In the Holy Bible, there is no thundering commandment proclaiming: “Thou shalt not ordain women as priests.”
True, Jesus Christ’s disciples were all men, but there are no directly quoted statements from Christ in the Gospels – as far as I know – that women cannot serve as priests.
I grew up Catholic. I remember asking a nun in catechism class how come all priests are men. She gave me one of her many versions of “because the Bible tells me so” after mentioning all of Christ’s disciples were men.
I didn’t quite buy her explanation, though. She is the nun who said she had a piece of His cross in a tiny little box she kept in her black robe. We, kids, all asked to see it; she never did show us. To that nun, our every question was answered with, “It’s a mystery.”
And it remains a mystery to me why women cannot be priests.
The Holy Roman Catholic Church is bound up in 2,000 years of tradition. That’s a good thing and a bad thing. Good because the eternal verities, such as “Thou shalt not kill,” should of course be honored and respected. Bad because after so many hundreds of years, reasons for this or that rule or restriction – often baseless ones – get blurred in the mists of time.
Barring women as priests seems to be one of those seemingly baseless restrictions. There have been many changes in Catholic doctrine, so why not change the one against women priests?
For example, I remember the Mass was conducted only in Latin, then later it could suddenly be recited in English.
I remember Catholics were not supposed to eat meat on Fridays. It was a sin. Later, the pope or somebody decreed it wasn’t a sin anymore. But many still honored meatless Fridays.
I remember St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, was suddenly booted from the Catholic pantheon of saints. Back then, a magnetic, white, plastic St. Christopher knick-knack on your dashboard (if you were Catholic) protected you from accidents. I told the neighbors the St. Christopher inside their beat-up baby blue Cadillac wouldn’t protect them anymore since he’s not a saint, after all. I remember dad said, “Oh, well, might as well leave him in there. Can’t do any harm.” Traditions really do die hard, especially after 2,000 years-worth of them.
In the early days of Christianity, Christian sects in the Roman world would meet in secret with the rites sometimes led by women. Throughout the years, the official Catholic Church became dominated by men, as everything else was in those ancient days. The men took over; they made the rules based on their own male prerogatives and often myopic world views.
That patriarchal structure (a form of sexism, let’s face it) persisted and became sclerotic, often shored up by self-serving misinterpretations of what the Bible says.
Even though I’m not a practicing Catholic anymore, I still have a soft spot in my heart for Catholicism. I have some good memories of the ritual of the Mass, the magisterial sounds of the priest intoning Latin phrases in a kind of sing-song chant (“Dominus vobiscum et spiritus saaaanctuuus”). There was something other-wordly and transporting about the stained-glass windows, the incense, the Holy Sacrament of host and wine, and there was even an impressive hushed awe about that dark confessional box so heavy with whispered sins.
I also admire to no end those Catholics (nuns, priests, laypeople) who work so hard, often in dangerous regions of the world, doing good deeds of social justice. Right here in the greater St. Cloud area, nuns have done the lion’s share of work founding our great educational and health-care institutions.
So doesn’t it make sense to allow women to be priests? I can think of so many good reasons for it. At the top of those reasons, it could revitalize the priesthood, as well as the Catholic Church in general, by breaking from the rigidness of a paternalistic tradition and the heavy weight of all those centuries. I predict allowing women to become priests will happen in the next 10 to 20 years.
Bernadyne Sykora and Ruth Lindstedt – the two Sartell women who became women priests and were promptly excommunicated – should be proud. They are determined women, courageous priests and spiritual visionaries pointing the way to the future.
