In this engaging clip, Cy Kellett and Catholic apologist Trent Horn tackle a thought-provoking question about the Catholic Church’s stance on the ordination of women. Trent explains the theological foundations behind this teaching, referencing Pope St. John Paul II’s document, *Ordinatio Sacerdotalis*, and clarifying that the Church’s position is rooted in the example set by Jesus and the early Church.
Transcript:
Caller: So I’m not Catholic because I am a female pastor. And so I’d love to talk a little bit about how it is that the Catholic Church understands the ordination process in such a way that it would exclude women.
Trent: Sure. Well, in 1994, Pope St. John Paul II released a document called *Ordinatio Sacerdotalis*. And in there, he said the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women, and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful. And so what he’s saying here is not that the Church has made a decision to not ordain women, but that God had not given the Church the ability to do this based on the deposit of faith.
And so the reasons Pope St. John Paul II gives in his apostolic exhortation in this document is primarily that Jesus, though he was free to do so, did not call any women to ever be apostles. And the early Church did not ordain women to the priesthood, even though there were deaconesses, there were women who traveled in Christ’s ministry. So that’s the primary reason. It has nothing to do with one sex having more dignity or value than any other. Because, of course, the highest honor we give to a creature is to marry who’s a woman. But that’s what we would say, is that it’s not that the Church doesn’t do it; the Church is unable to, as a part of what God has revealed. So that’s the short answer, I suppose.
Caller: So I think that that’s really helpful and it’s really interesting. In my denomination, we consider ordination, obviously something that has to be affirmed by the Church, but ordination itself as something coming straight from God and then being affirmed in our sacrament of ordination of holy orders.
Trent: What denomination do you belong to?
Caller: I’m a part of the Church of the Nazarene.
Trent: What congregation is that? Because you’re… I mean, does that belong to a larger group or…
Caller: No, the Church of the Nazarene is a global church that is its own denomination, but we come out of the Wesleyan Holiness movement.
Trent: Okay.
Caller: So I think it’s interesting that you would say that Jesus didn’t really call any women to be apostles. I think clearly our holy Scriptures are written in a time that was very patriarchal in nature. So of course, we’re not going to see that directly in the Scriptures.
Trent: Well, was Jesus patriarchal?
Caller: Well, no. And that’s exactly kind of what I want to say here. If you think about even like Mary Magdalene, who of course is the first person who proclaims the good news of the gospel, Jesus is alive. And you know, there’s this kind of direct connection there. Like Jesus says, go tell the others and she does. And so I understand that there was not, you know, an ordination ceremony that happened there, but I’m not sure that that happened with the other disciples either.
Cy: But what about…
Trent: Sure, but what about… As Catholics, we would say that their ordination takes place, that that sacrament is instituted at the Last Supper when Jesus is present with the 11 and tells them, “Do this in memory of me,” and he gives them the sacred responsibility of consecrating the Eucharist. So we would say that it takes place at that moment where there are no other women who are present.
But I guess when we talk about this, I know it’s an issue that’s fraught with discussions about women and men and their role in the Church, and it can be contentious for many people. I think there’s a primary question I might want to answer before we can move the discussion forward. So if it is the case that it is God’s revelation that only men are to be ordained to the priesthood, is that something you would be willing to accept?
Caller: Well, I mean, if that was God’s revelation, sure, but I just really don’t think it is.
Trent: Okay, what standard do you use to determine what God’s revelation is?
Caller: Well, I use Scripture and then I also use experience and history and tradition and reason. So when you take all of those things into account, I can’t really find a good reason for the exclusion of women in ordination.
Trent: Well then let’s continue on. I think even by that standard though, one could see how the needle would shift towards an understanding of the male priesthood. Because one, I think that tradition would be rock solid and heavy towards an understanding that only men are priests. When you look at Scripture, I don’t see any evidence there in the New Testament for women being priests. It all seems to be taken for granted that not only just taken for granted that men are priests, but Paul in his own letter to the Corinthians does not allow women to speak in church. Now he did allow them to prophesy, so it doesn’t mean that women had to be completely silent in church and can never utter a word.
But what Pope St. John Paul II talks about in that passage seems to relate to more who has teaching authority, like the ability to give a homily, which same today, only priests can give homilies in the Catholic Church. So to me that would leave Christian experience and reason. And I don’t see how Christian experience, I guess that’s tradition lived out today when we come to reason. It seems to me here why I don’t see what’s unreasonable about God calling men to a different role than women because men are different than women. We exist in a complementary way.
And one argument, this isn’t explicitly stated by Pope St. John Paul II, but some theologians have put forward that another reason that the priesthood is male is because as Catholics, we believe that priests are an *alter Christus*. They are another Christ. They literally represent, they are imitators of Christ in a way different from people who don’t receive the sacrament. And so in becoming another Christ, Christ’s maleness, the fact that he became a man is essential to his identity in a way that, I’ve had it explained this way: that aside from changing your species, the most radical thing that could change about one’s identity would be whether you’re a man or a woman.
So I’d say that if being male is an essential element of Christ’s identity, and the priest is another Christ, then it would follow we would see evidence for priests needing to be male. So I don’t think that there’s anything irrational about God calling men to a specific role in the faith. And I could see even reason pointing towards that. But I’ve been going on a bit. What do you think?
Caller: Well, I definitely would just want to point back again to the era in which Jesus came into the world.
Trent: Okay.
Caller: Clearly at that time in history, if Jesus had entered the world as a baby girl, I feel like there would not have been the authority in that patriarchal society for him to speak into the world. So I’m not necessarily convinced that Jesus came as male because it was, you know, preferable for men to be the leadership or the priests, but because that too could possibly be listened to at that time.
Trent: But…
Trent: Well, I don’t think that that’s necessarily the case. I mean, I agree with you that first-century Judaism was a very patriarchal society and so women did not have the same status as men. But that wasn’t universally true. We look throughout the Old Testament, you have female leaders that are upheld, people like Deborah and Judith and others like that. Though I agree it’d be difficult. But if we put limits on what God can do, if God is omnipotent, he could be our Messiah and also have been born a woman. But of course that would contradict, I think, his essential nature of being the Son, even though God is neither male nor female.
But let me get back to… I see the argument here is, well, yes, Jesus called men to be apostles, but it’s, you know, it’s a patriarchal society, so his hand is kind of forced in that perspective to do that. I don’t agree with that because that may have been the case maybe in Judea, but as the Church expands in the Gentile world, you have women of very high authority throughout the Greco-Roman world. In many other mystery cults, it was not a God that was worshiped, but goddesses that were worshiped. And there were female priestesses in other Gentile religions. So I think in the wider world at that time, there could have been female priests and they wouldn’t have stopped the Gospel, stopped the Church right in its tracks.
Caller: I sometimes feel like modern people are very much into culture and cultural conditioning and all that, but Christ is God and he does not… You can’t say, well, his culture compelled him to do this or that. Nothing. He even said, “No one takes my life, but I lay it down.” There’s nothing that… He doesn’t… He’s not subject to a psychology and an enculturation the way that we are.
Trent: The fact itself of preaching that God had become man in the Messiah and was now ushering the kingdom of God and had risen bodily from the dead completely smashed the cultural expectations of the time of Jesus. So Jesus was not averse to completely upending cultural expectations, saying that circumcision is no longer required, that one does not have to keep the kosher law—that radically smashes…
Caller: You can’t divorce your wife anymore.
Trent: Right. So there’s nothing to stop Jesus from doing that. So that means, I believe we should take seriously what kind of people Jesus called into the roles of being apostles while having women at the heart of his ministry. And I think that that provides very good evidence for at least the reasonableness of the teaching of the all-male priesthood.
But I think it will ultimately come down to, and this is where the discussion was going, where we understand divine authority and revelation. That you could say, well, no, God wants women to be priests. Well, how do you know that? Well, because it seems reasonable to me. Okay, well what’s your authority for determining that? If you put things in your own scheme of reason, there’s lots of theologians who think that contraception and homosexual behavior and lots of other things seem reasonable to them. The question is, are we going to hold fast to the deposit of faith that was given to the Church Christ founded or to our theologizing in the churches we founded?
Cy: And there’s something to using your reason to figure out how to obey as well. People don’t like that—that we obey Christ, we obey what he taught. It’s not a popular thought, but when you’re in the presence of God, obedience is a really good thing. It’s not a bad thing. And so what did he want?