On the Big News! Why WOC’s Addition to the Vatican’s Website Makes Sense

You may have heard the big news from earlier this week that the Vatican has included a link to WOC’s website on the “Synod Resources” page of the Vatican’s own website. It seems that, in advance of the 2023 Synod on Synodality, Pope Francis wants to hear from ordination justice advocates. Alleluia!

In the wake of this right and just news, I found it helpful to revisit the Vatican’s (flawed) theological arguments for excluding women from ordained ministry. And just in case anybody from the Holy Father’s office is listening, I’m going to try to use this blog-post space here to take the Vatican’s arguments seriously, scrutinizing them in a historical, theological, scriptural, yet charitable way.

So, the basic argument is that women cannot be ordained ministers because Jesus commissioned 12 men and no women to be his apostles, preaching and working miracles in his name. From this, the Vatican presumes that Jesus deliberately intended to exclude all women forever from ordained ministry.

This presumption has no explicit scriptural basis: The Gospels are silent on the worthiness of women for ordained ministry. The only basis for the Vatican’s exclusion of women from ordained ministry is that, well, women have always been excluded.

Yet, the Vatican doesn’t always blindly follow Early Church precedent on questions of gender. The early canons mandated that women who put on the dress of a man be anathematized, and that women be forbidden to enter the sanctuary during the Liturgy of the Eucharist on grounds that women’s bodies—no matter how covered—would endanger male clerical celibacy.

The medieval Church was similarly burdened by the sin of misogyny. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, opposed women’s ordination not because Jesus’s gender was male, but because “it is not possible in the female state to signify eminence of degree, for a woman is in the state of subjection.” The Angelic Doctor opposed the ordination of slaves and those born to unwed parents on similar grounds: “[A] man’s good name is bedimmed by a sinful origin.”

Were the Vatican to stop selectively applying ancient precedent on questions of gender and ministry, we would have no female acolytes. Yet, just last year, in Spiritus Domini, Pope Francis declared that service at the altar may “be entrusted to all suitable faithful, whether male or female.”

So the Vatican has abandoned certain ancient and misogynistic arguments and traditions—and rightfully so. The fact is that no human body exactly, literally, perfectly corresponds to our Great High Priest, Jesus. The flesh that the Word assumed in the human being of Jesus was raced as a Palestinian Jew, as was the flesh of the 12 men whom Our Lord first commissioned to serve as his apostles. Yet the Vatican does not assume that gentiles are unworthy of ordained ministry. And why, theologically, not? Because the Vatican understands that what matters in the Incarnation is Jesus’s humanness, not his racial particularity. Put simply, if it doesn’t matter that the first people whom Jesus commissioned to serve as apostles were Jewish, then it doesn’t matter that they were men, either. And a glorious sign of this eternal, Christological truth was always present right there in Holy Scripture. In the first verses of the Gospel according to St. John: “The Word became flesh and lived among us.” And in St. Paul’s letter to the Church in Galatia: “There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freeman, there can be neither male nor female—for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Every human being bears God’s image. Every human being is worthy to receive the love Jesus poured out during his earthly ministry. And every human being is worthy to do as Jesus did and pour out that same love in his name.

Let us pray that this gesture the Vatican has made toward the movement for ordination justice be just a small, first step in a long, righteous journey. Let us continue to hold the Institutional Church accountable to its sacred call to love and cherish all God’s children—not in spite of, but because of their God-given gifts of gender and sexuality.