Why major orders are male - Part I
by: Dr. Gary D. Knight
Recently I was out for a friendly beer with a gaggle of folks
engaged in lay ministries at our parish, and some of their
friends. Naturally I took along my wife, who appreciates a
fine wheat-beer and is a good conversationalist. A day or
so later the organizer of the outing asked me whether I
had overlooked that the call was for men only?
I was gob-smacked, as it never entered my mind that
Christians actively engaged in public ministries would
consider any cadre of themselves as socially exclusionary.
Especially ironic was that the lubricated exchanges had
turned on the needs of the ‘New Evangelization’ and how
inclusive outreach should be. I did not answer my friend in
a very affirmative fashion, for I could not help seeing his
clubmanship as part of the problem.
I came away realizing that some of the basis of complaint
of persons who feel ‘put in their place’ even in church
norms and practices is real and palpable. I myself, say as
a young man interested in Christian education, would be
affronted if told that only nuns could do that job, as they
largely did in my elementary schools. Even in secular
careers I had known the reverse discrimination of quota-
based hiring policy.
Just days later in a seemingly unrelated incident I was
shown an article by a rather combative young man, whose
arguments as to why the Catholic priestly ministry must be
male struck me as marred by the chauvinist bent of my
former beer buddies. It brought to mind that various good
friends, including nearly every RCIA candidate, has asked
for underlying reasons that the major orders, priesthood
and the diaconate, are male. And I felt here a call to
address this question with inclusive, non-chauvinistic
candour.
Questioners wish to know if the male Ordinary is
disciplinary (and so in principle optionable for change) or
is it theological. The sign that it is theological is the
definitive statement that on a question of change the
Church has no authority to rule. Always she has
disciplinary authority ("whatsoever you bind on earth is
bound in heaven”); so, unless a sainted pope was
theologically wrong, the matter must be theological. This is
the same pope who brought in the discipline of women
servers and eucharistic ministers at the altar of the Lord.
By settling the question John Paul II was guided by the
Spirit of the Church (the Holy Spirit .. easy enough to
demonstrate for a mystical body whose foundation, head
and mind is Christ and whose inheritance is divine) to
avoid speculating or specifying all the reasons in mystery
by which it remains that Orders are male.
Reasons might
be educed afterwards, as Monica moved Augustine to say:
“seek not understanding in order to believe; rather believe
and understanding follows.”
Ready-to- believe catechumens and and others who
express hunger for the truth (presuming as I do those
whose contentions are motivated by inquiry, not by
antagonism) may appreciate the effort. One feels a duty to
shed light on the theological issues that point strongly to
the aptness of Christ's fixed choice to constitute a male
priesthood - from whom derogate the diaconate too). It is
not to prove the matter; but neither are demonstrations of
God proof.
Saint Anselm, claiming to have had an interlocution or
‘light’ from God, noted how apt was a divine nomen “than
Which nothing greater can be conceived”. Even if the fine
aptness was no proof that God fully had explained Himself
thus, it has long since served as a sound ontological
demonstration.
Anselm’s recollection that God expressed Himself
touching what can at most be conceived, comports with
the fact that ours is most characteristically a religion of the
Person: less the book or bell or candle, ritual or rite, than
the Person of Christ or the trinity of Persons that is God.
Therefore a focus of this matter of ordained ministry must
be the essence of personhood, which one philosopher well
said is presence.
To allay unfortunate jumps to wrong conclusions, this
focus does not imply that men will be more essentially
persons than women. But it may mean that one cannot
personally represent essential maleness in Christ’s act of
spiritually begetting children of God by way of proxy
standing-in for Him, whether as male of female. We shall
see.
Regeneration by baptism can of course be effected by any
well intentioned Christian, a member of the royal
priesthood who by inheritance shares in the royalty of
Christ (Kristos means anointed as king). But recognition
and ratification of the fact of a new Christian needs to
come from a person in the order of Melchizedek. That is to
say a ministerial priest who acts in persona Christi at the
essential loci of Christian life: confessed sin and life-giving
nourishment to the soul.
Firstly then, the ordained minister acts in the presence of
God, like the temple priest to whom Jesus required the
healed leper to show himself: an ordinandi who would
ratify and confirm the blessing and mercy from God. A
strange Christianity it would be - a sort of anapresbytery -
to declare ourself a member with no ecclesial record and
affirmation! Sure baptism there must be, for there’s no
such thing as a living breathing Christian without it (those
known to God as baptized in blood or desire are Living,
but not breathing).
For the ecclesial community of the Church, a lack of due
form or evidence that the right things were said and done
is analogous to the problem of Anglican priests not being
able to demonstrate their apostolic succession. The
Catholic answer to these problems has always been
'regularization' - conditional renewal of the prima facie trial
actions of baptism, marriage, or ordination outside of form.
Accordingly the Church under Pope Benedict provided an
Ordinariate for Anglicans who wished to re-establish
apostolic succession including union with the bishop of
Rome. That is form.
Clearly, form and public ecclesial sign-value are deeply
intertwined. Our exposition thus far requires an ordained
human personhood to convey (and not just symbolically)
the voice of the Lord, at least to affirm and confirm what is
taking place upon human actions, supernaturally. This is
more especially the case when the minister’s own liturgical
actions, as in the Mass, are the requisite actions.
The centrality of form now puts the question, whence
comes the essential form of maleness in the ministerial
orders when those orders are requisite? Even the
proponents of female ordination agree the requisite locus
is the Mass, a supernatural re-enactment translated in
time to the selfsame supper of the Lord, as well as His
death and resurrection. The question thus reduces to 'why
is it necessary that the celebrant of Mass be male, even if
we agree the Eucharist is not a symbol but the real, true
and complete presence of Christ - body, soul and divinity?'
How can the 'form' of maleness be critical?
The word form lies central in the creed of Christians and in
our liturgical language, believing that the second Person of
the blessed Trinity took the 'form' of man -- which
decidedly does not mean the apparition of humanity (that
would be docetism), but rather the essence of humanity
expressed in a rather Platonic term as complement to the
Aristotelian substance used also in the creed to avoid
equivocating on the divinity of Christ (which would be
Arian).
The first essential thing, as to any minister acting in
persona Christi, is the form which is His humanity.
Perhaps aptness itself is the appeal.
Humanity is a broad term, and the Saviour of the world -
so far as anyone may conjecture - could have chosen to
be born a girl, or even (speculatively speaking) a couple of
fraternal twins to convey the innate communitarian nature
of the Trinity as described by Saint John-Paul. But the
problem with being incarnate as twins - aside from
confusions felt by Romans imagining an echo of or
rejoinder to Romulus and Remus - is that the love
between them would have to be so perfect as not to lack
personhood. How does one do that in the flesh, except
through singular oneness?
For the Holy Spirit is the perfect love between Father and
Son, lacking none of their infinite perfections, including
Personhood. Pax to eastern friends and confreres in
Christ, who prefer to take or receive the Spirit as
proceeding from the Father through the Son; our creed
prefers to say that what is done through the Son is the
creation of all things, and of course we agree east and
west that the Spirit is no creation.
RCIA candidates like to hear it noted how God created by
willing (as Father) and so speaking (the Word) carried on
His breath (the Spirit). A ‘breath’ might seem
anthropomorphic, but really it is God who is
deopromorphic with man: making him in His image and
likeness.
We are persons for this reason only: that God is
Person.
From the creation account one could equally say the Word
proceeds from the Father and the Spirit, and we glimpse
the inseparability of the Trinity of which the Hebrew
expression is ‘Adonai ehod’.
Speculations aside, it was most apt that God redeem man
as a single unmitigated unconfused and unmixed person,
since as St. Paul explains, sin and death entered by one,
Adam (rather letting Eve off the hook in those semiotics).
So the Redeemer had to take on human form as either
male or female. Why then male? Was this chosen as most
apt for the salvific mystery, or a choice forced by the two-
sex fact of human biology (as opposed to other life forms
and plants that are asexual or mono-sexed)? A similar
question arises in the science of physical cosmology,
about the ‘anthropic principle’: is the universe tuned for life
on purpose, or do we find it so because we are here
present in the cosmos to question it?
On the face of it, without loss of humanity and suffering,
Christ might have opted to arrive as androgynous or
hermaphrodite; so his actual choice of the male person
can be seen to have purpose and import. This He elected
without excluding from the work of salvation anyone - even
these exceptions of hormone balance that prove the norm
- since 'male and female He fashioned them' in his own
likeness.
Feminists generally agree with me when I say ‘to be a
woman is not not to be a man, a human’, and really good
friends will allow me to add “man-up to this”.
All are born
of woman. And moreover, just because 'nothing is
impossible to God’ or that He can always have chosen
other means, is no reason to discount in any way the fact
that He decided on being incarnate a male, just as He
chose that His mother as a primary figure and forebear of
the Church would be a perpetual virgin and a married one
at that.
Before tackling the reason (again, not proof) that, for our
sake, it was apt that Jesus be a man, and afterwards the
importance for sign-value that the minister acting in His
person be male, it is instructive to see the radical parallel
that Jesus presents between the love of Him for his church
as bride, and the sacrament of holy matrimony between
man and woman. St. Paul says it is a mystery of whose
depths he can only glimpse: this from a man who glimpsed
enough of the length and depth, breadth and height of
God's work to know that the Church has a divine
foundation and is the sacrament of salvation in the world.
In the original union of man and woman, what is
remarkable about God's use of the form and material of
Adam to fashion Eve is that this action taken directly by
Him is not subject to any of the natural law we must
always associate with making a physical copy of
something. Always in this world the law of entropy (or
degradation of information, or 'noise') ensures that a copy
of something never has the full unadulterated information
of the original. Not so in the case of Eve fashioned from
Adam.
So perfect was this divine act that it would have been
equally perfect to have formed Eve and from her obtained
Adam. For emphasis of this, she was given the exalted
privilege of all birthing: Eve would be the mother of the
living. Jesus too was a son of Eve (her seed who would
strike the head of the serpent), and so referred himself as
‘Son of Man’. On the cross He identified his mother as the
new Eve, saying ‘Woman, behold your son’.
If Adam is
saved with Eve, like John he is saved with the Mother !
Have I just now undermined a reason for the ordinandi of
Christ to be male? If in all essentials pertaining to the
image and likeness of God the man and the woman are
interchangeable and equal in dignity, how is there
something ‘male’ in essence about a priesthood — or for
that matter ‘female’ in essence about motherhood? One
answer, deferred below, is that the proper image is of their
togetherness.
But in heaven neither presbyterial priesthood nor
biological motherhood will be anymore in play .. all are
married to Christ (and that does not make me, straight up
a male, squirm at all). The end of our ‘priesthood’ is that
Christ is ‘all in all’; the end of marriage is that Joy is
consummated in Him; and the nature of motherhood is
fulfilled when (as St. Augustine put it), by Christian
generation God populates heaven. That is not as
triumphalist as it sounds: it means that anyone who gets to
heaven by pursuing the Truth (perhaps only in death) will
in that fact have entered the Church. In heaven it is simply
the family or assembly of the saved.
In the ministerial priesthood on earth, the male most aptly
depicts the fatherhood sign-value, which is morally even
more than physically a procreative prerogative, or a power
to name the new. Without the man’s continued will if not
initiative, nothing happens on the generational front.
Naming too, has always been key; as the Father declared
to Jesus “You are my beloved Son, in Whom I am well
pleased”.
On the other hand, the very Church whose minister the
priest is, and on whose behalf he approaches the altar of
the Lord, is mother.
Without holy mother Church, whose
model is Mary and the Holy Family, none of its cells or
families constitutes anything of spiritual or lasting
substance. Religion means, at least ‘lego’ - bound up
together. The female genes of an embryo give him bonded
substance, those of the male give it form, and one is
meaningless without the other.
It is true that “God plus one is always a majority”, as the
saying goes, and true that as long as there’s one believing
family the Church is not all in heaven. But even that family
would hope to beget sons and daughters in the faith,
either by the spiritual adoption of others, or by their
procreation. That is why Augustine refers to any Christian
husband as a bishop, and his wife and family the domus,
or domestic church. It may irk feminism that in the context
of the domus a mother isn’t necessarily bishop (though
indeed she is, if she is widowed, or if she is the one
Christian adult). But to appease them, the procreative
prerogative of a man stands as partner, not arbitrator, in
the woman’s most apt role as mater.
At the last supper, the pesach or seder meal of Passover,
Jesus could well have changed lamb meat to His body for
life-giving spiritual sustenance of his domus, the nascent
Church. He himself was the Lamb par excellence, for
whose sake the angelic instructions were first made to the
Hebrews to sacrifice a lamb (or for which reason Abraham
who was to sacrifice Isaac was given to substitute a ram).
But instead and thus with new purpose Jesus used bread
and wine: the samen of wheat, the seed of the vine.
Bread, or the staff of life as it’s called, was already part of
the inspired place-name of Jesus’ birth, where he was lain
in a manger - the feeding trough ultimately for all the
nations. In life He had spoken of his words as the real
bread from heaven, and silenced the tempter - who sought
to focus on bodily hunger - by proclaiming the sustaining
Word, of which He was (and is) the incarnation. And not
for nothing was His first recorded parable that of the seed
and the sower.
In a recent scriptural reading God speaks of his word as
that which goes forth with His regenerative and even
procreative purpose (bringing forth grain where there was
none) and returns to Him in abundance. That word is of
course the Beloved, who is the husband and redeemer of
all creation; and the return is the bride and Church he
brings back from the ‘death’ of germination. No seed bears
a stalk and ear without first dying - dying to self in fact, to
be multiplied.
Not in vain is all of this language parallel to the marriage
act. Already the God-willed fructification or fecund
generation of heirs to His kingdom is taking place in the
giving of Himself, body and blood, at first signified and
then embodied or disseminated under the appearance of
cultured wheat and fermented grape.
It is this fatherly
love-act that takes root supernaturally in His apostles, and
later their followers (men or women), and which now sets
them in gestation until the Church’s birthday at Pentecost,
assisted spiritually by His own mother, Mary.
Accordingly, when Jesus tells his apostles (even the
betrayer) “do this in my memory”, He is initiating the
temporal perpetuation - for his memory is without limit - of
the one sacrifice that will beget all saved souls. If I
paraphrase Him, “As I am lifted up, I do draw all souls unto
me”.
The foregoing is to note with as little doubt as possible that
the marital union between Christ and His mystical body
the Church, holy mother Church, is present in the mystery
power of the Mass to populate heaven till the fulfilment of
time. It is an essentially fatherly and husbandly act to set
this dissemination and fructification in motion; while indeed
it is thereupon a maternal act to cooperate as the very
willing, indeed eager, participants in the whole body.
The procreative prerogative is Christ’s, and the merciful
grace of growth is received by the Church and nurtured in
her and by her every means. She is the “fullness of help to
salvation in the world” not least because nowhere else can
a soul receive the body, blood, soul and divinity of its Lord
and saviour. To paraphrase again in relation to marriage,
“if you shun my body and blood, you have no real Life in
you”.
Again, this is not to rebut Christian assemblies who
believe the inspired Word that ‘when two or more are
gathered in My name, I am there with them’. He also was
with John the Baptist alone in his cell, especially when he
was visited by one of the disciples. But that degree of
presence was not the same intimate fleshly presence as
Jesus demonstrated when breaking bread with the
disciples in Emmaus.
The real Life that an assembly is
missing, perhaps in ignorance, is I presume not something
that any of them willingly shun. As Jesus put it to the
Samaritan woman at the well “if you knew Who it was who
asks .. you would ask of Him living water”.
This figure of speaking is much more than ‘symbol’ — in
all its essentials it is sacrament. The great parallel
between the sacrament of marriage and the sacrament of
the Eucharist can hardly be fathomed out. Referring back
to the original unity of man and woman, Jesus spoke of
the two become one even in flesh. They might already
have been one in affections (“friend” or “helpmate” could
be said by either), but still more were one body (“flesh of
my flesh”). Adam wakes at a start, hearing ‘yo, man !’ and
seeing her says ‘whoa .. man !’
So when the hierarchically related creation stories refer to
the fashioning of Eve after Adam - “after” in the sense of
“following the same blueprint” - and to their being “male
and female” in God’s image and likeness, there is no
tension at all. The likeness of God is love-unity in
communitarian nature, and that is what He impresses on
the society of man, male and female generally, and on the
united flesh of husband and wife intimately and personally.
Part II http://jceworld.blogspot.ca/2018/01/why-major-orders-are-male-reasoning-for_16.html