I’d Make a Great Priest

I’d make a great priest–I really would!  I’m knowledgeable, I’m faithful, I’m an excellent listener, and, boy, can I preach.1  I’d touch hearts in the confessional and set parishes on fire.

It’s not that I wouldn’t be a good priest, it’s that I can’t be a priest.

Look at it this way: those little girls I told you about?  I spend more time with them than their dad ever has.  I flew to Indiana for Megan’s first communion earlier this year; I’d bet money that he doesn’t even know her middle name.  He hasn’t seen them in years; I’m there every summer.  I may be a much better father to them than he is, but I can’t be their father.

I might not be so great at giraffey things like walking on those spindly legs.

Or how about this: I’d be an incredible giraffe.–bear with me here.  I’d be the first singing giraffe ever.  I’d be able to read and write and spell prehensile when blogging about my awesome prehensile tongue.  But I can’t be a giraffe.  It’s not a matter of being good enough–I’m not capable.  I don’t have the giraffeness it takes to be a giraffe, the maleness it takes to be a father, or the essence it takes to be a priest.

What we have to get here is that nobody’s saying women aren’t good enough to be priests.  Nobody loved women more than Jesus.  When he rose from the dead, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene (happy feast day!), and yet he didn’t invite her to the Last Supper.  He honored her above all the apostles but he didn’t make her a priest.  Not because she wasn’t good enough but because it wasn’t possible.

And quit telling me that the Church hates women.  You can’t spend more than 15 minutes around real Catholics without wondering if they don’t maybe worship the Virgin Mary.  You can’t feel the way we do about the blessed Mother and hate women.  So this has to be a matter not of talent but of capability–not of intelligence and piety and compassion but of something innate to men that women don’t possess.

Intrinsic to this whole question is the idea that men and women are essentially different in more than just chromosomes and their biological expression.  That’s what the church is assuming when she says (infallibly, btw) that women can’t be in persona Christi because they aren’t male.2

For a long time, I thought this was stupid.  Do priests then have to be Semitic and have beards and wear sandals?  Don’t be ridiculous.

But those things are all accidents (remember when we talked about substance and accidents?)–they’re characteristics that don’t define a person.  Jesus’ gender, on the other hand, is substance.  It’s essential to who he is.

Think about it this way: if John and Mary pull a Freaky Friday and switch bodies, John doesn’t become a woman.  His maleness is not a mere function of his body–it’s who he is.  We’d say that he was a man trapped in a woman’s body, not that he had become a woman.  He may have long hair, pink fingernails, and great legs, but he’s still a man.

We have to keep this in mind when we’re discussing women’s ordination: the Church has never said that women weren’t good enough to be priests but that they weren’t capable.  Just like my dad would have made a great mom but he can’t be a mom.  He doesn’t have the femaleness required.

So if you’re a Catholic, you accept this because of Scripture (Jesus didn’t ordain women) and Tradition (the Church has never ordained women and has said infallibly that women can’t be ordained).  You can argue all you like that Jesus was restricted by his culture, but then you’re a) ignoring the fact that everything he did flew in the face of cultural norms–prostitutes and tax collectors, anyone? and b) denying the divinity of Christ who would certainly have rejected those customs if he though it necessary, for that time or ours.

But why is this true??  I always got that I had to accept this, but it took a near miracle for me to see why God had designed things this way.  I had to know what there is about “maleness” that is intrinsic to priesthood.  C.S. Lewis (himself an Anglican) explains this brilliantly.  If you’re short on time, definitely read him instead of me.

Lewis doesn’t say much, though, about the argument that really makes sense of all this for me.  He understands that women can’t represent God to men the way that men can, not because they’re not kind or loving or wise enough but because God is masculine in relationship to his people.  God is the initiator, the one who gives to his Bride who receives.  (Forget your personal relationships for a minute and just recognize the significance of the act of sex in terms of what it means to be masculine or feminine.)  So when priests act in persona Christi, they can only do that by fully imaging Christ the Bridegroom.

When he stretched out his arms on the cross, Jesus consummated his marriage with his Bride the Church.  At each Mass, we step outside of time to that one sacrifice.  When the priest takes the host in his hands, he speaks the words of Christ once again, “This is my body, which will be given up for you.”  This moment in the Mass is the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the marital act of Bridegroom and Bride.  It is offered by Christ through the person of the priest.

That’s why the gender of the priest is essential.  The Mass is a marital act, an act of complete self-giving by Christ to his Church.  If a woman were the priest, each Mass would be the image of a homosexual union.  Think what you want about gay marriage in America, it’s pretty clear where the Church has to stand on the issue of the morality of homosexual actions (Rom 1:26-27, 1 Tim 1:10, 1 Cor 6:9).  And the Church’s central act of worship has to be in line with God’s plan for men and women as much as everything else the Church does.

If priesthood were a matter of talent, I’d make a great priest.  If Christianity were entirely reasonable (as Lewis says), it would be appalling to deny holy orders to women.  But when we enter the realm of the divine, we have to accept that there may be some truths that counter contemporary human wisdom.

Second wave feminism taught us that equality meant sameness, that if men and women were equal it meant that they were interchangeable.  What makes humanity so beautiful, though, is the difference between and complementarity of the sexes.  And I think the great downfall of second wave feminism, even from a secular perspective, is that it tries so hard to champion the value of women while telling women they have to be men.

Gloria Steinem didn’t argue in favor of respect for the feminine genius, as did John Paul II; she declared that women, being as good as men, were just like men.  So instead of earning the dignity we always deserved while embracing our femininity, we were told to want sex as much as men (and as indiscriminately as boys who are unworthy of the name “men”), to be as unemotional as men (without being bitches), and to work harder than men (since deep down we all know that women aren’t really as smart as men), all while looking hot.

Believe, me, I’m a feminist.  You are, too.  But I understand that to be a good woman, I don’t have to be a man.  I can be as athletic or emotional or nurturing or intelligent as is natural to me without comparing myself to anyone else’s ideal.  I can wear spike heels or Converse, work 10 hour days at the office or 16 hour days at home or never work a day in my life.  I can be girly or tough or quiet or nerdy or all of the above.  I’ve never let my culture define who I am because my self worth doesn’t lie in what I do but in who I am: I am His.

I’ve had people ask me in the past if it’s hard to be a woman in the Catholic Church.  My Episcopalian grandmother tells me every time I see her that it’s a shame I can’t be a priest.  But, having been blessed to accept this teaching, I’ve found that I love the Church all the more because of it.  I would never want to be a member of a church whose doctrine is swayed by the sensibilities of the world.  I feel so blessed to take refuge in a bastion of truth that stands firm in the face of onslaughts from every side.

I did feel a little sorry for myself for a while until I began to understand the beauty of being a woman in the Church.  Sure, men can be priests, but most aren’t.  Every woman, though, can be pursued by divine love in a way that speaks particularly to a woman’s heart.  Every woman can picture herself in the arms of Christ in a way that’s meaningless (or disturbing) to most men.  No, I can’t say Mass, and nothing will ever change that.  But I can read the Song of Songs as a love letter to me.  I can hear the voice of my lover crying out to me in the Eucharist, be lost in the romance of his embrace, and live as a princess in his kingdom.

And I wouldn’t trade that for a sham priesthood.  Not for anything.

  1. Please excuse the bragging here–I’m making a point. []
  2. If you haven’t yet read my most recent post on priesthood, please do. This post won’t make much sense if you don’t have that background. []

Maybe I’m Not Smarter Than Aquinas?

My father stayed home with us when I was growing up.  When he did work, he was a nurse.1  My mother worked, my last name was hyphenated–is that enough information to let you know that I wasn’t raised with a traditional understanding of gender roles?

Until I was a teenager, I honestly believed that men and women were the same–as in, I thought that women were physically as strong as men.  To recap, my dad bench pressed 400 pounds.  My mom clearly did not.  But my ideology was stronger than my logic and I remained convinced that the only difference between men and women was a minor accident of anatomy.

So when I found myself a Catholic in high school, I had a few bones to pick with the magisterium.  The biggest one, of course, was women’s ordination.  If women were just as good as men (which I knew the Church taught), why on earth couldn’t they be priests?  To my second-wave feminist mind, it was extreme patriarchal mysogyny.

This is a picture of me being a nerd. Give me a break, I thought the post needed an image.

So, like any good nerd, I began to research–rather belligerently, to be sure.  I asked friends and priests; I even read the Catechism on it.  Had the internet been more than a mass of awkward chat rooms at the time, I might have had a better shot at figuring it out, but I found myself at the end of my research with nothing more than I’d had at the beginning.  It still sounded like this Church I had given my life over to was telling me that women weren’t good enough to be priests.  How medieval could you get?

But I’d read Matthew 16:18-192 and John 6 and I knew I was stuck with the Catholic Church.  And I knew that if the Catholic Church was true (which I was convinced it was), she had to be right–about everything.  You see, the central claim of the Catholic Church is her claim of infallible authority.  If she’s not right about everything, she can’t claim to be right about anything.  I knew that if I rejected Church authority on this matter, I needed to find a new Church.

So I decided that maybe 2000 years of the world’s greatest minds might–might–actually know more than I did on something.  Maybe Aquinas and Augustine and Irenaeus and Tertullian and Chrysostom and all those ecumenical councils actually knew more about God than I did.  Maybe the infallible Church I claimed to believe in was infallible on everything, like she claimed, and not just on the things that made sense to me.

In the end, I realized that I trusted the Church more than I trusted myself, which was saying a lot.  So I submitted to the Church.  I sucked it up and accepted the teaching, not understanding it, because I accepted the Church’s claim of authority.

Six months later, I realized that I not only believed it, I understood it.  In submitting to the authority of Christ and his Church, I had made an act of faith, one far greater than my conversion had been.  For an arrogant intellectual like me to accept an unpalatable doctrine on faith, not reason, was almost miraculous.

I honestly believe that the Lord withheld understanding from me in order to call me to a deeper faith.  Up to that point, everything I believed, I believed because it was logical.  I had done the research and learned the arguments and I was completely convinced of every other truth claim the Church made.  There was nothing virtuous about my faith: in my mind, it was completely the product of my reason.  Catholicism seemed to be a product of my brilliant intellect, and God knew I needed more.

When I found myself up against a doctrine I didn’t understand, a doctrine I couldn’t accept, I had to learn to trust.  I had to follow God not because of what he’d proven but because of who he was.  I had to submit to the Church not because I had checked out her argument and given it the Meg Hunter-Kilmer seal of approval but because I accepted the Church as a truth-telling thing.3

I think that for intellectuals, this is where the rubber meets the road.  Catholicism is supremely logical, but nobody ever became a Saint by reason alone–or even a real believer.  You can argue and reason and explain your way almost to the Tiber,4 but it takes a leap of faith to swim across.

And this is the downfall for many of the most intelligent people.  If you’ve always understood everything, if you’ve been able to give a reasoned explanation of everything you’ve ever believed, it takes a heroic submission of the intellect to step from reason into mystery.  There is nothing in the faith that is illogical, but some of it is supralogical.  The Trinity is not accessible to our reason, but it’s not contrary to reason, either.  It’s above reason.  As a smarty-pants, accepting that something that you don’t get might be true is an almost super-human feat.  But that’s why we have grace.

The moment I decided (by the grace of God) to accept the Church’s authority was the moment my belief became faith.  It’s that faith that’s brought me through confusion and doubt and crisis and left me stronger on the other side, and it’s because I finally decided that I was all in.  I believed in the Church more than I believed in myself.  She hasn’t let me down yet.

So here’s an appeal to all of you who know better than the Church: you can’t.  Either you believe that the Catholic Church is the true Church of Christ, preserved from error when speaking authoritatively on matters of faith and morals, or you don’t.  If you don’t believe in every single thing the Church proclaims to be revealed my God, that’s fine.  Either submit anyway or find a new Church.  Because if the Catholic Church is wrong, she’s really wrong–and arrogant, and possibly evil.  Why would you want to be a part of that?

But if you do–if you believe that the Catholic Church is the Church Christ established in Mt 16:18-19, promising that the gates of hell would not prevail against it–you’ve got to accept everything the Church teaches.  Real Presence and contraception and homosexuality and confession and obligatory Mass attendance–all the hard stuff along with the fun stuff.

When it comes to infallibility, you’re either all in or all out.  There is no middle ground.

Stay tuned for an explanation of the all-male priesthood–an argument that was made clear to me only after I accepted it as truth.  Look for it in a few days.

  1. Before you call him a pansy, you should know that he also bench pressed 400 and trained dobermans and rottweilers. []
  2. And so I say to you, you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. []
  3. From G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy: “This, therefore, is, in conclusion, my reason for accepting the religion and not merely the scattered and secular truths out of the religion. I do it because the thing has not merely told this truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing. All other philosophies say the things that plainly seem to be true; only this philosophy has again and again said the thing that does not seem to be true, but is true. Alone of all creeds it is convincing where it is not attractive.” []
  4. The river that runs through Rome–get it? []