FIRST - it has NOTHING to do with value or status or superiority, the greatest human being is Mary, the first above us all.
Also, it has nothing to do with the culture, Paul is not in the least hesitant to attack sabbaths, circumcision, food laws, calendar issues, and other matters of intense cultural and traditional relevance. He does not hesitate to offend Jew and Gentile alike. Had women’s ordination been part of the Divine agenda for the New Covenant, it would have been part of that list of extremely controversial issues.
1) If you're going to change centuries old tradition you better have a damn good reason, In his treatise “Priestesses in the Church,” C. S. Lewis observed, “The innovators are really implying that sex is something superficial, irrelevant to the spiritual life. To say that men and women are equally eligible for a certain profession is to say that for the purposes of that profession their sex is irrelevant. We are, within that context, treating both as neuters. As the State grows more like a hive or an ant-hill it needs an increasing number of workers who can be treated as neuters. This may be inevitable for our secular life. But in our Christian life we must return to reality.”
C.S. Lewis is correct that when it comes to received Tradition, "We cannot shuffle or tamper so much. With the Church, we are farther in: for there we are dealing with male and female not merely as facts of nature but as the live and awful shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge. Or rather, we are not dealing with them but (as we shall soon learn if we meddle) they are dealing with us."
2) God is the Father, the Church His Bride. It may contradict the symbolic grammar of how we worship and relate to God for the past centuries.
Feser :
“the entire Christian understanding of salvation presupposes a masculine conception of God. Individual human souls (whether those of men or women) have, given their dependence on God, always been conceived of in the Christian tradition in female terms, e.g. as virgins awaiting their Bridegroom (Matthew 25: 1-13). The faithful are also characterized as children of Holy Mother Church, who is the Bride of Christ. The point of this imagery is that the role of the Church relative to the faithful is comparable to that of a mother who nourishes her child in the womb in preparation for birth – the “birth” in the case of the faithful being their entry into eternal life. And God protects and provides for the Church and the faithful as a husband and father does his wife and children.”
3) Biblical anthropologist Alice C. Linsley writes,
A woman standing as priest at the altar distorts the Gospel and creates confusion. Form and gender matter. However, the issue from an anthropological perspective is about the distinction between the blood work of men and women. Among the people to whom God first delivered the promise of salvation (Gen. 3:15) the two were distinct and never permitted to be confused. The blood work of men pertained to war and hunting. Women did not participate in these. The blood work of women pertained to the monthly cycle and childbirth. During these women went to a place apart - a birthing hut or cave which men were not permitted to enter.
With men we have blood shed resulting in death. With women we have blood shed resulting in life. The bloodless sacrifice at the altar is about the death of Jesus Christ whose blood, as the Son of God, leads to purification, deliverance from sin and death, and eternal life - all brought to completion at the third day resurrection.
Women were the first to be at the empty tomb.
4) Christ was Male.
That’s important as Novak explains,
“Why is the priest male? It figures. It fits. The priest’s maleness is a reminder of the central role played in our salvation by the sacramentality of human flesh”not flesh-in-general, but male flesh. “This is my body,” he says in the place of Christ, the male Christ. “This is my blood.” It is not an angel we eat and drink, not spirit, not a (disembodied) person: but the male Christ, body and soul, human and divine person. The priest’s maleness reminds us with Nicea: "Credo in unum Deum, PATREM omnipotentem . . . . ”
We believe in the Father almighty, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, who was conceived of the Holy Spirit by the Virgin Mary, “ et homo factus est .” The Word was made flesh, caro (John 1:14)”not “person,” not hermaphrodite, and not female, but male.
But, a feminist might object, “By the same logic, Jesus was a carpenter and a Jew, and that does not mean that all priests must be carpenters and Jews.” Except, of course, that it is not the same logic. For an embodied person, being either male or female is of the essence of being human; whereas to be Jewish or Irish, carpenter or professor of logic, is only an accident of culture and circumstance. That the priest be male is fitting to the essence of Jesus, a divine Person embodied as a male, a fully human male. One can “see Christ” in every human being, male or female, but a female cannot represent the male Christ before the community. Not, at least, without jangling symbols beyond their meaning, without communicating something essentially different.
In order to believe that Catholic priests may also be female, one has to believe that sexual differentiation does not illuminate the self- revelation of God in the doctrines of the Trinity; the Incarnation; the shocking transvaluation of sex roles in the moral teaching of Jesus; the spousal relation between Christ and his people; the precisely detailed emphasis of Christianity on the real flesh (including the resurrection of the flesh); its opposition to angelism under all its forms; and the exact complementarity (not interchangeability) of male and female in the mystery of God’s self-communion in matrimony. The institution of female priestesses would reverberate off-key through most of the major symbols of God’s self-revelation. The beautifully wrought sexual differentiation of the narrative of Christian faith will have buckled. And its collapse will have cracked every arch in its theological architecture.”
5) Look at the consequences of Churches who have initiated female priests, the heresy and transgressions of transgender liturgies etc
But, a feminist might object, “By the same logic, Jesus was a carpenter and a Jew, and that does not mean that all priests must be carpenters and Jews.” Except, of course, that it is not the same logic. For an embodied person, being either male or female is of the essence of being human; whereas to be Jewish or Irish, carpenter or professor of logic, is only an accident of culture and circumstance. That the priest be male is fitting to the essence of Jesus, a divine Person embodied as a male, a fully human male. One can “see Christ” in every human being, male or female, but a female cannot represent the male Christ before the community. Not, at least, without jangling symbols beyond their meaning, without communicating something essentially different.
In order to believe that Catholic priests may also be female, one has to believe that sexual differentiation does not illuminate the self- revelation of God in the doctrines of the Trinity; the Incarnation; the shocking transvaluation of sex roles in the moral teaching of Jesus; the spousal relation between Christ and his people; the precisely detailed emphasis of Christianity on the real flesh (including the resurrection of the flesh); its opposition to angelism under all its forms; and the exact complementarity (not interchangeability) of male and female in the mystery of God’s self-communion in matrimony. The institution of female priestesses would reverberate off-key through most of the major symbols of God’s self-revelation. The beautifully wrought sexual differentiation of the narrative of Christian faith will have buckled. And its collapse will have cracked every arch in its theological architecture.”
5) Look at the consequences of Churches who have initiated female priests, the heresy and transgressions of transgender liturgies etc
6) There are many, such as CS Lewis, who think male and female have a metaphysical significance.
7) Divine Law as expressed as the Natural Law within a Christian community. Men and women seem to have a biology for certain social functions, birth or war, and there may be a spiritual significance to this, as St. John Paul II taught, that MAY preclude females symbolically representing Christ.
7) Divine Law as expressed as the Natural Law within a Christian community. Men and women seem to have a biology for certain social functions, birth or war, and there may be a spiritual significance to this, as St. John Paul II taught, that MAY preclude females symbolically representing Christ.
8) The fundamental natural social institution – the family – has the father as its head, this reflects the Church organization as the Family is an Icon.
9) It may not be dogmatically possible within Catholicism :
“St. John Paul II wrote in Ordinatio: “Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”
10) It would damage Women’s role in the salvation of man :
“The question of women in the priesthood depends upon defining a priest. A priest is not the same as a Protestant minister. A woman may be a minister. A priest offers sacrifice. A Christian priest offers the sacrifice of Christ. Christ is the one who both offers (as High Priest) and is offered (as sacrificial victim). This is an unchangeable dogma of the Church, found in the Divine Liturgy. Therefore, the one who offers (the priest) must correspond to the one offered (the victim).
Christ is the Incarnate Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity. Christ was incarnate as a man. Why? The Holy Trinity is inherently neither male nor female. The Trinity is spirit. However, God the Father has revealed Himself as male. Why? The Father creates all things visible and invisible. The male is the source of creation. The female must be impregnated by the male. As the male is the natural source of creation, the supernatural source is revealed as Father. Christ, the Son, is eternally begotten of the Father. He is the image of the Father. When He is begotten in time, He reveals himself as a male.
Therefore, to correspond to Christ as He reveals himself, the priest must be male. This is the economy of salvation, as revealed in the Bible. This is the economy of salvation, as defined in the dogmas of the Universal Councils. If the priest were female, this would destroy the economy of salvation. Only those who do not accept the Revelation, can argue for ordaining women as priests.
If the priest is the type of Christ, women are the type of the Mother of God. The Mother of God is the most powerful intercessor among mortals. The ministry of women is maternal: intercession, loving service, education, and so forth. Mothers are not inferior to fathers. But mothers are not fathers. Men and women are created absolutely equal but different. To confuse one with the other is to deny the creative intention of God. Therefore, the movement to ordain women to the priesthood is fundamentally anti-Christian.”
- Fr. Alexander Tefft. Chaplain, Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge
If the priest is the type of Christ, women are the type of the Mother of God. The Mother of God is the most powerful intercessor among mortals. The ministry of women is maternal: intercession, loving service, education, and so forth. Mothers are not inferior to fathers. But mothers are not fathers. Men and women are created absolutely equal but different. To confuse one with the other is to deny the creative intention of God. Therefore, the movement to ordain women to the priesthood is fundamentally anti-Christian.”
- Fr. Alexander Tefft. Chaplain, Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge
11) The danger of paganism in imagery,
“….paternal and thus masculine imagery is naturally going to be regarded as the appropriate sort to use when characterizing God’s relationship to His creatures. For they are dependent on Him in a way comparable to a family’s dependence on a father; and He has authority over them comparable to the authority a father has over his family.
12) Does a woman have a just claim to the priesthood by law? If we look at the OT and NT I see no evidence she does.
“….paternal and thus masculine imagery is naturally going to be regarded as the appropriate sort to use when characterizing God’s relationship to His creatures. For they are dependent on Him in a way comparable to a family’s dependence on a father; and He has authority over them comparable to the authority a father has over his family.
That is one consideration. A second has to do with the way God creates. From a classical theistic perspective, God creates the world ex nihilo rather that out of His own substance. Creation is thus in no way comparable to gestation and birth, imagery which, when applied to theology, suggests either pantheism or a pagan cosmogony. The divine creative act is more like the relatively “distant” role played by the father in procreation. Accordingly, paternal and thus masculine imagery better conveys God’s transcendence.” - Feser
12) Does a woman have a just claim to the priesthood by law? If we look at the OT and NT I see no evidence she does.
13) Women lack natural authority - this is scientifically demonstrated, but also explains why in the thousands of years of civilization there have been so few women leaders. This makes sense as men are more aggressive and hierarchal and women more egalitarian.
As Tony Esolen says,
“Boys in the company of a true man find their hierarchical place and thrive there: they look up to him, but also -- this is a strange and powerful thing -- they enjoy with him a fellow-feeling, being One of the Men….
“Boys in the company of a true man find their hierarchical place and thrive there: they look up to him, but also -- this is a strange and powerful thing -- they enjoy with him a fellow-feeling, being One of the Men….
Women, I'm afraid, are not very good at this, and there's no reason why we should ever have expected them to be, since the care of small children requires a very different kind of personal engagement. Female bosses, from what their female secretaries say, sweat the small stuff, but have no natural authority from which to draw. You end up, in politics, with formless emotionalism, following fads and not principles, in endless "dialogue," AND rank-pulling, all the time.”
For proof one can look at children raised by single mothers, with a host of ugly problems, vs children raised by single fathers that are comparable to two family homes.
Woman are much more agreeable. Would you trust a female priests to sharply rebuke and bind a man with adulterous thoughts, and for him to follow a harsh, un pleasant scolding.
How explain the fact that if a mother brings her children faithfully to Church, but the father stay home, the children will not continue on.
But if the Father goes, so will the children continue.
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/thabiti-anyabwile/fathers-and-church-attendance/
14 ) Women have never built there own institutions or civilizations, they do not do so naturally, and do not know how.
As Tony Esolen says,
“No one is surprised by the existence of a band of brothers; it is too ordinary a thing. When Tom Sawyer and his friends meet in the cave and swear themselves in as members of a secret criminal society, with a blood-oath and all, we’re not surprised that boys would do that.... We do not notice that girls do not do that…”
For proof one can look at children raised by single mothers, with a host of ugly problems, vs children raised by single fathers that are comparable to two family homes.
Woman are much more agreeable. Would you trust a female priests to sharply rebuke and bind a man with adulterous thoughts, and for him to follow a harsh, un pleasant scolding.
How explain the fact that if a mother brings her children faithfully to Church, but the father stay home, the children will not continue on.
But if the Father goes, so will the children continue.
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/thabiti-anyabwile/fathers-and-church-attendance/
14 ) Women have never built there own institutions or civilizations, they do not do so naturally, and do not know how.
As Tony Esolen says,
“No one is surprised by the existence of a band of brothers; it is too ordinary a thing. When Tom Sawyer and his friends meet in the cave and swear themselves in as members of a secret criminal society, with a blood-oath and all, we’re not surprised that boys would do that.... We do not notice that girls do not do that…”
15) It is Man’s nature to be a Priest :
the Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, where it states that, “…the maleness of Jesus’ sacred humanity is inseparable from the entire mystery of his incarnation, and Jesus is the icon of the priesthood and the individual priest, the sexuality of the priest is likewise indissolubly linked to the mystery of the priesthood, for in fact the priest acts in the name and person of the God-Man in such a way so as to represent him as the Bridegroom espoused to his Bride, the Church.”
Among Abraham's ancestors the sun was venerated as the emblem of the Creator. It was believed to inseminate the earth and bring forth life. This is a distinctly masculine image for God and key to understand the origins of Messianic expectation among the Nilo-Saharans.
Their worldview was based on universally observed binary distinctions such as male-female, the east-west solar journey, dark-light, life-death, and on human experiences on a fundamental level of existence. The binary sets are observed by all people in all places on earth. The biblical worldview is not concerned with subjective distinctions such as tall-short, talented-untalented, dark skin-light skin, intelligent-unintelligent, etc. as these are not absolute and objective. The Bible is concerned about what is real ontologically.
The ancient Afro-Asiatics honored many realities, but one of the most significant is the male-female distinction. They associated maleness with the Sun and femaleness with the Moon. This association extended to semen and milk. The Sun inseminates the earth with its light and warmth and the Moon, which influences tides and body fluids, stimulates female reproduction and lactation. The ancients observed a relationship between the lunar cycle and the periodicity of the menstrual cycle. In France, menstruation is called le moment de la lune.
The binary distinctions were the basis for law and religious practice in the Afro-Asiatic Dominion. Both law and religion recognized that one of the opposites is always greater in some way. The Sun’s light is greater than moonlight. Males are stronger and larger than females. Heaven is more glorious than earth, and life is superior to death. Only in this last category is the feminine greater than the masculine, because the blood of menstruation and childbirth speaks of life, whereas the blood drawn by men in war, hunting and animal sacrifice speaks of death.
Because the Creator wants the distinction between life and death to be clear at all times to all peoples, He established this distinction between the “blood work” of women and men. This distinction between the two bloods is the basis for the priesthood, an office ontologically exclusive to males, since only men in the priestly lines could fill the office.
Warriors were responsible for the blood they shed in battle. Hunters were responsible for the blood they shed in the hunt, and priests were responsible for the blood of the animals they sacrificed. Midwives, wives and mothers were responsible for the blood of first intercourse, menstrual blood and blood shed in childbirth. The two bloods were never to mix or even to be present in the same space. Women didn’t participate in war, the hunt, and in ritual sacrifices. Likewise, men were not present at the circumcision of females or in the “mother’s house” to which women went during menses and to give birth.
It is also significant that among tribal peoples, brotherhood pacts are formed by the intentional mixing of bloods between two men, but never between male and female. The binary distinctions of male and female were maintained as part of the sacred tradition.
Female Blood Work
As a point of fact, the first reference to the shedding of blood in the Bible is not Cain’s murder of Abel. The first reference is to the blood of “the Woman” who would give birth to the One who would crush the head of the cosmic serpent and restore Paradise. This is significant because it places life-giving blood before killing. In other words, the blood work of women is posed as both prior to and equal to the blood work of priests.
In the Bible, the first blood work of women is not the birth of Cain, but the birth of Messiah promised to “the woman” in Eden in Genesis 3:15. This woman is not Eve, since Eve is not named by Adam until verse 20. The first blood work of Scripture is Christological, as indeed is the blood work of priests.
Male Blood Work
God sacrifices an animal to cover the nakedness of Adam and Eve (Gen. 3:21). In the Biblical chronology this places God as priest between the birthing blood of the Woman (Gen. 3:15) and Cain's murder of his brother (Gen. 4:8). God is at the sacred center between life and death. There God sacrifices what is His for humanity. In this sense, God is the first priest and that first animal that covers nakedness is a symbol of the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world.
From the Afro-Asiatic perspective, which is the perspective of the Bible, God is male and God is priest. It is clear also that God condescends to grant to the lesser a greater role. So it is that a young maiden from the ruler-priest lines should become the un-wedded Bride of God and the ever-virgin Mother of Christ our God.
16)And although Male and female are "accidental"; masculine and feminine are not. To leave these qualities out of the godhead leaves femininity with no ontological grounding. The theology of Hans Urs von Balthsar is helpful here.
Check out none other than John Medaille on this :
http://www.medaille.com/gender%20and%20intra-trinitarian...
An excerpt:
In the theology of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, not merely the relational character of the Trinity is asserted, but that the specific relationships involved are gendered, by which Von Balthasar means generativity and receptivity, “letting go” and “letting be”, giving and receiving, qualities which he identifies with the (super-) masculine and the (super-) feminine. Von Balthasar does not shrink from the analogy with human love; on the contrary he asserts the Trinity as the transcendent origin of what we actually see! As such, he sees it as dynamic, reciprocal and fruitful.
“Finally, the divine unity of action and consent – which, as we have seen, share equal dignity within love – is expressed in the world in the duality of the sexes. In Trinitarian terms, of course, the Father, who begets him who is without origin, appears primarily as (super-) masculine; the Son, in consenting, appears as (super-) feminine, but in the act (together with the Father) of breathing forth the Spirit, he is (super-) masculine. As for the Spirit, he is (super-) feminine. There is even something (super-) feminine about the Father too, since as we have shown, in the action of begetting and breathing forth he allows himself to be determined by the Persons who thus proceed from him; however, this does not affect his primacy in the order of the Trinity. The very fact of the Trinity forbids us to project any secular sexuality into the Godhead (as happens in many religions and in the gnostic syzygia). It must be enough for us to regard the ever-new reciprocity of acting and consenting, which in turn is a form of activity and fruitfulness, as the transcendent origin of what we see realized in the world of creation: in the form and actualization of love and its fruitfulness in sexuality.” (Von Balthasar 91)
In presenting this view of the processions, Von Balthasar makes bold use of the analogies of human love. In doing so, he presents us with a series of paradoxes which shed new light on some ancient problems, problems such as generativity, receptivity, death and immutability. In doing so, he is able to enlighten us about the way in which we image God, and image him in the way we are: as gendered persons, as male and female. This represents, to a certain degree a radical departure from the Medieval tradition, which was reluctant to assign the feminine a place within the Godhead, a reluctance which centered around the supposed imperfection implied by receptivity.
Receptivity
We can intuitively grasp the reason for this reluctance since to “receive” means to get something we lack, and a lack implies imperfection – impossible for God! Moreover,
“The classical – Aristotelian – philosophical tradition anchors the meaning of the feminine in ‘matter,’ and thus in ‘potency’ rather than ‘act’; and Aquinas follows Aristotle in this.”(Schindler 203)
Since potency lacks the perfection of act, the feminine principle is excluded a priori from the Godhead. It is certainly true that as ex nihilo creations, when we receive being, we receive something we lack. However, Von Balthasar asserts what is intuitively obvious, that “without this receptive letting be and all it involves – gratitude for the gift of oneself and a turning in love toward the Giver – the giving itself is impossible.” (Von Balthasar 86)
...
QUOTES FROM THE FATHERS :
FURTHER RESOURCES
https://www.rusjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Women_Nuts.pdf
https://www.hprweb.com/2012/02/women-and-the-priesthood/
https://www.serviamministries.com/blog/women-in-the-priesthood/
http://www.pravmir.com/article_511.html
https://www.amazon.com/Women-priesthood-Alice-Von-Hildebrand/dp/0940535726
“Finally, the divine unity of action and consent – which, as we have seen, share equal dignity within love – is expressed in the world in the duality of the sexes. In Trinitarian terms, of course, the Father, who begets him who is without origin, appears primarily as (super-) masculine; the Son, in consenting, appears as (super-) feminine, but in the act (together with the Father) of breathing forth the Spirit, he is (super-) masculine. As for the Spirit, he is (super-) feminine. There is even something (super-) feminine about the Father too, since as we have shown, in the action of begetting and breathing forth he allows himself to be determined by the Persons who thus proceed from him; however, this does not affect his primacy in the order of the Trinity. The very fact of the Trinity forbids us to project any secular sexuality into the Godhead (as happens in many religions and in the gnostic syzygia). It must be enough for us to regard the ever-new reciprocity of acting and consenting, which in turn is a form of activity and fruitfulness, as the transcendent origin of what we see realized in the world of creation: in the form and actualization of love and its fruitfulness in sexuality.” (Von Balthasar 91)
In presenting this view of the processions, Von Balthasar makes bold use of the analogies of human love. In doing so, he presents us with a series of paradoxes which shed new light on some ancient problems, problems such as generativity, receptivity, death and immutability. In doing so, he is able to enlighten us about the way in which we image God, and image him in the way we are: as gendered persons, as male and female. This represents, to a certain degree a radical departure from the Medieval tradition, which was reluctant to assign the feminine a place within the Godhead, a reluctance which centered around the supposed imperfection implied by receptivity.
Receptivity
We can intuitively grasp the reason for this reluctance since to “receive” means to get something we lack, and a lack implies imperfection – impossible for God! Moreover,
“The classical – Aristotelian – philosophical tradition anchors the meaning of the feminine in ‘matter,’ and thus in ‘potency’ rather than ‘act’; and Aquinas follows Aristotle in this.”(Schindler 203)
Since potency lacks the perfection of act, the feminine principle is excluded a priori from the Godhead. It is certainly true that as ex nihilo creations, when we receive being, we receive something we lack. However, Von Balthasar asserts what is intuitively obvious, that “without this receptive letting be and all it involves – gratitude for the gift of oneself and a turning in love toward the Giver – the giving itself is impossible.” (Von Balthasar 86)
...
QUOTES FROM THE FATHERS :
John Chrysostom writes in his “The Kind of Women to be Taken as Wives,” that “God maintained the order of each sex by dividing the business of life into two parts, and assigned the more necessary and beneficial aspects to the man and the less important, inferior matter to the woman.”
“But a Companion was made for him, one with a nature far different from his as the moon is from the Sun.”
“But a Companion was made for him, one with a nature far different from his as the moon is from the Sun.”
References to a woman's nature are found in the canons, hymns and patristic writings of the church.
St. Ambrose rebukes him further: “Adam was deceived by Eve, not Eve by Adam. . . it is right that he whom that woman induced to sin should assume the role of guide lest he fall again through feminine instability.”
This is why women cannot be priests.
FURTHER RESOURCES
https://www.rusjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Women_Nuts.pdf
https://www.hprweb.com/2012/02/women-and-the-priesthood/
https://www.serviamministries.com/blog/women-in-the-priesthood/
http://www.pravmir.com/article_511.html
https://www.amazon.com/Women-priesthood-Alice-Von-Hildebrand/dp/0940535726
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