The really sad thing about your observation about how the devil is re-tempting women is that he can lower the ante.
Eve was tempted by being told she could be like God. Today, the temptation is to be like a male. Not just any male, but a foolish man… . .
Gerry
It is a particularly modern and secular attitude to reduce life to functions and not to see the depths of nature, be it of the creation or of human nature.
No surprise if this spills over to the Mysteries of the Church and conflicts with them. When that happens, the person can realize the conflict of visions and adjust their own to the divinely revealed one and so be corrected by God’s view of things from one’s own erroneous assumptions and judgments. This is one of the many ways the Church saves us from ourselves. Protestantism, otoh, believes that individual judgment of the Church is superior and ends up in deep error which has inevitable consequences for human life down the road, as the modern functional individualism which destroys communion and ravages nature attests to when the inevitable secularism results and has full sway. Of course, it takes time to see all the consequences. Denial of a deeper level of existence below functions is quite secular.
Further, suggesting – as some here have done - that whether a priest is a man or a woman is a superficial question implies being a man or a woman is a superficial difference with regard to the Incarnation of God, and that implies being a man or a woman is a superficial difference as such. But such is a superficial understanding of human nature, the Incarnation, and so the symbolism of the Sacrament of Holy Orders, for the Church considers it a very deep question as part of Divine Revelation.
This really gets to the root of the problem, as proponents of priestesses think to point to the difference in ethnicity in the ordained as a reason to overcome the admitted Tradition of ordaining only males, namely that Our Lord chose only Jews as Apostles, but the Church did not stick to that, likewise. . .etc.
The Church is teaching, otc, that the difference between being a man or a woman goes to the heart of the Divinely-revealed Mystery of the Incarnation of God as a Man, or to put it in reverse, that the BASIC Mystery of the Incarnation is necessarily connected in fact with Our Lord choosing only men to be Apostles.
John Paul II on several occasions gave a couple of reasons why the priesthood of Christ is not an option for women, the main ones being that the priest acts
‘in persona Christe’, but also, that had women been chosen for that sacrament, Christ would have chosen His Holy Mother.
Now why don’t some find those reasons fitting? There must be something missing or skewed in their considering this
as a believer for them not to get it. IOW, they can’t think theologically very well. Probably because they have this attitude that if the arguments don’t make sense to THEM, they don’t make sense! Such an attitude is a failure to admit their limitations; if that’s the case, it would stem from pride of mind, as if the arguments had to make sense to them to make sense. A humble mind would say, “Gee, the Pope just gave us a couple of leads on why the Tradition can not be reversed; maybe I should follow those leads and reflect on how they fit with ordination”.
Theologians who are doing just that, i.e., thinking with the Church, are pointing to the significance of sexuality as a deeper symbol of God’s relation to His people, because the Son (
nota bene!) of God became a man and not a woman and chooses His Church to be His Bride. Now that tells us something, doesn’t it?: more clues as to the meaning of God’s choice. If these leads don’t resonate with the thinking of some Catholics, then perhaps they are just not used to thinking theologically at all. Maybe they’re used to thinking just scientifically, i.e., to say secularly and logically without the analogy of Faith; maybe they don’t have the habit of the science of God. Or perhaps they think too emotionally without connecting with the deeper truths at a level beyond the emotions.
Another dimension of women fomenting for ordination is that they are frequently anti-life, especially those on the forefront of this futile crusade (women priestesses being an inevitable spiritual dimension of this crusade for those who try in some to retain some semblance of their “Catholic” identity).
continued. . .
