Recently, in an RCIA class, a question about the ordination of women in the Catholic Church was raised.  It was occasioned by news from St. Louis that in fact two women were “ordained.”  One of the city’s newspapers, The Post Chronicle, began its report on the affair with the rather confusing announcement, “A couple of firsts: Two women were ordained as Roman Catholic priests Sunday in St. Louis -- and the ordination was in a synagogue.”  Almost as ironic is the fact that the two women would offer their first “Mass” in a Unitarian church.  Lots of confusion.  And that’s why I broach this rather touchy topic.

      These “ordinations” are ipso facto invalid.  It’s not that there is simply a rule against ordaining women, but rather it’s a point of doctrine of a two thousand year vintage and recently reiterated by Pope John Paul II in his Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, in which the Holy Father pronounced the issue closed and the Church’s long-standing tradition unchangeable:  “the Church has no authority,” the Pope wrote, to alter what Christ Himself had instituted and which the Church has followed for two millennia.  For on the eve of His betrayal, our Lord instituted in the Upper Room on Holy Thursday the Sacraments of Holy Orders and the Eucharist (and washed the feet of His Apostles to illustrate to them the service nature of the ordained ministry).  All of the ordinandi were men.  Some claim that Christ was simply following the norms of the culture of the time, that He Himself even was “culture-bound.”  But let us remind ourselves that we are here dealing with Him who in His Person, as the divine Son of God, quite easily transcends culture; that He did so repeatedly when He frequently disregarded the norms of a culture that would treat women as second-class citizens, something St. Luke especially bears witness to in his Gospel.

      The other evening I addressed this topic to the Confirmation class, and I summed it up with the simple fact that a priest is a father, and just as it takes a man to be a father in a household, so also in the household of the Church.  A mother, because of widowhood or the misfortune of a divorce, may have to fulfill as best she can some of the functions of a father to her children, but she cannot be a father for them.  Same is true of a man and motherhood. 

      We tend these days to reduce everything to function, when in reality, when it comes to the most important things about human life, we should rather emphasize being instead of doing.  “Doing follows being” wrote St. Thomas Aquinas.  This is true especially in the domestic life and in ecclesial life.  The Catholic Church, I know, is accused of discrimination against women in this matter, and if it were merely a matter of function, there would be some truth to the charge.  But this is not the case.  It’s a matter of the distinction between man and woman and the different functions that flow from their being one or the other.  Again, a priest is a father, and fatherhood cannot flow from a being who is female, maternal. 

      Besides holding their “ordination” in a Jewish synagogue and subsequently pretending to offer “Mass” in a “church” that is not even Christian (Unitarians deny the Trinity, thus their name), another anomaly entertained by these two women is their insistence on the validity of their orders, since the “bishop” who “ordained” them was ordained in the apostolic succession.  But that is the very same apostolic succession that has always taught and held that only a baptized male of right age can be ordained to the priesthood.  The very institution that the two women need to be validly “ordained” is the very institution that tells them they cannot be validly ordained.  Hmmm.  Sounds like they too are a bit confused.