The reason that women are unfit for ordination is because they are not men. Sounds extremely politically incorrect, doesn’t it? But the fact is that God created men to be men and women to be women. When he chose to incarnate, he didn’t just choose to become a human being, he chose to become a man. Just as he chose to incarnate into a specific time, place, people, family, and woman (Mary), so he chose to become a specific human being, the man Christ Jesus. Thus, those human beings who serve as priests in the person of Christ (Latin, in persona Christi) are men and not women.
This shocking particularity of God is not limited to choosing men to become priests. To demonstrate this to proponents of women’s ordination, you might turn their question around and ask them what is it about men that makes them unfit to bear children. Surely, you might state, a man is just as physically strong as a woman (if not more so) and psychologically and emotionally capable of the demands of motherhood. Surely he is not inferior to a woman, is he? Isn’t it unfair that only women can have babies?
The reason this line of logic descends into ridiculousness is because women bearing babies is a natural fact of life, something easily seen and understood. To shake one’s fist at the heavens and demand equal rights for men to bear babies is to rail against the natural order of creation. Once you and your debate partners are in agreement on that point, you can then establish the analogy that men being priests is a supernatural fact of life and to rail against it is to rail against the supernatural order of creation. Just because the supernatural order cannot be seen or as easily understood as the natural order – although the laws of the natural order, such as gravity, are also sometimes invisible to the human senses – does not mean that it does not exist.
