Women’s Ordination in an Undemocratic Church

Two Vatican documents from the past half-century form the basis for the Church’s official stance on women’s ordination today. The first, a declaration from the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Inter Insigniores, was issued in 1976 with the approval of Pope Paul VI. The latter of the two documents is Pope John Paull II’s 1994 apostolic letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. If Inter Insigniores was the crystallization of the official argument against women priests in the years following the Second Vatican Council, then Ordinatio Sacerdotalis was meant to be the final declaration on the subject. And while the 1994 apostolic letter has proven to be far from the final word on the subject, it has remained the official policy out of Rome.

Interestingly, while it is the more well-known of these two documents, Pope John Paul II’s brief 1994 letter doesn’t include much new information or reasoning beyond that included in the 1976 declaration, which it draws from heavily and regularly references. The notoriety of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis among Catholics today surely comes from its oft-cited closing line: “I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgement is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful”. And yet, it is the logic of the earlier document that stands behind this confident declaration. So let’s turn to the context and content of Inter Insigniores.

First, the context. As a young priest in Italy, Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, had been an admirer of the great French reformer Jacques Maritain and his “integral humanism”, a theological concept that would serve as the basis for the liberal Christian democracy movement seen across Europe and the Americas during the mid-20^th century (McGreevy). As John T. McGreevy argues, the Catholic Church of the 1960s and onward was, at least by some definitions, committed to liberal democracy. Not surprisingly, once in the Vatican, Paul VI’s agenda was attuned to the growing call for increased roles for women in society, a call heard loudly within the liberal, democratic societies of the day. In the closing document of the Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes (1965), Paul called for all citizens to take an active part in public affairs. “Where they have not yet won it,” he wrote, “women claim for themselves an equity with men before the law and in fact”. But just as the church turned with one foot towards the tenets of equality and liberal democracy, the other foot stood firmly against the ordination women. 

It was in the context of a worldwide surge in energy for women’s rights, the historical moment that gave rise to organizations like the Women’s Ordination Conference, that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, with the guidance of Paul VI, issued Inter Insignioris. The Congregation, under then seventy-year-old Croatian Archbishop Franjo Seper, decided it was time to provide a formal statement “on the question of admission of women to the ministerial priesthood”. Women’s rights were at the center of public debates throughout the world. In 1975, the United Nations held the first World Conference on Women in Mexico City. That same year, Paul VI exchanged letters with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan, expressing his concern over the Anglican Communion’s recent opening to the ordination of women priests in some of its provinces and the effects it would have on relations between the two institutions.

With this context in mind, let us now consider the content of the Vatican’s 1976 argument against the ordination of women, which by way of Pope Paul’s 1994 apostolic letter remains the foundation of the Church’s reasoning on the issue. After a preamble touting the pro-women bona fides of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, Inter Insignioris puts forth the familiar argument that, while women and men are indeed equal, their “respective roles” are different. The document is built around six arguments, which unfold as follows:

1. The Church’s Constant Tradition: Here, the authors argue that ever since Jesus’s decision to call only men to be Apostles, the Catholic Church has not ordained women (except for “a few heretical sects in the first centuries”). In this section, we also get the oddly contradictory admission that the Church fathers often said sexist things, but that those beliefs “had hardly any influences on their pastoral activity”.
2. The Attitude of Christ: The argument in this section is that Jesus regularly departed from Mosaic law to affirm the equality of women, but he chose not to do so when calling the Twelve to the priesthood. We are also treated to a quote from Pope Innocent III (in office 1198-1216), assuring us that the Lord had not entrusted women with “the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven”. It is clear that we are meant to revere the thirteenth-century pope’s words on this matter, but are we also to celebrate his bloody victories over Muslims and other Christians during the Fourth Crusade and the sack of Byzantine Constantinople, an act that John Paul II formally apologized for in 2001?
3. The Practice of the Apostles: This section argues that women played an important role in the early years of the Church, but never held ordained office. While I’m no expert on the workings of the early Church, dozens of serious historians and theologians have published evidence and analysis showing that there were indeed ordained women in the early centuries. Kevin Madigan and Carolyn Osiek’s 2011 primary source reader, Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History is a great place to start.
4. Permanent Value of the Attitude of Jesus and the Apostles: This section claims to refute challenges to arguments number one and two (see above). Essentially, if the Apostles and Jesus, who regularly broke with Mosaic Law to include women, didn’t choose women to preach the Gospel, then this must have been God’s will. Section four also claims that while the Church can modify the practice of granting and receiving sacraments, it cannot alter the substance of a sacrament.
5. The Ministerial Priesthood in the Light of the Mystery of Christ: This is the section on gender essentialism. It concludes that Catholics would be confused if they saw a woman administering Mass, because “it would be difficult to see in the minister the image of Christ. For Christ himself was and remains a man.”
6. The Ministerial Priesthood Illustrated by the Mystery of the Church: This section makes the case that “the Church is a society different from other societies” in its structure and function. The Church, as described here, is anything but the liberal, pro-democratic institution that the Vatican came to support during the Cold War. “[T]he priesthood does not form part of the rights of the individual,” reads the Vatican document. In other words, not everyone, by virtue of being a Catholic, has the right to become an ordained minister. Women had understandably, according to the document, confused the feminist, pro-rights movement of the 1970s as a call to break the stained-glass ceiling. Instead, “Christian women should become more fully aware of the greatness of their mission”.

Almost two decades after the publication of this document, John Paul’s Ordinatio Sacerdotalis turned it into an affirmative declaration, and in the following decades neither Benedict nor Francis questioned the teaching. But the arguments laid out in Inter Insigniores are a product of their time, and importantly, they represent one ideological thread in an ongoing debate amongst Catholics. As a 2013 Women’s Ordination Conference statement put it, “Instead of looking to Pope John Paul II for the answer, Pope Francis could have looked to a variety of sources. He could have quoted the Vatican’s own the Pontifical Biblical Commission that concluded in 1976 that there is no valid scriptural or theological reason for denying ordination to women”. As we challenge the Church to listen and to change, we must continue to breathe life into this old debate and work to counter the arguments that serve as the basis of the official Vatican stance on women’s ordination.