
But that doesn’t mean we shy away from a fight that’s in our
face. There is such thing as holy
anger and sometimes I can’t help myself, especially when the garbage going
around these days has to do with women’s roles in the Church. It’s just exasperating to read what the
non-catholic media comes up with when writing about Catholics – especially at a
time like this when Catholics are vulnerable. They report on the actual facts
of the conclave for 5 seconds and then spend 20 minutes airing personal
diatribes and launching full-scale attacks on the laundry list of beefs they
have with the Church. Women’s
ordination tends to be one of the top “problems” within the Catholic Church
these days, so journalists get away with saying things like women don’t have
the ability to be priests and are thus barred from the Church’s high ranks,
from holding any power whatsoever simply because they are female.

Second to that, the women leading the fight for women’s
ordination don’t seem to be doing so out of humility. They use the language of ‘power’ and ‘prestige’ – brushing
off theological and biblical justifications with the “explanation” that the
Church hates women and discriminates against them. I have just to quote the words of Alice von Hildebrand in
the book Women and the Priesthood – she said it best when she wrote, “God’s work is accomplished not by
efficiency and talents, but by holiness, and there is no holiness without
humility and awareness that ‘without Christ we can do nothing.’ Indeed we are useless labourers.” Dr. von Hildebrand also continued
on to say that we should realize that the “problem
is not an intellectual one; it is a moral
one. No one will ever accept
the validity of an argument he chooses
not to accept; purity of heart is indispensable in order to be convinced by a
solution which is unpalatable to one’s pride and rebelliousness.”

Sure Jesus did have many female followers and held women in
high esteem (more so than the society around him did) yet he did not call women
to be priests. He called men. The Church, in her Wisdom and
Tradition, has maintained this position from the very beginning, not because
stodgy old men in high ranks feel like keeping it that way (it would be much
easier in some respects to relent and allow the ordination of women) but
because they are deeply convinced that God wishes it to be this way. The rich and ancient symbolism of the
liturgy depends on the priest being male.
So much of the symbolic core of the Catholic liturgy would be rendered ridiculous
and defunct if women were to assume the role of priest…which is a fact that’s
annoying for Catholics who do not fully understand the faith and boringly
unimportant to by-standers who care nothing for Catholicism, but it is frankly
of great doctrinal import to those of us who do care.

Women and men are fundamentally different in their very persons – unequivocally equal in dignity and worth – but offer different gifts and talents and have hearts for different things. Yet at the same time we “...desperately need both the masculine and the feminine principles”, says Alice von Hildebrand. “They complement each other. They belong together.” And it’s this fact – the fact that the sexes require each other and belong together for wholeness, that makes it abundantly clear that women’s gifts are needed within the Catholic Church. If there is to be any flourishing of the Faith in the future, the Church absolutely requires the women of faith to humbly lay their gifts and talents down in service. Even the Vatican Offices may be opening up to more women in the future as Argentine Cardinal Leonardo Sandri said in a recent interview that it’s “only right that women should have more key positions in the Vatican administration where they can make a very important contribution because of their qualifications. But they also must be co-participants in the dialogue and the analysis of the life of the Church and in (other) areas, even in the formation of priests, where they can play a very, very important role.”
In the end, women are no better or worse off because they can’t be priests. There’s no ‘big party’ they’re missing out on, nor are they looked down upon as second-class ‘citizens’ because they cannot be ordained. Things are what they are because of two thousand years of Wisdom and Tradition passed down to us from Jesus Christ himself. Sure there are some things within the Church that can change, but as Peter Kreeft says, "God is the one who invented the priesthood and who calls to the priesthood. The Church did not invent the priesthood, she received it." In this case, the Church does not have the power to allow the ordination of women. To do so would seriously compromise much of the Deposit of Faith, not to mention shake the faith of believers everywhere.
Lets all keep those fighting for, and those confused about, the ordination of women in our prayers.
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