My burning pastoral concern expressed in the previous piece that the availability of the Eucharist should be a prime concern in the Church has never left me. In fact, it has deepened over the years. It is one of the main reasons why I feel so strongly that the Church needs to reconsider its position on the ordination of women.
However, there is a much more fundamental reason which comes out in the following excerpt from a letter which was published in The Tablet 2 December 1995, p. 1548. The article which follows spells out more fully the position outlined in the letter.
In its reply denying the possibility of women being ordained priests (see The Tablet, 25 November 1995), the CDF links this teaching to the deposit of faith. The Vatican congregation seems to be saying that the inadmissibility of women to the ministerial priesthood is an essential part of the Good News of the Gospel which brings joy and freedom to all human persons, women and men.
Could I dare suggest that the inadmissibility of women to the ministerial priesthood should only be presented as belonging to the deposit of faith if it can be shown to be an integral and essential element of the Gospel which has consistently been heard and experienced as ‘good news’ by women down through the ages? I suspect that the opposite has been the case. Far from being an integral part of the ‘good news’, it seems more like part of that cultural conditioning down the centuries which John Paul II referred to as ‘an obstacle to the progress of women’.
I have been drawn to this conclusion through reading texts from various early Christian writers explaining how they saw women to be different from men. This is the cultural climate which nourished the tradition that women cannot be admitted to the priesthood. It does not make edifying reading today. Augustine, for instance, believed that women are so obviously inferior to men in every other way that the only reason God created them must have been for the sake of procreation. The fourth-century Ambrosiaster, who wrote strongly against the ordination of women, argued his case on the grounds that women were not made in the image of God. They were made in the image of man. Most early Christian writers seem to have believed in the moral inferiority of women and point to Eve’s tempting Adam as an example.
Ultimately, the main reason that seems to have been behind the tradition against women’s ordination was that women are naturally subordinate to men and so are incapable of exercising authority and leadership over men. This line of thinking seems to have continued right through the tradition. It is found in Aquinas and even features in the textbook out of which I was taught moral theology in the mid-1950s:
The reason why a woman cannot receive holy orders is because the clerical state demands a certain superiority since it involves ruling the faithful: whereas a woman by her very nature is inferior to man and subject to him, even though at a personal level she can excel a man in her natural and graced giftedness (Noldin, Summa Theologiae Moralis, vol. III, no. 465).
It is difficult to see how the centuries-old tradition against the ordination of women can be identified with the ‘good news’ which we call the deposit (or treasure-house) of faith.
Not long ago, in order to stand up for their basic social, economic and political rights, women had to disregard those who told them that what they were doing was a sin. Such women come in for great admiration from John Paul II in his Letter to Women (see The Tablet, 15 July 1995). He implies that they were right to disregard those who told them that what they were doing was sinful. Could it be that women who today disregard the CDF’s statement and continue believing in and working for the ordination of women will be the object of similar admiration on the part of some future Pope?