Why women cannot be Catholic priests: three reasons, and Adam's choice

Amici,

Why can't women be ordained to the Catholic priesthood? Bishop Joseph Strickland recently sent a pastoral letter to his flock explaining why women cannot be ordained deacons. In 1994, Pope John Paul II wrote in Ordinatio sacerdotalis that women can't be ordained priests, saying the Church had no authority to do so: "The Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women".

Here in this essay I'll give three reasons women cannot be ordained to the priesthood – or ordained deacons for that matter, and certainly not bishops. May it be of use to those interested.

Preliminary: These reasons are rooted in Biblical Revelation and Church Tradition. Essential Point: As Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre wrote so succinctly, "Tradition is the Deposit of Faith." Christians should accept the Deposit of Faith because God reveals it and the Church has affirmed and defended it for two millennia, at least until Vatican II began to wreck it, and subsequently, in small pieces, cast it into the gutter. (After 70 years of that, the Church seems to teeter on the edge of oblivion.) A Modernist like Bergoglio, therefore, i.e. someone who thinks "God evolves" as we "evolve" à la Darwinism, and that morality evolves, that dogma evolves, that everything evolves, really, will not find these reasons to be sufficient in themselves. They won't even understand them. They have to believe "we've evolved past all that!" to think according to the Modernist paradigm, which molds their rationality in strict confines. This is true of Modernist Church leaders in Protestantism as well as Catholicism.

• So, if you don't think that "Jesus Christ, yesterday, and to day; and the same for ever," (Hebrews 13:8; see also 2 Peter 3:8), then forget about it. You're in the position of a modern scholar of Western Philosophy (from Descartes to Hegel and Darwin), or one steeped in Symbolic Logic, trying to understand St. Thomas Aquinas.

First reason: God wants it that way. John Paul II, so widely and snidely ignored today by the Bergoglian Anti-Church, sort of touched on this in 1994. The Lord God, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, God of Moses and King David, God the Father of the Christian Trinity, was always served by a male priesthood, and what's more, a celibate male priesthood. Abel, Adam and Eve's son, served God as a priest whose blood offering was accepted. Melchizedek is the archetype, the precursor of Christ's eternal priesthood, a mysterious figure and a mystery in himself, yet "priest of the Most High." The ancient Levitical priesthood God established from Moses's brother Aaron, and when individual Levites on duty in the Temple (they served on a rotational schedule), they had to be celibate during their service. Although in Early Christianity some bishops and presbyters were married, like the Orthodox today, they didn't marry after ordination. (In Orthodoxy today, a bishop must have never married.) But eventually this sorted itself out in the Western Church with compulsory celibacy for all priests. Practice varied, but from early on it was understood how superior it was was to have a fully celibate priesthood (something it took the Irish a bit longer to figure out than most of the others!).

But of course, women were never ordained, at any time. Why not? Because of the ...

Second reason why women aren't ordained: The actual role of the priesthood and the human nature of men and women.

God created us to serve one another, and through that service, learn to serve Him. We exist to serve, not to amuse ourselves, giving our wills free reign. But common experience and the study of Anthropology show that men "serve" less well, are less inclined to it, than are women.

• It's in the nature of women to serve, but men don't do it naturally; i.e., women are designed (whether you are a religious believer or a Darwinist) to bear children, offspring who take years of care to flourish. 
• It's a manifestly false narrative to say men can be as nurturing of babies and young children as mothers. 
• It's one of the conceits of the Modern Age, indeed, one of its petulant rebellions against nature that defines this expiring age. And it produces effeminate men and dissatisfied women. That reality is all around us.
  

Note also that men have traditionally complained of talkative women, but to the extent women are so, God has provided this faculty to them in order to raise children who can speak. Linguists have long realized that it is the mothers of the human race who form language and pass it on. One of the medieval Holy Roman Emperors, following the true Scientific Method (developed in the so-called "Middle Ages") collected some newborns and commanded their nurses not to speak to them; this great advocate of the Scientific Method wanted to hear what language they would speak on their own. The experiment only proved that such children died.

• Somewhere in his Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis had Screwtape observe that the most saintly man who cares for others couldn't match the care level an average woman offers on a daily basis. 
• This is just anthropology. Theologically, men need to be given extra grace to do what women do naturally: serve others. 
• And serving others is what deacons, priests, and bishops do. They are servants of the Deposit of Faith, Tradition, to help us all toward salvation.
  
• This is obviously opposite of the idea of priests and bishops as lords of "power relationships" over the laity. Hence, Our Lord and King said, "Feed my sheep" and not "experiment on them, still less, "enslave them."

However...

• If one is some sort of "feminist" who looks at human relations as nothing more than anthropological power plays, a who gets to boss whom game of who rules, who is ruled, and so on, then we live in what they call a "patriarchal culture" that they loathe and want to destroy, thus confusing men as to "what women want" men to be and do, and maddening women who simply cannot find a "real man".
  
• This is the root of the current "War on Masculinity" in the mainstream culture.
  
• But you can't go against God's order, His hierarchy of being and roles. (Satan tried it; it didn't turn out well.) There's an old joke: one feminist asks another, "Where are all the kind, sensitive, caring men?" The other feminist answers, "They all have boyfriends."

A priest is servant of his flock via serving the Gospel and the over-all Tradition, i.e. the Deposit of Faith. A bishop is servant of the servants, his priests. This is why bishops wash their priests' feet at Easter, imitating Our Lord and Sovereign Christ, who washed His disciples feet in order to drive the whole service point home to them, and to us. Idiotic, and I mean truly stupid cretins like Bregoglio and his imps and hobgoblins, wash the feet of strangers, non-Catholics, etc., in a puffed-up, meretricious and wholly narcissistic and unctuous sanctimoniousness that is sickening to behold. In this, and in so many other ways, they reject Tradition.

Women, many "modernistic" ones, want to be priests because they think it is a power position over others. They want in on that action, in on the "club". Yet it is a service job where the servants can expect to be killed, as Christ was, and as so many others have been. Being a clergyman is like being a soldier ordered to protect a group of civilians – at all costs. Including dying for them.

Which brings up the ...

Third reason: Adam's failure.

• This reason dovetails into the Second Reason, itself manifesting the will of God.
  

When asked why women cannot be ordained priests, the answer usually given is that a priest represents Christ at the altar, and thus must be a man. He "stands in" for Christ on earth, in persona Christi, and thereby "channeling" or representing or serving as the living intermediary of Christ's eternal and ongoing propitiatory and expiatory blood sacrifice (see Revelation 5&6, etc.; Revelation is largely a description of the Heavenly Liturgy). They used to say, "At the Holy Mass, the veil between earth and heaven is drawn back." We see the eternal reality of Christ's incarnation and sacrifice and resurrection.

For the feminist, who sees everything the mundane, profane viewer as a cruel power play, this does not suffice. So far, as basically stated. But here's the kicker: 

• Christian worship does not consist merely adoration, thanksgiving, and petition. 
• Christian worship is not Protestant, to put it simply. 
• Christian worship is a true propitiation, meaning a direct involvement in Christ's propitiation to the Father for the sins of the human race that Christ offered up at Calvary. 
• Protestants, hearing Catholics try to explain this Mysterium Fidei, accused Catholics of sacrificing Christ a second time, not understanding that heaven and now Our Lord Christ is outside of time entirely, and that He is still incarnated into our "space-time continuum" via the Holy Eucharist. 
• He is present physically now, and always. The world is changed essentially; nature is changed, forever – transformed by the Divine Presence. Trying to explain the Most Holy Eucharist and the Divine Presence, Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine only served for Protestants to accuse us of idolatry, i.e., that we "worship a piece of bread and a drop of wine".

The Catholic understanding is true, however; it's the Deposit of Faith. It's Tradition. It's the ancient, consistent belief of the Apostolic, Seven-Sacrament Churches. And there's a deep level to it. The reason only men can be priests goes all the way back to Adam. Adam was made to cultivate and defend the Garden of Eden. "And the Lord God took man, and put him into the paradise of pleasure, to dress it, and to keep it." (Genesis 2:15) "Keeping it" meant defending it. From what?

From the Dragon that confronted Eve. The Hebrew word usually translated as "serpent" or "snake" can also mean "dragon", and if translated this way, then the Bible opens and closes with a dragon. The same Dragon, in fact. So, Eve had to face the dragon alone. Adam was nowhere to be found. The text does not mention him as being there. We can be sure Adam wasn't tending the tobacco patch in the "back forty". We can surmise, indeed, deduce, that he was in hiding. Therefore, when God incarnated into the human race He did so as a man in order to be the New Adam, as the Blessed Mother was to be the New Eve, and to make up for Adam's cowardice. Our Lord and Sovereign redeemed Adam's failure and the Fall of Adam and Eve by His Final Perseverance on a Tree, reversing our first parents' sin at a Tree.

And so, to bring that eternal sacrifice ever present into the world we live in, Christ's "stand in" must be a man.

Adam's choice

I've not seen this following idea anywhere. It's pure speculation on my part. But I think Adam knew with certainty that the Dragon was hunting him to kill him. God assigned Adam to be sergeant of his two-person squad, and defend Fort Eden, "at all hazard". The Devil wasn't coming for the corporal. He wanted to sink his teeth into the leader, Adam. Adam had named the animals and was lord of the physical creation, as the Devil had been of the angels. No wonder Satan was not happy with Adam. He came gunning for his "rival". So, Adam "did a bunk", he split. Ran for it. High-tailed it to the hills. And perhaps it was the shame of this cowardly behavior that then caused Adam to later eat the forbidden fruit. He might as well be hanged for a pound as hanged for a penny.

• And this in turn would explain why the Incarnation of Our Lord was not enough. 
• His Death was required, the blood sacrifice Adam failed to provide.

True or not, it makes sense of what information we're told, and what we're not told but left to speculate on.

Summation

These arguments clearly do not lend themselves to 30-second soundbites. They're not easily boiled down. Their answers involve knowing a number of things that bear on them that it would take a book to delineate. For example, have you ever wondered why God didn't just snuff Adam and Eve after they fell? The answer is He had made a Covenant with them and with all His creation on the Seventh Day. See Genesis chapter 2, the first two verses. Then verse four is a signature line on a cuneiform clay tablet. "These are the generations of the heaven and the earth, when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the heaven and the earth." God Himself, apparently, signed this tablet. (Curiously enough, Genesis 1 and first four verses of Chapter 2 would fit on a cuneiform tablet!) And because of this First Covenant, God was "on the hook" to fix the mess Adam and Eve had made.

See how complicated it can be?

I pray this helps those who wonder themselves, or have loved ones or friends who raise this ordination question.

 An Préachán