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Rome says that women cannot be ordained priests because the priest acts
‘in the person of Christ’. Christ, who was a male, can only be
adequately represented by a male priest. Read the full argument in
Inter Insigniores, § 24-28.
The argumentation is wrong for the following reasons
- The argument as presented by Thomas Aquinas and his followers is
seriously flawed and cannot be accepted as valid today.
A woman too can act in persona Christi
because women and men are equal in Christ.
- Being the ‘image of Christ’ both in Scripture and Tradition
does not refer to resemblance to Christ’s maleness, but to Christ’s
personhood as Child of God.
Women too bear Christ's
image as adopted children of God.
- Christ has feminine traits as well as masculine traits.
A woman represents Christ better in his feminine
traits and the feminine symbolism of his life giving mission.
- In baptism and marriage women fully represent Christ.
As
ministers of these sacraments women already act as
‘other Christs’.
- The essence of Christ’s priesthood demands
‘signifying’ his love, not his male gender.
A woman, as much as
any man, can represent Christ’s love, which is
the essence of his priesthood.
Note. The reasons are presented here without
any implied priority in their sequence and admitting of some overlap.
It should be noted also that Rome's ‘iconic’ argument is not
‘traditional’. We do not find it until the Middle Ages.
“As for the argument of a male priest needing to represent Christ,
it may be noted that the NT does not seem to have any theological interest
whatever in the maleness of Christ. I have found only three texts in which the
word aner is used of Christ (Lk 24:19; Jn 1:30; Acts 2:22), and none of
them exploits Christ’s “maleness.” It is interesting that in Rom
5, where Christ is presented as the “one man” through whose obedience
the disobedience of the “one man,” Adam, was undone, the word for
both figures is anthropos, not aner. The point, obviously, is not
to question Christ’s maleness nor to suggest that one’s relationship
to him is not affected by it, but simply to show that theological emphasis on
the maleness of Christ’s humanity is foreign to the NT.”
Joseph A. Komonchak, ‘Theological Questions on the Ordination of
Women’, in Women and the Catholic Priesthood, pp. 241-259; here p.
250.
“The argument based on the need of male representation is virtually
unprecedented in Tradition. It does not in fact state any of the traditional
grounds on which ordination to presbyterate or episcopate has been denied to
women. To accept the argument and its practical consequence, therefore, is not
to maintain tradition, but to alter it by altering its meaning. It is to accord
a quite new sense to the Church’s long-standing refusal to ordain women.
This is not only, or even principally, because the idea that a presbyter or
bishop somehow ‘images’ Jesus in a special way is one which arrived
rather late on the scene in Christian history. What is genuinely novel in it is
the idea that Jesus’ maleness is at least one of the crucial things about
him which ecclesial priesthoods must image. This novelty, furthermore, does not
fall into the category of minor and peripheral products of pious musing. It
touches ultimately upon questions having to do with Christology and with the
economy of salvation; and for that reason it demands the most careful and
sceptical scrutiny.”
“. . . Thus [after studying the sources] we may say quite firmly in
summary that the maleness of Jesus is of no christological interest in
patristic tradition. Furthermore, it is possible to detect in the development
of patristic ideas on the subject a logic which suggests why it never occurred
to the Fathers to make any more play with Jesus’sex than they did with his
race. What the Fathers learned to understand by ‘incarnation’ was
the likeness of the Word of God in his humanity to all those who are
included within the scope of his redemption. It is this likeness, expressed
in the word anthropos, which for them explains the logic of the
Word’s becoming flesh. ‘For he became human that we might become
divine,’ said one of them (Athanasius, De Incarnatione § 54).
And presumably this ‘we’ (and therefore this humanity) includes
women. To make of the maleness of Christ a christological principle is
to qualify or deny the universality of his redemption.”
“
. . . . In the light of these considerations, it must be said that as from a
strictly christological, so from a theological, perspective the fact of
Jesus’ maleness is not, for the classical tradition, a constitutive factor
in the meaning of ‘God-with-us’. It is definitive neither of what is
meant by ‘us’ in that expression, nor of what is meant by
‘God’. So we are left roughly where we were at the end of the last
section. Maleness is not constitutive of Jesus as the Christ. On the contrary,
Christology envisages him as the representative human being - a category
which presumably includes female human beings. The question then arises: Why
would maleness be significant among the conditions which qualify a person to
‘represent’ the Christ in the ministry of Word and Sacrament?”
R.A.Norris, ‘The Ordination of Women and the Maleness of
the Christ’, in Feminine in the Church, ed. by Monica Furlong,
SPCK, London 1984, pp. 71-85; here p. 73, 78, 80.
John Wijngaards
Follow @JohnWijngaards
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