Sir, - The argument for the ordination of women is based not on the equality of the sexes, which all Catholics enthusiastically believe, but upon the idea, which all Catholics vigorously reject, that the sexes are ultimately interchangeable. This in turn is based on the dualistic claim that gender difference is something purely anatomical, mechanical, external, superficial - that men and women are not just equal, but really the same.
Yet the behavioural sciences, as they continue to document the differing cognitive processes and communicational patterns of the sexes, would seem rather to corroborate the conviction of the Catholic Church that the sexes, though absolutely equal, are profoundly distinct.
It is for this reason that it cannot be immaterial, for example, whether a man has sex with another man instead of with a woman or vice versa. It is for this reason that a man who carries a foetus to term in his abdominal cavity or a man who is hormonally induced to lactate cannot ever be in any true sense a mother. It is for this reason that a woman can never validly be ordained to the priesthood. The Lord himself ordained only men and, as the sexes are not interchangeable, we are not entitled to replace one gender with the other even in individual cases.
The objection that the Apostles were also all Jewish is too unintelligent to be taken seriously - cultural identity, a purely received phenomenon, is hardly analogous with the congenital and ontological difference of gender. The objection that Jesus was a man of his time and influenced by the prejudices of his age evidently ignores the fact that he was and is all-seeing God, incapable of sin, and therefore of unjust discrimination - and crucified precisely for challenging the cultural presuppositions of his and every society.
The Church is never entitled to do anything other than what Jesus has already done. She cannot, for instance, use in the Mass anything other than bread and wine, simply that is what he used - not because bread and wine are in any way superior to other foodstuffs. Thus the campaign for the ordination of women is, I fear, but another expression not merely of the growing impatience of some Christians with the Church, but of a systematic decay of faith in Christ himself, true God and true man, eternal Word and Lord of history. We have forgotten that it is not what we want that matters but what he has decreed. We have outgrown the truth that the servant is not greater than the Master. - Yours, etc.,
(Fr) David O'Hanlon CC
Kingscourt, Co Cavan.