Why won't the Catholic Church ordain women?
A philosophical reflection on the male-only priesthood
Above: “Ordination and First Mass of St. Juan de Mata” by Vincenzio Carduccio (1576-1638).
The Catholic position on a male-only priesthood is not arbitrary. It isn't as if women could be ordained priests but the Church just won't ordain them. It's that they can't be ordained. Why is this?
A priest isn't someone who merely preaches sermons, provides counseling, attends to the poor and sick, oversees a parish or local church community, and the like. If that's all that being a priest amounted to, then perhaps women could be priests just as well as men. But the priesthood is not like that. It is a sacrament (Holy Orders), an outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace. The sacraments effect what they signify, similar to the way in which the words "I do", given the proper marital context, effect what they signify, namely, a life-long covenant. It's the matter plus the context and intent that bring about a new reality, not simply the physical utterance itself.
The primary role of a priest is to administer sacraments and to teach. And to do those things he must serve as a conduit between heaven and earth; he must represent the people to God, and God to the people; he must be a symbol, an icon or prototype, of God's relation to the world and to us—masculine to feminine, begetting (i.e., giving from self without receiving) to receiving, transcendent to immanent, father to child, Christ to the Church. Men by nature are suited to represent and symbolize in these ways; women by nature are not.1
The priest, therefore, does not simply carry out managerial tasks; in a special sense he gives himself up to become another Christ so that Christ might act through him. There is, then, an ontological principle or truth which must be maintained by way of the sign. Whenever he celebrates the mass or gives absolution in the confessional, he is acting in the place of Christ: in persona Christi. A priest truly represents—is deputized to act in the power and place of—our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Thus, the Church has authoritatively spoken on this theological question, including the definitive affirmation by Pope John Paul II that “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women.”2
An objection
A philosopher once said to me something along these lines:
Do you mean that receiving belongs to what it means to be a female and begetting belongs to what it means to be male? If so, that’s an out-dated understanding of reproduction. The ancient Greeks assumed that the male gives the seed and the female gives the place for the seed to grow and develop. So females are receptive matter and males are the ones who emanate the form (cf. Plato, Timaeus on the Receptacle; or Aristotle on reproduction). But this is mistaken. The female provides half the genetic material and the man the other half. The female both receives and begets, but the male only begets (though in fact begetting is a joint activity with the female, not something that the male does alone). So I don't find the male/female distinction that you have presented to be compelling; let alone justifying a priority for men.
If the objector wishes to target the claim that the male gives the seed and the female gives the place for the seed to grow and develop, then I would ask him to tell me which of those conjuncts is supposed to be false. Clearly, both are true.
I did not imply that a woman by nature contributes nothing to DNA, the development of a baby, etc. The woman grows the baby for nine months, so of course her body is designed to contribute to and build it.
I implied that there is at least one unique way in which man stands to woman as begetter to receiver. It is irrelevant to say that there is a separate, unique way in which a woman contributes to DNA and an unborn child’s development, so that she is not merely a receiver in that respect.
Thus, even if we grant these points on “out-dated” biology, it does not follow that there is no unique way in which man (by nature) stands to woman as begetter to receiver.
In the history of religion we find a common theme, namely, that transcendence is always associated with fatherliness or the masculine type, while earth is associated with motherliness or the feminine type. It is the contrast between something which produces outside oneself and one which receives and nourishes within itself.
See his 1994 Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. Also, even though he wasn’t Catholic, C. S. Lewis saw all of this many years ago and argued for it in an essay called "Priestesses in the Church". It's a good, short essay and I commend it to any reader who wants to think deeper on this subject.