Ordaining Women: Two Views

Jennifer Ferrara’s argument is presented first. 

A decade ago, Michael Novak observed in the pages of this journal that “one scarcely ever encounters a theological argument against the proposition that women should be ordained priests” (“Women, Ordination, and Angels,” April 1993). Though some Catholics have begun to openly defend the Church’s position on women’s ordination, they frequently do so with less zeal than when discussing other topics of social and cultural import. I suspect this is because orthodox Christians of every stripe are often thrown together in an “ecumenism of the trenches” and from that vantage point do not wish to dwell on subjects that divide them. Conservative Catholics who agree with the tradition of restricting the priesthood to men do not wish to offend their Protestant friends who have grown accustomed to female pastors or who may even be female pastors. Nor do they wish to insult their fellow Catholics who may think women should be ordained. A friend who is a priest explained to me that he does not openly oppose women’s ordination because he knows several nuns who “suffer greatly” because they cannot be priests. It can, then, seem easiest and most charitable for those of us who oppose women’s ordination to keep our opinions to ourselves.

However, in doing so, we do not help the suffering nuns, and we concede the high ground to those who wish to interpret Church doctrine in light of feminist ideology rather than the other way around. This is not a small problem: the feminists and their allies have gained ascendancy in many seminaries and dioceses throughout the country. Moreover, by way of response to the current scandals within the Church, they have ratcheted up their calls for women’s ordination, despite the fact that lack of fidelity to the Church’s teachings helped create the problems in the first place.

As a former Lutheran pastor who is now Roman Catholic, I understand the confusion and tension surrounding the issue of women’s ordination. My own spiritual and intellectual journey has resulted in my holding every possible position, from being supportive of women’s ordination, to not knowing what I believed, to being opposed to it. In fact, when I first began to seriously consider becoming Roman Catholic, I disagreed with the Church’s practice of excluding women from the priesthood. I even set out to write an article outlining what I presumed to be the theological deficiencies with the Catholic Church’s position, which in retrospect seems like sheer arrogance. As I began to read in preparation for the article, I became increasingly convinced my presumptions were wrong.

As a Lutheran pastor, I supported women’s ordination as part of a more general argument that God did not intend men and women to have different roles, and I found support for this position in Martin Luther’s writings. In his Lectures on Genesis, Luther explains, “[Adam and Eve’s] partnership involves not only their means but children, food, bed, and dwelling; their purposes, too, are the same. The result is that the husband differs from the wife in no other respect than sex; otherwise the woman is altogether a man.” Differentiation between the sexes according to Luther is a result of the fall of our first parents: “If the woman had not been deceived by the serpent and had not sinned, she would have been the equal of Adam in all respects. For the punishment, that she is now subjected to the man, was imposed on her after sin and because of sin.” As a result, she “has been deprived of the ability of administering the affairs that are outside [the home] and that concern the state.”

According to Luther, the affairs outside of the home include those of the Church because the Church is an estate within the kingdom of the world and is, therefore, guided by the same laws that pertain to civil society. Galatians 3:28 (“There is neither male nor female . . . for you are all one in Christ Jesus”) does not invalidate the law that subjects women to men because it applies only to the kingdom of God. According to our conscience, we are free of the law, but as long as we continue to live in an imperfect world, we are still under the law. Luther’s theology of two kingdoms (law for one, gospel for the other) creates a dilemma for those theologically and confessionally orthodox Lutherans who wish to oppose women’s ordination. The question they must answer is why the law subordinating women to men governs relationships in the Church and perhaps the home, but not in the rest of society. Consistency would require an across-the-board application, as Luther argued.

I believed then that this widespread inconsistency in the application of God’s law invalidated calls for male headship in home and church. In an article in Lutheran Forum, I argued that male headship was not natural law, as Luther thought, but rather a cultural cloak for the law that calls for order in the home. Luther believed that the law which grants men authority over women was designed not only to punish women but also to curb evil intentions. The disciplines that derive from it serve a good purpose: “They tend to humble and hold down our nature, which could not be held in check without the cross.” As a modern woman, I thought our selfish tendencies could be held in check through mutual subjection worked out through egalitarian principles. According to Luther, social arrangements should be preserved within the Church lest we give scandal to the gospel. I thought restricting ordination to men had become such a scandal; it had become a modern-day stumbling block to people’s conversion and continued faith. If the subordination of women to men is, in fact, a human ordinance, we deny the principle of justification when we turn it into law. The acceptance of equality between the sexes throughout much of the world demonstrates that past generations wrongly thought the headship principle was a matter of natural law. Therefore, I thought that ordaining both men and women might well be the best way to serve our Lord in this time and place, despite 2000 years of tradition to the contrary.

When I started to think about becoming Roman Catholic, I went back again to the beginning and read, with a critical eye, John Paul II’s Catechesis on the Book of Genesis. There I found an entirely different vision of creation than that set forth in Luther’s Lectures on Genesis. According to John Paul, Adam and Eve were not created essentially the same. Masculinity and femininity are not just attributes; rather, the function of sex is “a constituent part of the person.” In other words, Eve is not Adam with a female anatomy: “Man and woman constitute two different ways of the human ‘being in a body’ in the unity of the image of God.” Or again, “Womanhood expresses the ‘human’ as much as manhood does, but in a different and complementary way.”

Though different, men and women both have the capacity to give of themselves and to receive love. Prior to the fall, Adam and Eve naturally gave of themselves to one another. At the time of the fall, this natural capacity for giving was lost. Henceforth, men and women are prone to view each other as objects, which is why they are now ashamed of their nakedness. Human sexuality, rather than a natural means of self-giving, becomes a way to manipulate and exploit others. Genesis 3:16 (“Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you”) is not natural law, as Luther argues, but a description of the lasting consequences of original sin. In particular, the woman becomes an object of male domination. Original sin burdens the relationship between men and women, but it does not ultimately define it.

John Paul believes that radical self-giving is what, in the end, makes us human. To lord over others is the antithesis of Christian service (Luke 22:25-27) and results in a turning away from God; it is, therefore, a negation of self. Therefore, John Paul speaks of the need for mutual submission. Here he differs from other conservative Christians, including some Catholics, who think the reestablishment of responsible male headship in church and home is necessary for the reformation of church and society. The Holy Father, by contrast, says we must look to our theological pre-fall history—a history that does not involve the subordination of women to men—in order to understand the relationship to which God calls men and women. When Jesus talks about marriage, he twice uses the phrase “from the beginning.” This phrase is key to John Paul’s thinking about the relationship between men and women. He says Jesus asks us “to go beyond, in a certain sense, the boundary which in Genesis passes between the state of original innocence and that of sinfulness, which started with the original fall.”

When I first read these words, I was startled: they went against all my deeply ingrained Lutheran sensibilities. I had to think outside of the two kingdoms box in which I had resided for most of my theological life. As a Lutheran, I had thought of myself as being simul iustus et peccator (at once saint and sinner). Though Christ’s righteousness had been imputed to me in exchange for my sinfulness (making me a saint), I continued to live in this world (and therefore continued to sin). Marriage was very much a part of this world. The relationship between our original parents in paradise (God’s kingdom) could not be replicated in our fallen state (the kingdom of this world). For John Paul II and Catholics traditionally, the Christian life is one of progress toward holiness, the goal of which is to be like God by becoming “full of grace” (1 John 3:2).

The Pope’s theology of the body and of marriage can only be understood within this context. By God’s grace received through the sacraments (including the sacrament of marriage), we can aspire to something greater in marriage than a power struggle hemmed in by laws designed to curb our selfish intentions. Husbands and wives can be partners in a marriage based upon a sincere and radical giving of self on the part of both spouses, a giving that results in mutual submission. Men’s dominion over women is a result of the fall and is, therefore, something to be overcome in Christ, however imperfectly, in this life.

Jesus, whose authority and kingship is exercised through service, has set us free from sin and provided all people, but men in a special way, with a model for radical self-surrender and self-giving. This model is set forth in Ephesians 5:21-33 (“Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord . . . .”). What does John Paul have to say about the portrayal of Christian marriage in what has become one of the most controversial passages in all of Scripture? He acknowledges some of the concepts in the passage are “characteristic of the mentality and customs of the times.” However, he also says St. Paul demonstrates “courage” when he uses these concepts to describe how mutual subjection in Christ works. Today, our mentality and customs are different, as is the social position of women in relation to men. John Paul goes on to say, “Nevertheless, the fundamental moral principle which we find in Ephesians remains the same and produces the same results. The mutual subjection ‘out of reverence for Christ’ . . . always produces that profound and solid structure of the community of the spouses in which the true ‘communion’ of the person is constituted.”

Though John Paul II never speaks of male headship, he recognizes that inherent to their natures are differences in the way men and women express love for one another. Men have the more active role in the relationship: the husband is the one who loves while the wife is she who is loved and in return gives love. This special capacity to receive love is what is meant by feminine submission and is the basis of the image of the submission of the Church to Christ. Submission here means to be subsequent or responsive, not necessarily obsequious or subservient. For the man, a love modeled upon Christ’s self-sacrifice leads to a desire to provide and protect to the point of a willingness to give one’s life, both literally and figuratively. Men represent Christ in a way that women cannot because men’s relationship to creation is one of detachment and distance. They cannot fully share in the intimacy that women have with their children. Therefore, they better serve as an image of transcendent love, a love that is wholly other but seeks only the welfare of the other. As primarily relational beings, women are images of immanence and ultimately of the Church, which is prepared, at all times, to receive Christ’s love. The result is a mutual submission, even mutual dependence, that does not undermine the role of men in church or home.

John Paul II places the inherent differences between men and women within the context of “an order of love” rather than “an order of creation.” According to this order of love, all persons find themselves by sincerely giving of themselves to others. True authority in the family, in society, and in the Church is exercised through service: “To reign is to serve.” However, men and women serve in particularly masculine and feminine ways. As the Pope explains in his 1995 “Letter to Women,” “a certain diversity of roles is in no way prejudicial to women, provided this diversity is not the result of arbitrary imposition, but is rather an expression of what is specific to being male and female.”

At the heart of this diversity lies the difference between motherhood and fatherhood. No matter what men and women do, they bring paternal or maternal characteristics to their vocations. The Catholic saint and philosopher Edith Stein always said that all women need to accept their maternal nature if they are to accept their vocation specifically as women. This means that every woman, no matter what she does, brings maternal characteristics to her vocation. All women, married and celibate, are mothers all the time. The same can be said of men and fatherhood. John Paul reminds us that celibacy (continence for the sake of the kingdom) is not a rejection of marriage but a different form of marriage. It is a “nuptial giving of one’s self for the purpose of reciprocating in a particular way the nuptial love of the Redeemer.” This giving of one’s self, which is the definition of conjugal love, must lead in its normal development to paternity or maternity in a spiritual sense, just as marriage does in a physical sense through procreation, rearing, and education of children.

In other words, a Roman Catholic priest is not simply a father figure; he is a father. To state what has ceased to be obvious in a society governed in large measure by the principle of androgyny, fathers and mothers are not interchangeable. Women are not men and, therefore, cannot be priests any more than they can be fathers in the physical sense. If women can step into the role of priest, then it is no longer one of fatherhood.

Why can’t we have spiritual fathers (priests) and spiritual mothers (priestesses)? The answer is one that feminists do not like to hear—namely, that the priest is an icon of Christ and acts in persona Christi at the altar and in the confessional. In 1976 the Vatican issued Inter Insignores or “Declaration on the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood.” As this document says, we cannot ignore the fact that Christ is a man. He is the bridegroom; the Church is his bride. This nuptial mystery is proclaimed throughout the Old and New Testaments. One must utterly disregard the importance of this symbolism for the economy of salvation in order to make an argument for women’s ordination. There are actions “in which Christ himself, the author of the Covenant, the Bridegroom and Head of the Church, is represented.” At these times, Christ’s role (this is the original sense of the word persona) must be taken by a man. This is especially true in the case of the Eucharist, when Christ is exercising his ministry of salvation.

Those who favor women’s ordination argue that women can represent Christ as well as men because femaleness is an attribute along the lines of Jewishness. To say that women cannot represent Christ is to suggest they are less fully human than men. This argument might have merit if it were sensible to believe that men and women are, as Luther suggests, both versions of men—and that those differences, flowing from the fall, would be overcome at the Eschaton. According to this line of reasoning, women should be allowed to represent Christ as a sign of the final consummation.

Such a view, however, is simply contrary to Catholic anthropology. Masculinity and femininity are not traits like skin or eye color; they are modes of being human. As Inter Insignores argues, these modes are built into the economy of salvation. Jesus did not just happen to be male. His masculinity is a reflection of God’s paternity. God’s paternity resides in His being wholly other from His creation. Of course, God is without gender and contains within Himself true masculinity and femininity. As the Catholic theologian Louis Bouyer explains in Women in the Church, “God is neither man nor woman, though He encompasses from the beginning all that humanity will ever bring to realization. He goes beyond masculinity in the only fatherhood worthy of the name, and is at the same time, in this eternal virginity, the antitype of all motherhood.” However, the fact remains that God chose from all eternity to take the form of a man, and that Jesus is the embodiment of the Father’s love.

Moreover, the priest as male represents God’s transcendence. However, as symbol of the gift of Christ’s love for his bride, he does not have the same sort of authority as the “rulers of the Gentiles.” The priest’s authority derives from service and self-sacrifice. It is an authority that should lead to mutual respect and affection between priest and parishioners, not feelings of superiority and inferiority. As Henri de Lubac points out in The Motherhood of the Church, paternal authority is much less apt to result in abuse of power and tyranny than authority derived from other sources. The response of some to the current sexual crisis in the Catholic Church is to say that paternal understandings of authority need to be replaced with functional understandings. As is usually the case with those who dissent from Church teachings, they have it precisely backwards. The most obvious way to ensure fewer instances of clerical abuse in the Catholic Church would be to see that those in charge of seminaries and rectories have a clear understanding of the role of the priest as father. I am not suggesting that this is the only solution to the present crisis, but candidates for the priesthood need to be evaluated for their fitness for fatherhood. A fit father, a good father, does not abuse his children.

Instead, spiritual fatherhood has come under attack in the Church by feminists and their allies who believe the Church should reflect the unisex vision of men and women that pervades society, and they have had an influence in many dioceses and seminaries far greater than their numbers would suggest. A seminarian named Daniel Scheidt writes in the Catholic journal Crisis that men in seminaries and rectories are suffering from a form of identity crisis that mirrors that among men in society at large. Scheidt says that efforts to downplay the theological interrelationships of paternity (God the father) and maternity (mother Church embodied in Mary) have “taught the seminarian to be insecure and embarrassed—or even suspicious and hostile—toward facets of the divine mysteries that give ultimate meaning to his life as a man and, one day, as a ‘Father.’” Clearly, many in the Church today are taking their cues from culture rather than traditional Catholic doctrine.

I know how easily this can happen. As a Lutheran pastor I completely accepted the notion that men and women are ultimately the same. In order to be taken seriously, I thought it absolutely imperative that I act like a man and be perceived as being exactly the same as a man. I tried to imitate my father, who was also a pastor, which must have looked and sounded pretty silly. I soon discovered that my parishioners enjoyed seeing me in “motherly” roles, especially those involving children. They repeatedly told me that I brought maternal sensibilities to the office and that they liked that. When I left, the congregation’s leadership told me they wanted another female to succeed me. I found this gratifying and proof that women belonged in the ministry.

I now think that my parishioners’ reaction to me points to a deep deficiency within the churches of the Reformation. Protestants have few female models of holiness to turn to for comfort and guidance. Here I am thinking not only of Mary and the female saints but of the women religious. I attend a parish that is served by decidedly traditional nuns, and I find that they and the priests offer the same sort of balance of the feminine and masculine that ideally exists between mother and father, and that they teach us in the parish by example what it means to be men and women, fathers and mothers. Consecrated women are our spiritual mothers, though many seem to reject this self-understanding.

As a Roman Catholic laywoman, my life as a woman, wife, and mother has taken on a new sense of definition. For the first time, I am trying to listen to what the Church has to say about who I am rather than expecting the Church to conform to what I think it should be. In general, modern women and men chafe against revealed authority because they expect the outer life of institutions to be rendered serviceable to the psychological inner life of individuals. Therefore, if women want to be priests and claim to feel pain because they are not priests, it automatically follows that they should be priests. Yet nuns and other women who insist that they have a call to the priesthood and use their pain as evidence for an authentic interior call from God are, in fact, using the protean politics of pain and not Catholic theology to explain their experiences. If they truly wish to empty themselves and renounce their own will for the sake of God and Church, they will find innumerable opportunities for service, though perhaps not the sort of self-gratification they seek.

Contrary to popular opinion, the Catholic Church offers a rich and multidimensional understanding of what it means for humans to be male and female, far more complex than the unisex vision of many feminists. The interplay between masculinity and femininity is by no means rigid. Catholicism has always recognized that in the spiritual life of both the married and celibate, women acquire masculine virtues and men acquire feminine ones. It is not the principle of androgyny or gender bending at work in Catholic theology. Rather, the Church has an anthropology that recognizes the differences between male and female, motherhood and fatherhood. In Heart of the World, Center of the Church, David Schindler points out that the complementarity of the Catholic tradition is not based on a fragmentation of the male and the female into two distinct parts: “Each images the ‘whole’ of the Trinity, but does so differently.” Men and women share in what is proper to each.

In a tradition dating back to the early Church, all Christian souls have been described as being feminine. This is because receptivity is necessary for holiness. In the Catholic tradition, women have always provided models of holiness for men. Louis Bouyer explains the importance of women for men as follows: “Man, the male, never finds himself except by a process of discovery blemished by narcissism, and, except by and in women, he never meets the world in an encounter which is real communion rather than a simple confrontation. The world is never real for the man except by symbioses with women. It is, moreover, by that alone that man attains the consciousness of himself which is not solipsistic absorption, but the discovery of this identity as participation in the divine image.”

Priests are no different from other men in this regard. Unlike Jesus, they must begin by being fundamentally receptive. As Schindler writes, “The ordained is first dependent upon the Marian fiat even as he is . . . empowered to represent Christ’s initiative.” Mary is the woman through whom the priest finds himself. What does this say about priests who steadfastly avoid having a spiritual relationship with Our Lady? If Bouyer is correct, they run the real risk of becoming profoundly and dangerously narcissistic.

Actually, everyone—male and female—suffers when Church and society no longer recognize the importance of the truly feminine or the “feminine genius,” as John Paul II calls it. The Catholic philosopher Alice von Hildebrand suggests that “when piety dies out in women, society is threatened in its very fabric; for a woman’s relationship to the sacred keeps the Church and society on an even keel, and when this link is severed, both are threatened by total moral chaos.”

The Catholic understanding of the feminine would be lost forever if the Church had a female priesthood. Those who insist the Church ordain women to elevate their status are, in reality, denigrating femaleness, especially motherhood. They are also engaging, as Schindler points out, in a “clericalism” which disproportionately emphasizes the importance of priests and the importance of the masculine: “Common to . . . ‘clericalisms’ is a lack of sense of anteriority, and primacy, of the feminine in the call to sanctity.” We do not raise the status of women by convincing them that what they need to be is men. Though women can and should be allowed to do most of the jobs traditionally filled by men (bringing to them a feminine sensibility), they cannot and never will be biological or spiritual fathers. Those who insist otherwise effectively deny what is noble and holy about being wives and mothers (biological and spiritual) and thereby slight the importance of the feminine (mother Church) in the plan by which God intends to redeem His creation.

A loss of the feminine and its importance in the economy of salvation is part of the legacy of the Protestant Reformation and its de-emphasis of the iconic elements of faith. Luther placed the institutional Church squarely in the kingdom of the left hand, and the result was a Church more sociological in character. He also effectively denied a role for the feminine in the Church and in salvation when he developed an anthropology that took the male as the sum of what it means to be most fully human. The result was a minimalist ecclesiology that was starkly masculine in character.

For Catholics, the most important icon of the Church and the feminine is Mary, Mother of God. The diminishment of Mary and the severing of her connection to the Church by the reformers was one step along the long road to women’s ordination. Interestingly, the famous Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich recognized the profound change that occurred in the Protestant churches when the figure of Mary was eliminated: “The increasingly symbolic power of the image of the Holy Virgin . . . presents Protestantism with a difficult problem. In the struggle of the Reformation against all human mediators between God and man, this symbol was abolished, and, with that process of purification, the feminine element in everything of ultimate concern was largely eliminated.”

Over time, Protestantism invested God with symbols of immanence. The result has been a leveling out of the differences between creation and Creator. At the same time, the Church took on a more sociological, institutional nature. Hans Urs von Balthasar observes that the prominence of Mary as archetype of the Church has protected the Church “from disintegrating into mediocrity and ultimately into sociology.” These developments within Protestantism paved the way for women’s ordination as ministry took on an increasingly functional nature and men no longer were seen as symbols of God’s transcendence.

For those who are determined to see the Catholic Church embrace the principle of androgyny that dominates the rest of the culture, no argument against women’s ordination will be persuasive. However, those who recognize the God-given inherent differences between men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, and see their importance not only for the proper working of society but for our salvation, should give thanks for the Catholic Church’s resolve in adhering to two thousand years of tradition—a tradition rooted in God’s good purposes for all men and women.

Jennifer Ferrara is the co-editor of The Catholic Mystique: How Fifteen Women Found Fulfillment in the Church.

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson makes her argument below. 

To consider the ordination of women is to take a plunge into the rich depths of Christian theology. It is a wild ride indeed, with high stakes, fierce debates, and all sides burning for the purity of the gospel. This is to be expected. Though Vincent of Lérins defined orthodoxy as that which has been believed “everywhere, always, by all,” he was, unfortunately, wrong. Orthodoxy has been a battle from the get-go, as the apostolic epistles amply demonstrate. An appeal to the unchanging teaching of the Church does little justice to the Church Fathers who engaged their whole minds and souls in the defense and articulation of the truth, based on Scripture, reason, liturgy, peculiar strands of philosophy, and sundry other allies they mustered to their side. Studies in the history of doctrine demonstrate that there is development in the teaching of the Church. We are at the crossroads of what will become either a further development or a heresy tossed aside.

Fundamentally, the question of women’s ordination is an ontological one. Though there are arguments for and against it of other kinds, in the end they are inconclusive for the debate. Scriptural injunctions to the silence of women in church are, in the first place, not observed anywhere, not even in churches that prohibit women at the altar. Women sing, chant, pray, and speak in tongues of humans and angels alike. Furthermore, the injunctions against speech and authority are internally contradicted by the equally scriptural witness to the activity of women in the earliest Church: Mary the mother of God praying with the disciples, Priscilla instructing Apollos, Phoebe serving as deaconess, and so on. The Church Fathers acknowledged this too: Basil of Caesarea regarded his older sister Macrina as his spiritual guide and Augustine attributed his catholicity to his mother Monica.

The same inconclusiveness applies to the argument that Jesus called only men to serve in the Twelve and that we