Two questions I have answered via e-mail recently, that seem worthy of answering here:
Tithe to the parish? I was not clear in my tithing homily last week about how to think about support for the parish. Ultimately, what matters is how much money you give away. But when you think about how much of that money to give to the parish, I use a rule of thirds: 1/3 to the parish, 1/3 to the Archdiocese, and 1/3 to other causes. The reason I put the Archdiocese in there is because the Annual Catholic Appeal is, functionally, just an extension of our parish budget, since we have to pay the difference if we do not make our goal. So I am functionally giving 2/3 to the parish, but I also understand I have a bias since I am so deeply invested in parish ministry. I could see an argument for a 50/50 split between parish and other causes.
Women in the Priesthood
The question of ordaining women to the priesthood has been coming up in a few places recently, so I might as well address it.
For your own reading, the fundamental document declaring this a closed question, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, was published by Pope St. John Paul II in 1994. It is a very quick read, maybe 5 minutes. Then the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith confirmed it as a teaching that must be held by all the faithful and published a commentary on the teaching itself.
The reasoning depends on the following contentions:
- All sacraments are instituted by Christ through the Apostles.
- The priesthood is constituted by the Sacrament of Holy Orders.
- Christ instituted the Sacrament of Holy Orders at the Last Supper alongside the Eucharist, and he intentionally invited only his Apostles to this Last Supper because it was his intention that his Apostles should be his priests.
- Christ was intentional in only choosing men to be his Apostles.
In order to admit women to the priesthood, the Church would have to deny one of the above contentions.
- If Christ did not institute the sacraments, then they are merely human rituals not divine acts. Human rituals can certainly be meaningful, but as profound as our experience of them might be, they remain human. For sacraments to have divine power, they must have been given to us by God.
- Denying that the priesthood is a sacrament is to make the priesthood into a merely human expression, which is the position shared by every Protestant church except certain Anglicans. It becomes a church office similar to a governor: the office holder possesses real power, but that power only exists because it is given by human authority, either the King or a voting bloc. For a priest to act with divine power – and divine power is necessary for us to believe that the Eucharist is truly Jesus or that sins are truly forgiven – that power must be given by God through a sacrament.
- No one who accepts that Holy Orders is a sacrament denies that it was given by Christ at the Last Supper. But those who deny that the Last Supper was sacramental, i.e. that the Lord did not intended to provide the Sacrament of the Eucharist through his final meal, will always deny Holy Orders along with it.
- Denying that Jesus intentionally chose men to be his Apostles and therefore his priests is the most common denial you will hear in the Church today. Usually it takes the form of saying that Jesus was born into a patriarchal society and was, therefore, limited by the social conventions of his time. There are three problems with this line of thinking:
- Jesus broke a lot of other religious conventions of the time, so why would he not break this one? The pagans had female priests, so it would not even have been much of a stretch.
- Jesus and the Apostles all had profound love and veneration for Mary, the Mother of God. If priesthood were some form of reward for or recognition of holiness, the Virgin Mary should be the first in line for the priesthood, and yet Jesus does not confer it on her.
- The only information we have about Jesus is what is contained in the Scriptures. If we say that Jesus had some hidden opinion or belief about women that he failed to mention or implement, then we open the door to Jesus having every possible opinion. What other secret opinions might Jesus have had? We replace the actual statements and actions of Jesus with what we want him to have done or said.
When I present these arguments to parishioners or school kids, I try to add two final notes. First, as Pope St. John Paul II made clear in his documents, the Church believes in the absolute equality of men and women – equally created in dignity and equally loved by God. But equality does not mean being identical. The differences between men and women are also important, because without their complimentary differences, humanity would be incomplete. It is not unequal for men and women to be different, including playing different roles in society and in the Church.
Second, the Church has never dogmatically said why we think Jesus decided only men should be priests. However, our best argument isthat the priest has the unique role of making Christ incarnationally present. At the Mass, for example, the priest does not say “Jesus took bread and said that it was his body”, he says “This is my body.” The priest stands in the place of Jesus and, for a brief moment, actually is Jesus saying those words. There are many human differences which we do not believe touch on identity: height, weight, skin color, etc. These could easily be changed* without changing who a person is. But the differences between men and women are so profound that we think they do touch on identity. Which is to say, a man cannot become a woman* without changing who he fundamentally is, therefore Jesus – who is a man – cannot become sacramentally incarnate in a woman without changing who he fundamentally is. In other words, because Jesus took flesh as a man, certain sacraments require the priest also to be a man so that he can stand “in the place of Christ” sacramentally.
[*Obviously, the ability to change our DNA to this extent remains theoretically. But the theological grounding for placing sex in a separate category, even in theory, is found in the Genesis creation accounts, which only emphasize the creation of humanity as male and female, and do not call out any other differentiating characteristics.]
Note again that none of these are statements of dignity or worth, nor are they statements about whose opinions should matter. The Church is just trying her best to remain obedient to the Lord and his explicit intentions in the Scriptures. I am certainly open to the idea that, apart from changing the sacraments, the Church could do better by women in a multitude of ways.
Fr. Moore 