David Quinn
Our Lord’s maleness was not an accident, writes David Quinn
The debate over whether or not women in the Catholic Church can be priests is one for Catholics, first and foremost. That ought to go without saying.
Many of those chipping in on the issue over the last couple of weeks don’t believe in a priesthood at all, never mind in women priests. They don’t believe in priestly ordination and they don’t believe in any of the Sacraments. None of it makes any sense to them. When we are baptised, they don’t believe anything happens. The Church’s secular critics don’t believe anything happens when we are confirmed, or married (except legally speaking), or when we receive the Last Rites.
They don’t believe any change takes place in us when we receive any of the Sacraments. They don’t believe the Sacraments are moments when God’s grace works in our lives. They don’t believe anything happens when the priest at Mass says the words of consecration over the bread and the wine, and they don’t believe anything happens when a priest is ordained. He remains exactly the same as he was before.
They don’t really care what Christ willed for his Church, or for the priesthood. It might be interesting from a purely historical perspective to consider what type of Church (community of his followers) Jesus had in mind. But does it really matter that much if Jesus was only a man? If he was only a man then we have great liberty to change what he intended.
But people who simply believe Jesus was a good man, and nothing more, are not Christians at all. It is not an imperative for them to work out what Christ wills for us and for his Church.
For Catholics (and Christians generally), it is a different matter entirely. We believe that Jesus – God Incarnate – willed an ordained priesthood. We are obliged to follow his will in all things even when doing so scandalises the wider world.
Every faithful Catholic, liberal or conservative, believes this. We believe in the Sacraments. We believe we cannot remake the Sacraments in our own image and likeness. We believe that under certain circumstances the Sacraments are not efficacious at all. For example, a ‘priest’ who is not validly ordained cannot say the Mass, and if he does, nothing happens at the moment of consecration.
At the Mass we at not at liberty to use something else as substitutes for the bread and the wine because Christ told us to use bread and wine as symbols of his body and blood. Catholics believe these become the literal body and blood of Jesus when a validly ordained priest says the words of consecration. Take away the bread and wine and this does not happen. Take a validly ordained priest out of the picture, and it does not happen.
Can we substitute a woman for a man at Mass, which is to say, are we at liberty to ordain women? Did Christ intend us to ordain women as well as men? Does Jesus believe that the priesthood is a gender-neutral role, or that it is gendered, which is to say male, because he himself was gendered and male?
Must the priest be a man because Jesus was a man? This is what the Church believes and has always believed. We see that Christ choose 12 men to be his apostles. Was this an accident? Was it historically contingent, which is to say, if God had chosen other time and place to become incarnate, could he as easily have been a woman, and his apostles all female, or a mixture of male and female?
Priestesses
In the time of Jesus there were religions with priestesses. Priestesses were acceptable in some societies in the ancient world, including Ancient Rome (which remained appalling sexist, by the way). Why did God not become incarnate in one of those societies as a woman?
The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us that at Mass the priest is ‘another Christ’. The gender of Christ is not treated as something accidental and changeable any more than the choice of bread and wine to symbolise his body and blood is accidental and changeable. Christ was a man and therefore the priest must be a man if the priest at Mass is to be ‘another Christ’, if he is to truly represent Christ in his gendered reality.
If God had become incarnate as a woman, could a man represent this female priest-saviour at Mass?
We are simply not at liberty to treat Christ’s maleness as an accident or pretend that the sexes are interchangeable in respect of the Mass because Christ’s sex was not an accident.
We live in a time and place that strenuously denies the complementarity of the sexes and which insists that there are no real differences between men and women and that men and women are completely interchangeable.
Remember, in its law, Ireland sees no difference between men and women even in their roles as mothers and fathers. It believes that a man can be a mother-figure to a child as easily as a woman can.
Furthermore, our law believes that a woman can literally become a man, and vice versa. Anyone in Ireland over the age of 18 can write to the Department of Social Protection and ‘change’ sex. Even if they were born male, they can insist, no questions asked, that all of their official documents be changed to show their ‘true’ female gender.
The idea of equality and sameness have also become completely confused. We think one means the other. When we try to say that men and women are not the same, this is an offence against the modern meaning of equality, a mortal sin today.
Christianity believes in the complementarity of the sexes and that God created us male and female for a reason.
The Church has no right to pretend that the sexes are the same, and that they are totally interchangeable. The priest as a man stands in at Mass for Christ, who was a man. We cannot pretend that the maleness of Christ was an accident, an irrelevancy, which is what many people are now asking us to do, including many Catholics.