In
discussing whether women should be ordained to the priesthood or not it will be
well, for the sake of clarity, to make some preliminary points.
First
of all, it must be recognised that two quite distinct questions are involved,
though once their common existence and their mutual distinctness have been
accepted it will for the most part be possible to discuss them together. The
former is whether it is Possible for women to be priests, the latter is
whether it is right and desirable for them to be priests; and unless the
former is answered in the affirmative the second cannot arise. This is
important, because it is frequently assumed without argument that a woman upon
whom the traditional rites of ordination to the priesthood have been performed
by a bishop will undoubtedly have become a priest, so that the only questions
remaining to be discussed are ethical ones (Is it not unjust to withhold the
priesthood from women?) and pastoral ones (Will not women perform the
traditional duties and functions of the priesthood just as efficiently as
men?).
Secondly-and this is closely connected with the first point-it must be stressed
that what we are concerned with is the Catholic priesthood, as that has come
down to us in the great episcopal communions of East and West, and not with the
various forms of ministry that exist in the Protestant churches and
communities. In saying this, one is not adopting an attitude of contempt or
unfriendliness to our separated brethren but simply recognising the fact that
the Catholic conception of the ministry is different from the Protestant
conception, even if the Catholic conception includes the Protestant conception
as an element in itself, and even if-as is undoubtedly the case-the Catholic
conception is itself undergoing today a great deal of re-examination and
development. We shall see later on that on one understanding of the nature of
the ministry in Protestantism the ordination of women is no less abhorrent than
it is in traditional Catholicism and Orthodoxy. It is indeed doubtful whether
there is one basic doctrine of the ministry held throughout Protestantism, of
which the views of the different denominations are merely variants. When, for
example, the late Paul Tillich wrote: “There are in Protestantism only
laymen; the minister is a layman with a special function within the
congregation .... He is a nonlayman solely by virtue of his training” ,(1)
he was not merely contradicting himself verbally by saying first that a
minister is a layman and then that he is not; he was expressing a view of the
ministry quite contrary to that of many Protestants, who would hold that what
makes a minister is neither his training nor his choice by a congregation but
his call by God. The point remains that, on Tillich’s view and no doubt on
some other Protestant views as well, there is nothing impossible in a woman
becoming a minister, for she is just as capable of undergoing a course of
training as a man. I must add that I do not despair, as ecumenical dialogue
proceeds, of Catholics and Protestants coming to a common understanding of the
Church’s ministry. What I do maintain is that they have not come to it
yet, and that discussions about the ordination of women, as of other matters
connected with the ministry, frequently reach a condition of frustration
through lack of agreement about what the ministry is and sometimes through the
lack of any clear conception about the ministry at all
This
point can be illustrated by the decision of the established Church of Scotland
to open its ministry in principle to women. This was announced by the
newspapers, no doubt in accordance with the tenor of the preceding debates in
the National Assembly, under such headlines as “Pulpits now open to
Women” and “Women now allowed to preach”. Now I do not deny the
importance of preaching as a function of the ordained minister nor do I suggest
that Presbyterian ministers never celebrate the sacraments, but it will, I
think, be clear that the nature of the debate and the grounds of decision are
likely to be very different in a church in which sermons are preached every
Sunday but the Lord’s Supper is usually celebrated only once a quarter
from what they will be in a church in which the Holy Eucharist is celebrated
weekly or even daily. In the former case the primary question will be
“Should women be commissioned to preach the word of God?”, in the
latter it will be “Should (or can) women be ordained to celebrate the
Eucharist?”, and it will be well to bear this difference in mind when
consulting such statistics as those given in a recent number of Concilium
(2) about the practice of various churches in the matter, since it is
logically possible to give an affirmative answer to the former question
and a negative one to the latter.
It is
furthermore important not to misunderstand the suggestions, (in some cases even
the demands) emanating from certain Roman Catholic circles for the ordination
of women to the priesthood. Some of these rest upon no theological basis at all
and are merely typical of a temperamental desire to destroy all the inherited
structures of the Church and to assimilate the Catholic religion to the trends
and outlooks of the contemporary secularised world. Some of them, however,
manifest a praiseworthy wish to give the Church’s life a wider and firmer
foundation than that of postTridentine scholasticism. It is important to
remember that it is a common practice in the Roman Catholic Church to question
the truth of a statement or the legitimacy of a practice in order to elicit the
fundamental reasons for the truth or the real grounds of the practice; thus, to
give a famous example, St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologise raised
without qualms the question whether God exists. In a communion in which nothing
is likely to be upset overnight there is a lot to be said for this method; it
is well exemplified by the resolution which was submitted by Cardinal Flahiff
to the Synod of Bishops in Rome in October, 1971, on behalf of the bishops of
Canada, urging the immediate establishment of a mixed commission to study in
depth the question of the ministries [sic] of women in the Church.(3) While it
was understood that this did not exclude the question of the priesthood (and
indeed no comprehensive study could), it was emphasised that there was no
desire to prejudge the question or to make recommendations as to time or mode
of further action. There is thus no justification for Anglicans to urge such
Roman stirrings as providing an example for precipitate imitation, or for
saying “Rome is going to ordain women, so let us get in first”. This
is not, however, the first case in which the tentative reopening of a question
by Roman Catholic bishops or theologians has been taken by over-enthusiastic
Anglicans as an invitation to jettison traditional positions of doctrine or
practice.
