Why can't women become priests? Part 2
The roots of the exclusively male priesthood are neither anthropological (a supposed superiority of men) nor “strategic” (a supposed greater autonomy), but come from Revelation: God has revealed, established, and given us the ministerial priesthood in a masculine form, not feminine, and for this reason the Church does not consider herself authorized to change this disposition, admitting women to priestly ordination.
The twelve Apostles, whom Jesus chose to make them sharers in his priesthood, were men, not women. Later, they continued choosing male candidates.
This was well established from the beginning. When, in the first centuries of Christianity, sects arose that wanted to entrust the exercise of the priestly ministry to women, they were immediately rebuked and denounced as heresies. Even in the following centuries, the Church considered it a binding apostolic practice.
Some may think that this practice was conditioned by the circumstances of the time, in which the figure of women had little public relevance and was viewed in a subordinate position. We must remember, however, that Jesus did not allow himself to be conditioned by the cultural customs of the time, but openly challenged them, also concerning women: he spoke freely with them, he gave them as an example in the parables, he granted them equal rights concerning marriage, he welcomed sinners, etc.
The apostles, for their part, did not yield on this issue either when evangelization expanded outside the Semitic sphere to the Greek and then the Roman world, where, because of the existence of pagan priestesses, the presence of “Christian priestesses” would not have scandalized.
Moreover, the Son of God became incarnate by taking on a human nature sexed in a masculine, not feminine, mode, and it is the virtue of that human nature, which is the instrument of the divine, that is made sacramentally present in the candidate when he is ordained a priest.
In short, the masculine human nature of Jesus Christ is sacramentally “prolonged” in a human “support” that must necessarily be masculine to be a valid support. Let us not forget that the incarnation of the Son of God does not end with his Ascension into heaven: Jesus Christ was male and continues to be male.
Indeed, the New Testament does not explicitly address the question of the non-admission of women to the priesthood. But it is Revelation as a whole –the New Testament data read in the light of the living Tradition of the Church– that expresses the ecclesial faith about the matter.
The Church has officially affirmed this doctrine “to clear up any doubt on a question of great importance, which concerns the divine constitution of the Church herself,” and St. John Paul II reaffirmed “that the Church has in no way the faculty to confer priestly ordination on women, and that this sentence must be considered definitive by all the faithful.” This doctrine “requires definitive assent” because “it has been infallibly proposed by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.”
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