Priestess of Christ?

Last time, we talked about the truth behind the myth of Pope Joan. We ended with a question, though. Why does it matter that only men can be priests?

Well, in 1976, it was formally and officially put into words by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in their letter to the world, Inter insignores. In that letter, and in Pope John Paul II’s document Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, it was stated that the priesthood was reserved for men, and men alone, and there was nothing the Church could do about it. Now, these two letters were not authoritative in themselves. However, they were authoritative in that they were the teaching of the entirety of the Magisterium, meaning that reserving the priesthood for men alone is an official and formal teaching of the Catholic Church, and none can, in good conscience, reject this teaching and remain Catholic.

Why is this, though? Why do we stick with the “archaic” idea that only men have the “right” to be priests, even after Paul says in Galatians that “there is no male and female” (Galatians 3:28). Well, there are a number of reasons.

The first, and most obvious, reason we don’t allow for women to become priests is the very simple reason that Jesus didn’t choose any women to be among his twelve apostles. Instead, Jesus chose twelve men to lead his Church after he left.

The objection to that is usually that choosing women to be priests would have been incredibly unusual and would have thrown everyone off of his message and driven most of his people away. Except for one minor point. In that time, the Jews were the weird ones for not having priestesses. The Romans had the Vestal Virgins, the Greeks had Oracle at Delphi, among others, the Egyptians had Cleopatra and God’s Wife of Amun. The list goes on and on with the different priestesses in the region around Israel. Priestesses actually would have been normal.

Beyond just the normality of priestesses in the world at the time, though, Jesus wasn’t exactly known for following social customs. He spoke to a Samaritan woman, a known adulteress, while in Samaria, breaking at least three different social taboos simply acknowledging her existence. He dealt with the ritually unclean on a nearly daily basis. One of the twelve was a tax collector, the absolute lowest of the low in the world of Jewish social customs. A woman would probably actually have been closer to normal than some of the other things he did.

There’s also the fact that Jesus did actually greatly respect women in his ministry. The first people he appeared to after the Resurrection were women. Jewish tradition would have thrown out their testimony, but they were the ones who were to bring testimony to the Apostles, yet they were never to be counted among the number of the 12. Mary, the very mother of God, the absolute pinnacle of womanhood, without whom Jesus isn’t born, wasn’t even numbered among the twelve. The one with the strongest claim to any authority outside Christ held none.

Beyond just what Jesus did, though, the Apostles continued the trend of not choosing women. After Judas died, in the upper room, Mary had been present, but instead of choosing God’s mother, the obvious choice, they chose Matthias. Mary wasn’t even the other top choice, it was Barsabbas. Even when the Apostles move out to the rest of the world and start spreading the Gospel in a culture that welcomed and accepted priestesses, there was never a woman ordained, only those who aided in the mission of the Church as lay ministers.

Next time, we’ll take a more in-depth look at some of the history after the apostles of this teaching, as well as some theology about it.