness to introduce departures from precedent and its own traditions-for example in its elevation of Mary-for which the New Testament presents scant evidence. So that isn’t the problem. The fact is that Novak in particular and the Roman Catholic Church in general have a cultural and social preference against women pastors. . . .

Yes, there will continue to be genetic differences between men and women, but this is no theological justification for withholding ordination from either men or women. And while the genetic and cultural argument is being made, you might just as well argue that blacks or Asians should be denied ordination because Jesus didn’t have any of them as his disciples. . . .

Kurt Hoeksema
Chicago, IL

Michael Novak’s article attempts to suggest reasons why women should not be ordained priests. His reasons create more difficulties for an already volatile issue. Some of the problems are:

(1) As Mr. Novak makes clear, “being Spirit, God has no gender and is properly spoken of neither as male nor as female.” And yet, Scripture and Tradition use gender-specific words to speak of, about, and to the Almighty. Why? Because God is the ineffable reality which can never be completely grasped by finite human speech. Religious/liturgical language is a language of symbol and metaphor that makes it possible to express the reality and presence of God, discuss God in an intelligible manner, and finally, voice the praise and gratitude of the Church.

Mr. Novak confuses God with the metaphors about God, and then proceeds to identify God with the metaphors. Once in this trap, God becomes anthropomorphized. The assertion then follows that there are male characteristics in God, which contradicts Mr. Novak’s own observation that there is no gender in God.

God is eternal and unchanging, yet the symbols, language, and metaphors used by the Church to express God are subject to the vicissitudes of history and culture. The symbols, language, and metaphors used to voice the mystery which is God will change as history and culture continue to change. . . .

(2) Mr. Novak restricts his discussion to the question of admission of women to the office of priest (and presumably, a fortiori, the office of bishop). This restriction is necessary, for in Catholic sacramental theology women may, at present, administer two sacraments. In marriage, the man and the woman are the ministers of the sacrament. In the case of an emergency, a woman may baptize, as St. Thomas argues in his Summa. The office of deacon is not mentioned in Mr. Novak’s article, nor in the Declaration on Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood of October 15, 1976, issued by the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. This silence would signify serious debate as to whether women should be ordained to the office of deacon, an integral part of Holy Orders. It is worth noting that the Orthodox Churches have addressed the question of women and ordination. The office of the Ecumenical Patriarchate issued the Conclusions of the Inter-Orthodox Consultation of Women and the Question of Ordination in 1988. This document, while stating the impossibility of ordaining women to the priesthood, calls for the revival of the “apostolic order of deaconesses,” which “was never altogether abandoned in the Orthodox Church though it has tended to fall into disuse.”

(3) Mr. Novak does not use the term in persona Christi, but he alludes to it time and time again. This phrase is at the heart of the Declaration’s rationale against women in the priesthood. The Declaration states that the priest, acting in persona Christi when speaking the words of consecration, must be in the very image of Christ, bearing a natural resemblance to Christ, who was and remains a male. This phrase deserves some attention. St. Thomas uses the phrase several times in discussing the minister of the Holy Eucharist. The question posed by St. Thomas is: How is the sacrament effected? Response: by the person of Christ present in the minister. Thomas uses in persona Christi in terms of instrument causality, i.e., God, the principal agent, uses a minister as an instrument to produce the effect of the sacrament.

St. Thomas explicitly poses the question whether the female sex is an impediment to the reception of the Holy Orders. A woman may not receive the sacrament of Holy Orders because a female fails to signify the eminence of degree necessary for Orders (emphasis added). Thomas understood well that the priest was a sign of Christ. But for Thomas, a woman could not be a priest because she could not be recognized as one who could exercise jurisdiction over a man.

This obscure and little known phrase in persona Christi, seldom used in nineteen countries, is used with great frequency in the last two decades. The current usage, however, occurs with a major shift in use and interpretation. Thomas’ use of a term to describe sacramental causality has been taken to require, in the priest speaking the words of consecration, a physical imaging of Christ. This transition remains unexamined and unexplained. Some critical reflection would be helpful in the use of this phrase.

(4) That Jesus was a male is not in question. The question is: Is there a necessary and constitutive character of Jesus as a male in his role as revealer of the kingdom of God or as savior? Mr Novak’s literalization of metaphors apparently leads him to respond in the affirmative. For example, does the teaching of Jesus that God is our Father tell us of male characteristics in God, or is the revelation of God as Father, or more precisely, “Abba” (Romans 8:15), an attempt to use our language to assist our comprehension of the intimate and overwhelming love of God in a manner we can understand? Mr. Novak’s article simply fuels the feminist argument that Christianity is a patriarchial religion, seeing God as a male and therefore assuming that the human male is superior and the human female subordinate to the male. The question then arises as to whether this is consistent with Christian theology and Christian anthropology. What is certain is that the debate will continue.

(The Rev.) Michael Wakefield
Holy Family Church
South Pasadena, CA

Michael Novak’s piece on ordaining women was good but could have been better. As an M.Div. student at Asbury Theological Seminary, I am in a distinct minority in my reluctance to affirm women’s ordination. I have encountered the argument, “If a man represents Christ better than a woman, why don’t we require ministers to be Jewish carpenters? Wouldn’t they represent Christ best of all?” Mr. Novak’s distinction between that which is essential and circumstantial to humanity was very helpful.

Mr. Novak’s concern about “angelism” is also well taken. As a recent issue of Christianity Today describes, angels are “in.” This faddish interest in angels is often accompanied by a blurring of distinctions between what is human and what is divine.

But it is at this point, I think, that Mr. Novak missed the most powerful argument against women’s ordination. Women should not be priests or preachers because the image of a feminine God, which is the necessary result, is much more likely to lend itself to paganized worship and religion. The modern renascence of angelism shows us that the ancient biblical emphasis on transcendence requires undeviating affirmation. Pagan forms of religion are seductive. How alluring to believe we can manipulate the gods, the forces of the universe. How piquant the notion that all that is god is human, and all that is human is god. What freedom from restrictive authority and absolute ethics. . . .

How does a feminine view of God lend itself to this mythic worldview? If God is viewed in the female gender, the biblical distinctions between humanity and God are necessarily blurred. God as a male creates the world by his power. He fashions humans from the dust of the earth. God as a woman gives birth to the cosmos by copulation, and demands a consort. If God gave birth to us, and is our Mother, then we lived in her loins for a time. We are her children in a way that makes us god-like, a pagan apotheosis. This is the stuff of myth, a worldview that is alive and well.

Certainly we deny all nonsense about God being genetically male. These problems are endemic to human speech, and are the result of very limited options. But if we are to hold on to biblical religion, we do well lovingly to deny the priestess and her god. I say this being committed with my whole soul to all that promotes the welfare of women. I am a feminist of sorts. But how interesting it is that the denominations that are frenetic about women’s ordination are also unable to stem the rising tide of syncretism.

Joel Allen
Wilmore, KY

I write to congratulate Michael Novak for his cogently argued, indeed definitive, demonstration that ordination of women as priests would be theologically heretical and disastrously dangerous for the entire future of the Church. Mr. Novak, however, only comes close to articulating what I think is the most important single argument in this regard, namely what might be called the “iconicity” of the priesthood, although the concept is certainly implied in his article. A thorough presentation of this idea might start with St. John of Damascus’ great Defense of the Holy Icons. St. John (?675-749) was arguing against the Iconoclasts who had insisted on the removal of icons from the churches. He actually describes Christ Himself as an “icon” (image) of the Father: “The Son of the Father is the first natural and precisely similar image of the invisible God, for He reveals the Father in His own person. . . . The Son is the natural image of the Father, precisely similar to the Father in every way. . . .”

It follows that the priest is a living icon of Christ, the first priest, who embodies the essential elements of Christ’s incarnate humanity in all its precious specificity, including of course maleness. . . .

Jonathan Chaves
Washington, D.C.

. . . If I understand my life as a Catholic woman correctly, my central goal is to draw ever more close to God and to ever more perfectly carry out His will. If I am making any progress, I should notice how compelling God is in this approach. With every step, I should be more acutely aware that the only reasons I can even think about making this approach are His generosity and incomprehensible goodness. It has nothing to do with any adornments that I have succeeded in adding to myself.

Our earthly notions of self-enhancement, such as adding to our credentials-either as a man or as a woman-the sacramental mark of the priesthood, are not necessary. What God wishes from us, and the only thing that we have the ability to give to Him, is [the obedience of] our free will. The blessedness that we hope to enjoy with God in eternity will radiate from Him, not from some “value added” that we fancy ourselves as being able to display.

For a priest, the “value added” is not as an achievement, sought after and acquired by him, but that this priesthood was God’s will for him, and that, bending to that will, he carried out this vocation to the best of his ability.

Constance M. Manning
Portland, OR

Michael Novak claims that Jesus’ maleness, coupled with “male” trinitarian imagery, signals that Jesus’ gender must be constitutive in the life and ministry of the Church. At one point Mr. Novak properly notes that God is genderless. What he fails to see, however, is that by making such a big deal of Jesus’ gender and by taking trinitarian God-talk beyond metaphor, he has in fact imported gender distinction into the Godhead.

But this move is surely as mistaken as feminists who import female sexuality into a God(dess) who “births” Creation. This would also make it precious difficult to maintain the teaching that both males and females image God with neither gender “looking” more or less like God than the other.

And anyway, nowhere in the Bible is Jesus’ gender made an issue, not even in those two or three “women must be silent” passages. While, as Novak says, gender is essential and not accidental to human existence, the Bible goes out of its way to emphasize that when it comes to being “in Christ,” gender is in fact accidental. Presumably, therefore, Jesus’ gender was likewise accidental in the effecting of that salvation.

Thus, traditional atonement doctrine finds no saving significance in the maleness of Jesus but only in his being vere homo. To suggest that the atonement turns mostly on male human flesh is to say something that Scripture nowhere hints at. To assert that it is principally male flesh and blood in the Eucharist scandalously suggests that there is something about maleness that effected atonement in a way spilled female blood could not have. Indeed, how would Mr. Novak’s argument look if one added that the Host represents male, Caucasian flesh?

Throughout his essay Mr. Novak properly asserts that if women are to become ministers or priests, then we need cogent theological arguments to make this change. Unhappily Novak’s article not only fails to mount significant theological points, it even runs roughshod over traditional doctrines on God, humanity, and the atonement.

(The Rev.) Scott Hoezee
Second Christian Reformed Church
Fremont, MI

I enjoy your publication very much, but I must respectfully object to Michael Novak’s “Women, Ordination, and Angels.” No complaint with Mr. Novak’s intentions or the interesting theological points he eloquently makes, but in my opinion he misses the only real reason for male priests or ministers: God said so (e.g., 1 Timothy 2:12).

Perhaps this is so obvious that it’s not worth mentioning. Except that today it is common to think of the church as a democracy or debate club and not what it really is, a monarchy whose King demands complete obedience.

I appreciate that Mr. Novak wants to persuade gently, and there is wisdom in his approach, but he undermines his own arguments with statements like, “God does continue to lead and to guide His Church by the path of theological debate, reflection, and intellectual inquiry. He did so regarding various doctrines bearing on the role of one woman, the Mother of God, to name but one example, as in the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption.”

Appealing to these controversial doctrines, which are not grounded in Scripture nor accepted by the church universal, Mr. Novak gives unwitting aid to those who want to redefine Christianity to today’s norms. . . .

Robert Ditmars
Mt. Vernon, OH

Michael Novak’s “Women, Ordination, and Angels” develops well from its premises; unfortunately, I find its premises to be flawed.

Mr. Novak identifies examples of women of God but denies that they can serve as priests, representatives of Christ. By demonstrating the significance of a history of andromorphic revelation and a physical incarnation he thus opposes the feminist position. (I am always suspicious of statements of “the feminist position” if only because there is no single feminist position.)

His statement of this position, however, which asserts that “whether a priest is male or female makes no difference; gender is simply irrelevant,” is somewhat of a straw man and does not do justice to those who favor the ordination of women. Clearly gender makes a difference but it is faulty to conclude that it disables one gender from mediating the presence of God. There are racial and other differences that might arise here, but we still ordain non-Jews (and non-carpenters). . . .

Mr. Novak’s response to this argument is that gender is “of the essence of being human” whereas race or profession is “only an accident of culture or circumstance.” Whether race is any less central to one’s humanity than gender is questionable, but, more importantly, Mr. Novak has improperly equated the importance of elements of human identity (gender, race, profession) with how they have been formed. Yes, gender is certainly central to one’s definition of one’s self but it is no less “accidental” than race or profession; indeed, gender is entirely dependent on which sperm, among millions, happens to be in the right place at the right time. . . .

Colin Rowat
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada

Michael Novak has done an excellent job of laying the theological foundations for an all-male Catholic priesthood. But if we really wish to get theological about God’s alleged male chauvinism, we could do worse than to recur to the original creative intent. “God who made you without you,” wrote Augustine, “cannot consummate his love for you without you.” It’s not enough to analyze the nature of the Christian priesthood; rather, we must ask in the service of what relationship God established the instrumental priesthood.

The initiative in what God hopes will become a bilateral relationship is strictly and unremittingly divine. God loves us into existence without our bidding, only so that we may assent to his unendingly enriching our being. For nothing less is meant by our being the conscious and freely welcoming objective of divine love. God thus seeks to ravish us with the super-exuberant excess of his prodigal self-giving. Now that unconditional, gratuitous reality of God’s constitutive love surely makes him our suitor par excellence. Man or woman, we all, vis-a-vis God, play a receptive, expectant, feminine role. God is the only active one.

If God is thus all-male in his romancing us, won’t he most fittingly appoint only men to be his official, earthly refractors and representatives? Wholly inadequate though these men be, to the extent that they actualize both the engifted divine life and the genuine content of their native masculinity, won’t they better betoken the divine courtship than women ever could? That’s not to derogate femininity—on the contrary. In the game of creation and salvation, all of us succeed as Christians only to the extent that we femininely conform to our non-originating status and let God do his transforming thing. The whole suspense is whether we’ll be receptive to the divine overtures. The additional burden laid on priests with ordination is that these mere men are also called to reflect, in however diminished and unworthy a manner, God’s loving energy and enterprise in humanity’s regard. Once one thus understands this specifically priestly role, no one in his right mind would take it upon himself to play God to humanity. Priests are much more to be pitied and prayed for than to be envied. Christ so loved his mother, all women, and all men not called to orders that he spared them the added burden of officially mediating God to humanity. . . .

Dennis Helming
Washington, D.C.

I found Michael Novak’s article interesting and challenging, but not always convincing. I agree that gender is important, but for different reasons than he does. His statement, “Made in His image as we are, it is through complementarity as male and female that we piece together such fragments of His reality as we are vouchsafed to know,” brings into focus one reason why the Church needs women priests. The all-male presence at the altar leaves out the female dimension, and so only partially mirrors the divine. It is my view that in Christ is the fullness of male and female without distinction. “All are one in Christ” (Galatians 3:27-28). We see the so-called male traits manifested in His courage, strength, and power, and the so-called female traits in His compassion, gentleness, and meekness. We know that men and women show varying degrees of overlapping male and female traits, and Christ, the perfect man and true God, contained in His male nature the divine source of both. . . .

Eleanor Merrick
Bay Head, NJ

Thanks to Michael Novak for an interesting and enlightening treatise on the question of ordination of women in the Catholic Church. His exposition of why in human terms the ordination of women must be considered, at least for now, unacceptable is extremely persuasive, but I think he falters miserably in his attempt to create a theology against the proposition that women should be ordained priests. . . .

I agree with Mr. Novak that the Catholic Church cannot be trendy or abandon its position because of social pressure or indeed because of the fundamental equality of the sexes before God. The Church has a mission from Christ Himself to go and teach all nations. If one pictures the world today with Arabs, Hindus, and Chinese alone, it has a huge number of people who do not accept female equality, and to those people a male and female priesthood would surely be a serious obstacle. Actually, I don’t think we have to go that far afield. Men in general do not like to take instruction from anyone and particularly from women.

Like it or not, that’s the way the world is, and I think the Church would be wrong to take the step of ordaining women at the risk of its mission. It is wronger still for those of us who are the heirs of almost 2,000 years of Christianity to insist that personal aims and goals be promoted without regard to tradition and, more profoundly, to sociological and psychological realities, some of which are today being ignored in the secular life of this country, possibly to its peril.

Where Mr. Novak errs, I think, is in extending the use of logic to explain the ways of the Lord, from which one must conclude that God, if not an Englishman, is surely male. While Mr. Novak correctly denies this at one point, he marches straight into the error of stating in fact that the self-revelation of God in the doctrine of the Trinity is male “Father,” male “Son,” and male “Holy Spirit.” However, to be equally logical Mr. Novak must answer the question: If mankind is created in the image and likeness of God and is created male and female, where is the female in God? I am certainly not a student of theology, but it seems to me that the concept of maleness (and femaleness) is one of limitation and God cannot by definition be ascribed any such limitation. . . .

Therefore, while I am persuaded that, at least as of today, women should not be ordained, I think Mr. Novak’s theology is just plain wrong.

Katherine M. Griffin
San Francisco, CA

Michael Novak is correct that a genuinely theological approach has been lacking in the debates over the ordination of women to the priesthood or ordained ministry. After several decades of discussion the argument against the ordination of women rests primarily on statements from th