Women and the Eucharistic Presidency

Abstract

There has been much discussion recently about the ordination of women to the priesthood of the Catholic Church. Most writers on this subject agree that there are no theological reasons why women may not be admitted to the priesthood, and so the debate is conducted between prejudice on one side and sentimentality on the other. I do not see how it can be denied that there are many pastoral ministries, including preaching and counselling, where the effectiveness of women ministers would be very great; nevertheless, I believe that there are important theological considerations which tell against the ordination of women to one of the central ministries in the Church, the celebra-of the eucharist.This has nothing to do with the intentions of Jesus: the fact that he included no women among the Twelve is fundamentally irrelevant to the question of whether women today should be admitted to the priesthood, and not because of changed social conditions (that argument is merely one version of the fallacy that man has ‘come of age’ in the twentieth century), but rather because of our changed understanding of how, the Church stands in relation to Jesus as her founder. Even if Jesus did intend to found a Church, we have no warrant to suppose that he drew up detailed blueprints for its structures: and as it appears much more probable that he had no such intention, but exercised a ministry wholly within the parameters of contemporary Judaism, the question of what he would have thought of women priests becomes purely speculative. Further, it is in any case clear that the relation of the threefold ministry as it developed in the second century to the ministry of the Twelve is extremely distant; since the Twelve could not be replaced in their most important function, that of eye witnesses of the ministry and the resurrection appearances of Jesus (cf Acts 1 :2 If), the sense in which bishops or popes may be said to be their successors according to a pipeline model of apostolic succession is far from obvious.