An Open Letter to Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, S.J.

Your Eminence:

In an article recently published by a major German Catholic website, you suggested that the question of whether the Church can ordain women has not been definitively settled: “I cannot imagine how a Church can continue to exist in the long run if half of God’s people suffer because they have no access to ordained ministry.” Putting aside for a moment the questions of what and how suffering is caused by the Church’s ancient practice of calling only men to Holy Orders, your formulation raises questions about the past, present and future.

Are you, for example, suggesting that there has been something essentially wrong with the Catholic understanding of Holy Orders for two millennia? How would such a notion square with the Lord’s promise to preserve his Church in truth through the continual outpouring of the Holy Spirit (John 15:16, 16:13)? The question of who can be admitted to Holy Orders has never been understood as a secondary matter of ecclesiastical discipline; it has been understood to engage the very nature of the ordained ministry, which is a constitutive part of the structure of the Church – and the Church is Christ’s creation, not our own. Has the Church misunderstood Christ for two thousand years? Or did Christ get it wrong in structuring the Church and its ordained ministry as they have been structured for two millennia?

As to your inability to imagine a future for the Church in which women are not called to Holy Orders, doesn’t that suggest a rather clericalist understanding of the Kingdom-life we are living now (Mark 1:15)? If the Kingdom broke into history during the Lord’s time among us, and if that inbreaking and its promise of eternal life is the reality in which we live now (however often we forget it), how can “half of God’s people” be cut off from the fullness of life in the Spirit? And what does your fear for the future say about your understanding of the inbreaking of the Kingdom in the past? Was Our Lady cut off from living the fullness of the Kingdom-life proclaimed by her son because he did not call her to Holy Orders? Were Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila and Edith Stein, all patron saints of Europe? Was your mother? Was mine?

Then there is the present. The Catholic Church takes divine revelation seriously, which means that God’s creation of human beings as men and women – equally human, distinctively human and complementarily human – was not simply a matter of the Creator working through the mechanisms of evolutionary biology. Genesis 1:27 – “Male and female he created them” – is not mere description; it is revelatory of deep truths built into the human condition. That is why the Catholic Church does not and cannot accept the late-modern and post-modern conceit of a unisex humanity in which maleness and femaleness are reduced to differentiated plumbing.

In the fifth chapter of the Letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul describes the Lord’s relationship to his Church as spousal: the Lord loves the Church as a husband loves his wife. The ordained priest, as the Catholic Church understands him, embodies that spousal relationship of Christ to the Church. Priests are not just members of a clerical caste licensed to conduct certain ecclesiastical functions. Rather, the ordained priest is an icon of Christ the High Priest, the spouse of the Church.

Unisex cultures find that idea hard to grasp. So do cultures that imagine that two men or two women can “marry” each other. But the Church is not obliged to surrender to the confusions of any culture. And it certainly cannot sacrifice to those confusions its conviction that God disclosed important truths about our humanity when the Holy Spirit inspired the author of Genesis 1:27 to write what he did, and when that same Spirit inspired St. Paul to write Ephesians 5.

St. Paul also described this spousal relationship of Christ to the Church, which is crucial to the Catholic Church’s understanding of who may be called to Holy Orders, as a “great mystery” – meaning a deep truth of faith that can only be grasped in love, however carefully we try to understand it intellectually. Permit the suggestion, Your Eminence, that the Church’s pastors should avoid causing further confusion (and, indeed, whatever suffering is caused by those confusions) by helping God’s people embrace the mysteries of faith in love, rather than by suggesting that what has been settled by divine revelation and the authoritative teaching of the Church (in the 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis) is not, in fact, settled.

Yours in the fellowship of Easter faith – GW

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