35. Women's Ordination: An Ancient Heresy & a New Church

An Argument Against Priestesses

Do you really think that allowing women to be ordained would be an improvement for priesthood? Akin to Gnosticism is another heresy of the early Church called Docetism. It claims that Christ's body only appeared to be real and therefore his suffering and death was a pretense. In Gnosticism, Christ the Redeemer is really one of the aeons (cosmic and semi-divine powers) who descends upon the human Jesus in order to reveal the saving knowledge or gnosis. Similarly, he did not really become a man and die on the cross. Both saw the material as evil. Removing the sexual requirements from sacerdotal priesthood "is a Docetism as romantically superhuman as that which engages plans for a non-institutional Church, free of the trivia of administration" (Priest and Priestess by George William Rutler, p. 79). Fr. Rutler writes: "It places the burden of integrity on the individual's talents rather than on the simple fact of his sexual existence, scorning the Messianic precedent which chose a specifically masculine human nature with all its limitations for the earthly representative of the High Priesthood of Christ Himself" (Ibid., pp. 79-80).

Last March, the National Catholic Review ran an article about 72 lay women at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. In the course of the report, Dean Hoge, a sociology professor at our local Catholic University noted that studies he had conducted suggest that if ordination was opened to women, only about 3,600 would take up the offer by the millennium. While I am not convinced of his figures, I have to wonder what kind of women would make up this group. It gives me cause to shudder. One student at CTU remarked, "It isn't the eucharistic part [I should hope not], I'm attracted to that. It's the clericalism, the celibacy and the political system that I couldn't stand." Ah, so the nature of priesthood and our ecclesiology would have to be revamped before many women would embrace orders. It makes sense. Indeed, would not the ordination of women itself imply such a transformation? Yes, I think so. There would be a new priesthood for a new Church. It would also mean the end of real Christianity.