Lost Journals

Should the Catholic Church ordain women as priests? Does the pope wear a funny hat?

No student of the papal selection process seriously believes the new pope might be inclined to ordain women as priests. But he should consider it.

Women's ordination as priests in the Catholic Church would diminish the increasing scarcity of parish leaders. In Western society, at least, the well is not only drying up, the well was filled in.
Reuters reports, "In the United States, the number of men newly ordained as priests fell to 533 last year, down from 994 in 1965, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University in Washington."

I love those who oppose women's ordination quoting Scripture as the basis for their position. The argument usually goes something like, "Jesus Christ did not call any woman to be part of the twelve apostles" (Inter Insigniores) or "In this way Jesus established a permanent norm for the future Church: Jesus simply did not want women to be priests!" (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis)
But the truth is, similar to interpretation by various courts of common law in the United States today, there is Scripture to back up almost any argument true believers would like to make. Other scholars remind us that the earliest recording of Jesus' words at the Last Supper is in St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians. That letter was written about 57 A.D. or almost a quarter-century AFTER Jesus' death.

The earliest written versions that scholars possess of the Gospels were written much later, almost a half-century after Jesus was crucified. Can you imagine how much re-interpretation and misinterpretation of what did or did not happen at the Last Supper could have gone on before any of it was written down? Especially in the ancient Middle East?

Despite all that, St. Paul did not leave behind any details about who was at the Last Supper. He simply repeated Jesus' words. In the first few centuries of the Church's existence, there is ample evidence that those who lived much closer to Jesus' time than any of us today did believe in ordaining women.

Dorothy Irvin, an archaeologist and theologian, has combed the catacombs of Rome for physical evidence to back up the claim that women were indeed ordained during the first millennium of the Catholic Church.

She found a fresco in a chapel in the Catacomb of St. Priscilla in Rome depicting women with arms outstretched toward the cup and plate. They were gesturing consecration at a celebration of an overnight Eucharistic vigil held near the tomb.

Irvin also describes a fourth-century fresco in the tomb of Priscilla, showing a bishop laying his right hand on the shoulder of a woman priest at her ordination.

As the cardinals select the next pope, let's hope he remembers that in 1977 the papal declaration, "Inter Insigniores."

Paul VI was pope at the time. He had asked his Vatican Biblical Commission to study the Scriptures about the subject of ordaining women. The Commission found nothing in Scripture that said women could or could not be ordained.

Which side will the next pope come out on? We already know. But a girl can still hope. And so can a woman.