Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!uupsi!njin!paul.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: jhpb@garage.att.com (Joseph H Buehler) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: ambitious women may approach the altar now ... Message-ID: Date: 17 May 91 06:51:55 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 63 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article oracle@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Brian T. Coughlin) writes: >- The Catholic hierarchy is all male, by Divine will. Women cannot be >validly ordained, and cannot exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The second sentence is true, up to a point, while the first is untrue. Women cannot be validly ordained, that's true... AT PRESENT. It is not Catholic moral teaching that inhibits women from being ordained, but rather it is procedural doctrine of the Church as institution; that is, the prohibition against female clergy is a procedural tradition that is NOT infallible moral teaching, and is capable of being reversed by the Pope at a moment's notice. I beg to differ. I think it *is* Catholic doctrine that prevents women from being validly ordained. It is true that there is no exercise of the extraordinary infallible magisterium on the subject of women's ordination. This does not mean that the Pope can reverse the present custom at a moment's notice, however. There is also ordinary infallibility to be considered. It is a fact that women have *never* been allowed to be ordained in the Roman Catholic Church. This is of moment in Catholic theology. Whether it can be changed depends on why the traditional practice is what it is. I frankly do not think there are any Catholics present who are competent to defend the idea that women should be ordained. To deal adequately with the issue requires training far above and beyond anything that a layman is likely to possess, at the very least. A precise understanding of the traditional theology on the subject would be required. This would involve a doctoral level study of the history of the theological sources. Why did the predecessors of the current hierarchy not ordain women through so many centuries? The reasons have to be completely understood. If the reason(s) are such that they are unaffected by time (as I believe they are), then women cannot be ordained in the 20th C any more than they could be in the 19th. I think that the present agitation for women's ordination springs from a number of motives. One of them is a profound confusion over the different roles intended by God for men and women. >- God became Incarnate as a man. True. But, not meaning to be disrespectful, *so what?* I can easily see that God, wishing His Messiah to be taken SERIOUSLY by the socially immature, male-dominated society, would decline to incarnate the Messiah as woman. But this serves as no basis whatsoever for asserting that men are somehow "more intrinsically holy" than women. Had the society of yesteryear been more understanding of the intrinsic worth of ALL humans, gender notwithstanding, God might well have become incarnate as woman. Point to ponder. Holiness doesn't have anything to do with the issue at hand. The Mother of God is admitted by all Catholics to be the most holy of all creatures, beyond even the angels. Yet she could never be a priest. This is a question of office, not holiness. The question is more one of the male psyche vs. the female, and the Divine will for order in human society. There is a *reason* that God the Father is God the *Father*. It isn't simply that society is male-dominated: that would be to make the proper names for the persons of the Trinity depend on the whims of men, certainly not something I think appropriate to Catholic theology.