The Philadelphia Inquirer Tue  Feb 16  1993

Why Catholicism can’t allow women priests

By JOHN M. HAAS

Catholicism is a religion that believes in absolute truths – not all of which are complete with reigning American orthodoxies. Some are so blatantly at odds with dominant attitudes that the church seems to threaten social peace. All know the obvious ones with respect to abortion and homosexual acts. Another, however, is the practice of the church ordaining only males to the priesthood.

The church, of course, does not expect that others would accept its beliefs and practices. But insofar as the issue has been opened to general public debate on this page (and elsewhere), it seems only fair to suggest that there should at least be sufficient openness in this supposedly pluralistic society for readers to at least listen to the church’s reasons for not ordaining women.

First, it must be said that Catholics do not believe God is male! The Creator is beyond sex. However, Catholics do believe there are three persons in one God, and only one became a human being.

Although God transcends sex, humans do not. God had to become either a male or a female. And there has never been any question among Christians that He became a male – the Jewish carpenter of Nazareth.

Second, unlike Protestantism, Catholicism is a religion of symbols. Catholics believe that certain symbols were given by God himself to make present the divine realities that they symbolize. 

Catholics believe, for example, that water not only represents the washing away of sins but that sins are in fact washed away in the water of baptism. Bread and wine not only represent Jesus; in the mass bread and wine actually become His body and blood.

Catholics also believe the priesthood is a symbol which makes present that which is symbolized – Jesus. This is why the priest can stand at the altar and say with bread in hand, “This is my body.” This is why he can sit in the confessional and say, “I forgive you your sins.” To non-Catholic ears such statements would be blasphemous. But the Catholic believes Jesus himself speaks through the words of the priest. 

Third, the Catholic practice of not ordaining women has nothing to do with a judgement that a woman would not be as capable as a man in “doing the job.” There are undoubtedly women who could chant better, preach better, counsel better, manage a parish budget better than a given man who happens to be a priest. What a woman cannot do – and it has nothing to do with her capacities or her moral worth – is represent the male Jesus at the altar in the confessional.

Fourth, a society intent on eliminating virtually every social difference between male and female completely has difficulty grasping the Catholic insistence on the fact that there are areas in which the differences cannot be overlooked. Catholics believe the difference of the sexes is a gift of the Creator, a blessing not a curse. 

The insistence on a male priesthood is bound up with imagery which must appear very strange to contemporary Americans. The Bible is filled with imagery of God as the husband and Israel as the wife, with Jesus as the bridegroom and the church as his bride. Jesus gives His life for the church, and the church surrenders her life to him. The result is new life forever coming to the church.

Again, Catholicism is a religion of symbols. A woman simply could not represent the bridegroom without distorting the reality Catholics believe is imparted through the symbolism – the reality of the relationship between God and his believed. This reality does not require that the one who represents Jesus be a Jew or a carpenter, but it does require that he be a male. 

Fifth, it is said Jesus did not choose women for His apostles because He was bound by the social convention of his day. However, Jesus was constantly in trouble with the authorities for breaking social convention and religious taboos. He healed on the Sabbath, took the hand of a dead girl, allowed himself to be touched by a prostitute and a menstruating woman, socialized with despised tax collectors and military officers of the occupying Roman army, spoke with outcast Samaritans, threw merchants out of the Temple. These were not the actions of a man bound by convention.

Sixth, when Christianity emerged into the larger world it encountered numerous religions with priestesses. If the church allowed itself to be conditioned by society it could easily have adopted priestesses for itself in order to be more appealing to the society around it. It did not.

Seventh, it is Catholicism that venerates a woman above any priest, more than any other creature – Mary. We believe no one had a more intimate share in the work of Jesus than his mother, and yet she was not made a priest.

Eighth, Catholicism has usually had greater roles for women than Protestantism. After Protestants closed convents there was no church role for women. 

Yet Catholic women built hospitals, asylums, schools, missions, colleges and universities, led troops into battle (Joan d’Arc), ordered a wayward Pope back to Rome (Catherine of Siena), had jurisdiction over vast tracts of land (mitred abbesses). Today, for example, the largest non-profit health-care delivery system in the country with assets of over $4 billion is owned and operated by Roman Catholic women – the Daughters of Charity. Catholic women are university presidents, chancellors of dioceses, canon lawyers. 

Tolerance is a great social good. If the reasons for the Catholic practice of a male priesthood were better known, the molders of public opinion in the U.S. might be more tolerant of the church’s practices and less quick to see them as a threat to justice and social harmony. 

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John M. Haas is the John Cardinal Krol Professor of Moral Theology at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary.