Equal, but not Interchangeable

[John655]

A friend of mine was raised main-line Protestant, but converted to Buddism. He is outraged that women cannot be priests in the Catholic Church.

I said that pastors and Catholic priests are not the same thing - that a pastor gives a sermon and works to unite the congregation in fellowship, but that a priest’s main job is to offer a sacrifice. I talked w/ him about “persona Christi” - that the priest stands as Christ at the altar, offering Jesus’ sacrifice at the Cross to God the Father. When I said that it is our belief that only a man can represent Christ at the altar, he became furious, and swore (this guy is typically very “zen” and laid back).

As I was thinking about a good way to explain this another way, the Lord laid something on my heart. I showed my friend two 25 watt light bulbs. One of the light bulbs was meant for a ceiling fan, so the end that is screwed into the appliance was large. The other bulb had a much smaller end.

Both light bulbs are equal - they provide equal light - they are of equal worth, but they are not interchangeable. In a similar way, men and women have equal worth in the eyes of God, but they are not interchangeable. A woman cannot fertilize an egg - a man cannot give birth to a child. One of the challenges in our society is that because we value the equality of men and women, we think that they must be interchangeable.

I thought this was a good explanation - he said it worked better w/ lightbulbs than people. Any thoughts?

 

[MyMotherMary]

I really like the way you used the lightbulbs to illustrate your point! Well done. How did your friend react? I am curious about something, why was he outraged at all? I mean, he is now a Buddist, so why does the issue of women in the priesthood matter to him at all? Just curious.

Have a Blessed Day!

 

[puzzleannie]

A friend of mine was raised main-line Protestant, but converted to Buddism. He is outraged that women cannot be priests in the Catholic Church.
?

why does he have an opinion at all about the practice of any Christian denomination and particularly the institution of the Christian priesthood since he has rejected Christ utterly and finally? It is hard to see that he could be swayed by any arguement based on Christ’s work and teaching, which he rejects. I have no opinion whatever on Buddhist practice inside their own religion, why should I as long is it does not impact my freedom of religion. Why does he feel the need and right to express outrage about our teachings?

 

[EricFilmer]

As I was thinking about a good way to explain this another way, the Lord laid something on my heart. I showed my friend two 25 watt light bulbs. One of the light bulbs was meant for a ceiling fan, so the end that is screwed into the appliance was large. The other bulb had a much smaller end.

Both light bulbs are equal - they provide equal light - they are of equal worth, but they are not interchangeable. In a similar way, men and women have equal worth in the eyes of God, but they are not interchangeable. A woman cannot fertilize an egg - a man cannot give birth to a child. One of the challenges in our society is that because we value the equality of men and women, we think that they must be interchangeable.

I thought this was a good explanation - he said it worked better w/ lightbulbs than people. Any thoughts?

I think your lightbulb example is a good analogy, so to that I say, “Good job!”

Exactly why does your friend have such a strong reaction against the Church’s position against the ordination of women? Does he feel that this is an affront to the dignity of women? If that is the case, you may want to go over the Church’s official statements on the dignity and vocation of women. For example, here is the link for Pope John Paul II’s apostolic letter which delves into this very topic:

vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_15081988_mulieris-dignitatem_en.html

Likewise, here is the letter concerning the Church’s explanation of reserving the sacrament of ordination for men alone. Judging by you initial post, it seems that you are already familiar with this material, so I am simply posting this link for the sake of the general discussion at hand:

vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_22051994_ordinatio-sacerdotalis_en.html

 

[Lutheranteach]

Because at the core Catholic hierarchy is terrified of women.

 

[invocation]

No two people are interchangeable to start with, so I am not sure how one defends the Church’s position by saying men and women are not interchangeable. It implies that all women, or all men, are indifferently interchangeable, which is not the case.

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I think in order to give some sort of an account of the Church’s position you have to explain what it is about women, as women, that makes them unfit for the priesthood. Something about femaleness per se has to disqualify them for the job. And whatever that is, that quality must not be present in males as such. Then, having explained how being female is essentially different from being male, you then have to go on and explain how the difference between male and female is so profoundly different from all the differences we experience between people that it becomes such an important qualifying criteria.

It is easy (or at least easier) to say why an individual may not be suited for the priesthood: maybe they are not pastoral in their interactions with families, or they do not feel comfortable enough in positions of leadership, etc. It is hard to explain why women are not suitable. Why has the sex of the person become such an important general criteria?

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Finally, to those who do not like that non-Catholics have opinions on things like the way the Church treats women, birth control, etc., etc., I would simply remind them that the Church interjects itself into the public debate on issues that relate to these things all the time, and not only that but feels it has an obligation to do so. So, the positions that it advocates in the public sphere are directly related to the way it treats women, homosexuals, the way it understands sexuality, within the Church itself. Therefore, the way in which the Church handles these matters internally are matters of concern to the general public.

I would also point out that even this forum has a whole section devoted to the discussion of non-Catholic religious practices where Catholics weigh in on the ways in which non-Catholics do or do not understand the relationship between themselves and God.

 

[John655]

He says women can be Buddist priests, so women should be able to be Catholic priests. He says he rejected Christianity partially beacuse is is an “old white man’s club” at the Vatican.

I’ve truly never seen him loose his cool before - something that I said about “persona Christi” must have hit a nerve.

 

[fermat]

I like to kick off those discussions by saying that I agree completely. I then say I also think it is an outrage that men cannot carry babies. To this day, no one has ever agreed with me on that point.

The conversation almost always goes like this:

Them: ‘It is outrageous that women can’t be priest!’

Me: ‘I know! It is also outrageous that men can’t have babies!’

Them: ‘What? Men aren’t designed/meant/supposed to have babies.’

Once they make that point, it is fairly simple to show there are situations where the ‘equal but not interchangeable’ is perfectly valid.

I like the light bulb analogy as well. Good work.

 

[Scoobyshme]

It doesn’t sound “kosher” for a Buddhist to be “enraged” about the religious beliefs of Catholicism. From what I’ve read, that has nothing to do with Buddhism. Sounds like your friend is more into “the world” than any religion. The world, as we know, is violently opposed to the values of Christ.

 

[EricFilmer]

I think in order to give some sort of an account of the Church’s position you have to explain what it is about women, as women, that makes them unfit for the priesthood. Something about femaleness per se has to disqualify them for the job.

May I suggest that if you are going to criticize the Church’s position, it would be better to address what the Church actually says, rather than your interpretation of it. In my last post I provided the link to the Church’s official statements explaining why ordination is reserved for men alone. Therein you will notice that the Church does not use the term “unfit” when denying the sacrament of ordination to women. The priesthood is not a matter of who is “fit” for the job, because no one is, neither saint nor sinner. Who among us can actually claim to be fit, or qualified, or worthy to stand in the person of Christ? No one.

It is easy (or at least easier) to say why an individual may not be suited for the priesthood: maybe they are not pastoral in their interactions with families, or they do not feel comfortable enough in positions of leadership, etc. It is hard to explain why women are not suitable.

I agree that there are those who are more unfit than others due to character flaws which would impede pastoral ministry, and that this deals with aspects of personality than gender. But, once again, no one is truly fit. It is rather a question about whom God calls to this ministry, which also stems from the gospel example of those called by Jesus to be his Apostles. If the priesthood was simply a matter of being fit or worthy of it then the Virgin Mary would have been the first person Jesus made an Apostle.

 

[Mintaka]

Technically, there’s no such thing as a Buddhist priest.

A male “bikkhu” or a female “bikkhuni” (both of which mean “beggar”) is usually translated as “monk” or “nun”, because they’re much more like a monk or nun than a priest or priestess. There are two different kinds of “ordination”, and one allows you to marry and one doesn’t. Both kinds of “ordination” impose a sort of monastic rule of life, though it’s got different priorities than Christian monasticism does.

The folks who get called “priests”, “priestesses”, or “ministers” in translation are monks or nuns from Buddhist sects (mostly Japanese) that decided to eliminate all the rules of Buddhist monastic life ('vinaya"). This has kind of drifted over to Japanese Buddhist monks and nuns of other sects, in popular usage, because the Japanese like to call anybody who works at a temple a priest or priestess, just like in Shinto. (Heck, I’ve seen anime where people were calling Catholic nuns priestesses, and were singularly unclear on what nuns do that priests don’t, and vice versa.)

Anyway, these folks aren’t priests the way we have priests, or even the way Shinto and Hindu and Chinese pagans have priests.

In fact, since Buddhism performs no sacrifices of animals, a Buddhist couldn’t possibly be a priest in the sense that most religions mean it. To be a priest is to be associated with sacrifices of some sort. Catholic priests are associated with the Unbloody Sacrifice, but the only reason that makes sense is that Jesus offered Himself in a very bloody manner first.

Buddhists do make various sorts of food offerings to gods and spirits and what have you, but they aren’t immolated. They usually give them to the birds after a while, if the rats and mice don’t eat it first. A lot of Buddhist websites say that offerings are actually just supposed to make the worshipper symbolically see and acknowledge that all good things are transient and meaningless, so you may as well give them away. That would be pretty much the opposite of offerings in most religions!

Of course, I’m sure your friend would say that any guy who staffs a temple is a priest and any woman is a priestess, or that priesthood is all about offerings but not sacrifices, or possibly that being a priest is all about the ability to hold prayer services and formal rituals. But that’s a whole different kettle of fish.

(And of course, there’s a lot of variations of practice and terminology and belief between one Buddhist country or sect and another. But this is the basics.)

Soooooo, your friend really doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about, or any reason to get mad. He’s comparing apples and oranges, or possibly oranges and rocks.

 

[invocation]

May I suggest that if you are going to criticize the Church’s position, it would be better to address what the Church actually says, rather than your interpretation of it. In my last post I provided the link to the Church’s official statements explaining why ordination is reserved for men alone. Therein you will notice that the Church does not use the term “unfit” when denying the sacrament of ordination to women. The priesthood is not a matter of who is “fit” for the job, because no one is, neither saint nor sinner. Who among us can actually claim to be fit, or qualified, or worthy to stand in the person of Christ? No one.

I agree that there are those who are more unfit than others due to character flaws which would impede pastoral ministry, and that this deals with aspects of personality than gender. But, once again, no one is truly fit. It is rather a question about whom God calls to this ministry, which also stems from the gospel example of those called by Jesus to be his Apostles. If the priesthood was simply a matter of being fit or worthy of it then the Virgin Mary would have been the first person Jesus made an Apostle.

I wasn’t aware that there was any indication that the Virgin said she felt called to be an apostle. Jesus does, though, by the way, refer to Magdalen as an apostle at the resurrection. But why dwell on that?

In any case, you can use whatever word you like, all you need to know about a person is that they are female and you already know they barred from ordination. According to the Church something about being a woman makes women unfit for, not capable of being called to, incapable of having a vocation for – or any other polite phrase you would prefer to say all the same thing – priesthood.

Btw, I am familiar with OS, which says: ‘the reasons are fundamental, but we are not going to tell you what they are; just take our word for it, women can not be ordained b/c we say so; now stop talking about it, please!’.

 

[invocation]

I like to kick off those discussions by saying that I agree completely. I then say I also think it is an outrage that men cannot carry babies. To this day, no one has ever agreed with me on that point.

The conversation almost always goes like this:

Them: ‘It is outrageous that women can’t be priest!’

Me: ‘I know! It is also outrageous that men can’t have babies!’

Them: ‘What? Men aren’t designed/meant/supposed to have babies.’

1. Any 8 year old knows the difference between a rule that says they have to come straight home after school and the inability to fly. The first is institutional, while the latter is grounded in so called facts of nature. If the inability of women to be ordained is somehow encoded in their biology I am sure you can explain what biological issues prevents it, much the same way we can explain what has, to this point, made it biologically impossible for a man to become pregnant.
2. Just as we have overcome the so-called fact of nature, by which human beings are unable to fly, will you likewise drop this silly argument when science figures out how to allow men to carry a child to term (which seems less and less like science fiction every day given the development of reproductive technology)? *. In any case, as with flying, we do not generally treat the resistance of material nature to our projects as, somehow, creating an absolute ban on the activity proposed.
3. The analogy you use between women’s ordination and a ‘fact of nature’ further reinforces what most Westerners think of the Church in any case… that in a bizarre case of some-sort of inverse of Freud’s theory of penis-envy (uterine envy? ), men have created a special sphere for themselves, and have thus arbitrarily set off a realm of power and leadership that belongs to them alone: the priesthood (and by analogy, to continue the point about ‘uterine envy’, they even get to give birth to Jesus every time they consecrate the bread and wine).
4. Finally, comparing an rule pertaining to institutional practice to a ‘fact of nature’ also reinforces the idea that the Church’s teaching on ordination women (along with most of its teaching on sex, gender, sexuality, etc.) are holdovers from the feudal period when people thought social differences were entirely natural: some people were born “noble”, others born to serfdom; some were born to be masters, others to obey; and within the household, as within the Church, this meant a hierarchy of men over women (enshrined in marriage vows in the idea that the wife should obey her husband). Just as the Church did not see that as a threat to the equality of persons in the eyes of God, so also it does not see discrimination against women, in the area of ordination as negative. Both positions seem hard to justify.

The reason that the Church has had to appeal more and more to sheer authority to justify its patriarchal form leadership (as seen in OS … ‘Jesus chose only men, therefore this must be fundamentally significant for us still today – though we can’t explain why or how’) is because we do not believe that ‘biology is destiny’ in that sense. The whole thrust of the modern world, including modern science both modern science and the new forms of political life, has been to overcome the limits of nature and make nature a place within which human freedom can be achieved instead of nature being a tyrant to which humanity must blindly submit.

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Again, the fact that the Church’s position on women, sex, etc. carries over into the public sphere indicates that what the Church idealizes in terms of institutional practice really does have bearing on what it believes should be the case in our social and political practice, and that one has reason to be suspicious of its commitment to equality generally…(all one has to do is reference the hierarchy’s opposition to equality laws in the UK, any of a series of laws regarding homosexuality in Europe or North and South America, to which it has voiced steady opposition). The Church, as with its position on slave ownership, for instance, generally has to be drug along behind when it comes to changing social relations.

No one is interchangeable with another person. This goes to the very nature of what we mean by a person. To make this point with regards to the difference between a man and a woman does not really add anything.*

 

[EricFilmer]

I wasn’t aware that there was any indication that the Virgin said she felt called to be an apostle. Jesus does, though, by the way, refer to Magdalen as an apostle at the resurrection. But why dwell on that?

There is certainly no need to dwell on something that never happened. Mary Magdalene was a disciple of Jesus (as were many women) and she was sent by Jesus to inform people of his resurrection, so in that sense she could be called an “apostle” for the simple reason that the word “apostle” means “to be sent.” But this does not mean that Jesus was referring to her as a member of the 12 Apostles specifically. Incidentally, at the time of Jesus’ resurrection, Judas was dead and gone and his position had not been filled yet by the others. Therefore, there was a “slot open” and Jesus could have easily actually made Mary an Apostle, but chose not to. So was Jesus declaring Mary Magdalene “unfit”?

In any case, you can use whatever word you like, all you need to know about a person is that they are female and you already know they barred from ordination. According to the Church something about being a woman makes women unfit for, not capable of being called to, incapable of having a vocation for – or any other polite phrase you would prefer to say all the same thing – priesthood.

And you can use whatever phrase or word you like, but the reason the Church bars women from ordination is the same reason Jesus barred them from being Apostles. So whatever you say of the Church is what you say of Jesus.

Btw, I am familiar with OS, which says: ‘the reasons are fundamental, but we are not going to tell you what they are; just take our word for it, women can not be ordained b/c we say so; now stop talking about it, please!’.

Once again, your interpretation. The Church states that there is nothing in revelation that permits the ordination of women. Just because certain people want women to be ordained is not sufficient reason. The Church does what God wants, not the desires of each passing earthly generation. And quite frankly, anyone who claims to “be fit” for ordination, be that person male or female, ought to be barred from it on that basis alone. It is a job for the humble.

 

[Just_Lurking]

1. The analogy you use between women’s ordination and a ‘fact of nature’ further reinforces what most Westerners think of the Church in any case… that in a bizarre case of some-sort of inverse of Freud’s theory of penis-envy (uterine envy? ), men have created a special sphere for themselves, and have thus arbitrarily set off a realm of power and leadership that belongs to them alone: the priesthood (and by analogy, to continue the point about ‘uterine envy’, they even get to give birth to Jesus every time they consecrate the bread and wine).

You mean that having a penis isn’t as anatomically necessary to confecting the Eucharist as having a uterus is anatomically necessary to carrying a fetus to term? Even in the TLM?

 

[John655]

Could those who reply please keep your observations focused on the original post?