Firstly, it is obvious that our conscience cannot be the ultimate arbiter of or authority on what is true. Weakened by sin, we are far too capable of lying to ourselves convincingly, such that to rely upon our conscience alone or in opposition to Church teaching would be catastrophic. Moreover, a conscience is not an absolute even unto itself. Logically, it cannot be the ultimate authority if it is itself subject to ignorance, lack of formation, incorrect or false formation, pride or impediment due to the influence of any number of sins or deficiencies. Secondly, each of us bears the burden of informing our conscience so as to conform to God’s will, not merely to justify an exercise of our own will. It is God who is the ultimate authority, and our ultimate responsibility in considering and contemplating His Church’s teaching on the ordination of women, or any teaching of His Church for that matter, is to inform our conscience so as to conform and not stand in opposition to that teaching. Doubtless this may be painful for some, but, in all charity, it may also be their cross to bear. God desires us to seek Him in humility; pride clouds our vision that we cannot see Him when he is present nor hear Him when He calls us. It is we who must soften our hearts, not the Church which must bend to our demands or the demands of a culture which simply reject any distinction between men and women.
As to the justification for maintaining the ordination of men, the mere fact that one sex is blessed by God by a vocation to the ministerial priesthood does not mean that that same vocation is unjustly denied to the other sex. Our creation as men and women was ordained by God before the beginning of time itself and to each of us is accorded the full dignity as a child of God which is our right. Neither sex is superior to the other and the Church denies not one iota of a woman’s dignity by not extending ordination to the ministerial priesthood beyond the bounds which Christ himself established. God, who is love, created man and woman in his image and likeness and could no more have created one to dominate the other than he would have created an absurdity such as the rock He himself could not lift.
Pope John Paul II declared the limits of the Church in the ordination of women:
“Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal Tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the Magisterium in its more recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless considered still open to debate, or the Church’s judgment that women are not to be admitted to ordination is considered to have a merely disciplinary force. Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Luke 22:32), I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful” (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis 4).
There is no debate to be had here. Sadly, I have my doubts that some will be willing to accept this, to their own distraction and misery.
). Perhaps you are just nonplussed because you are faced with a word to which grammatical gender is proper, but at the same time can’t be used in our religion not because of negative implications but because of pagan implications. Perhaps this is the reason Jesus chose only men. Perhaps this is the reason we need to continue to ordain only men. We are a people set apart.
