She-Wolves in Shepherds' Clothing
(On Women's Ordination)
In a move criticized by many supporters as an unforced error in the otherwise crowd pleasing first thirty days of his second term, President Trump appointed televangelist Paula White to the White House’s newly-formed Faith Office.
It wasn’t the establishment of the office itself that was the problem—indeed, many Christians praised the move as a much-needed step in the right direction in a State that has become increasingly separated from Church—but the appointment of Paula White in particular raised more than a few pious eyebrows.
White’s scandal-ridden reputation received the lioness’s share of the outrage, but there was and is a much more fundamental problem at play here—one that many otherwise orthodox Christians are less than eager to admit—about this prosperity preacher in a pantsuit:
Paul White is a woman. And women can’t preach.
Before we get into why this controversial claim is the case, let’s remember that this isn’t the Donald’s first faux pas regarding a clerical Karen.
Just a couple weeks earlier, President Trump and Vice President Vance—with family members in attendance—were subjected to an awkward encounter at the Washington National Cathedral, wherein the Episcopalian so-called bishop Mariann Budde traded beatitudes for platitudes in order to hector the newly-elected head of state for his immigration policy.
Such an embarrassing optics blunder could probably be blamed on an unscrupulous staffer who failed to vet the prelate’s previous public criticisms of the President, but even that should have been unnecessary: the fact that the current Bishop of Washington is a woman should have been the only red flag needed to justify declining her invite.
Both of these incidents speak to the larger problem of President Trump’s blind spot when it comes to religion—but there’s also a blind spot shared by many self-professed Christians, regardless of which side of the aisle’s pew they’re seated in: the erroneous notion that women can become priests, pastors, or preachers.
The prevalence of this misunderstanding is understandable, given America’s liberal, egalitarian, and feminist sympathies—but it’s anything but biblical.
[W]omen should keep silent in the churches, for they are not allowed to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. But if they want to learn anything, they should ask their husbands at home. For it is improper for a woman to speak in the church.
1 Corinthians 14:34-35 (New American Bible, Revised Edition)
St. Paul’s words are unequivocal: whether you read the Bible as a sola scriptura literalist or a context-is-key symbolist, it’s difficult to interpret this passage as anything other than a prohibition on women preaching.
And yet, the Catholic Church—for all the flack it gets for being a holdout against ordaining women to the priesthood—explains the passage as being a provisional cultural norm subject to mutable customs, rather than a moral absolute…which is why you get to enjoy listening to Susan From The Parish Council at the lectern during Mass, while the homily is (mercifully) reserved only for those with holy orders (i.e. men).
St. Paul further ruffles feminist feathers in his first letter to St. Timothy:
A woman must receive instruction silently and under complete control. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man. She must be quiet.
1 Timothy 2:11-12 (New American Bible, Revised Edition)
And so, while distinctions between sermon, homily, teaching, preaching, etc. really only concern the intricacies of Catholic Canon Law, the general Scriptural and Traditional consensus on female preaching is a clear no can do.
Yet the role of spiritual leader requires more than just a knack for public speaking or the ability to deliver a rip-roaring sermon.
Potential pastors are expected to—as the etymology of the word “pastor” (Latin for “shepherd”) makes clear—roll up their sleeves and do the dirty work of tending to their spiritual flock. The analogy itself implies a masculine vocation,1 as ancient sheep herding was a dangerous business: shepherds had the lonely, physically exhausting job of guiding unruly livestock across vast stretches of rugged terrain, all the while warding off baying wolves and bad weather. Drawing on this powerful imagery, pastors form, guide, and lead their spiritual flock toward heaven, just as the shepherd guides his physical flock toward greener pastures.
Of course, the shepherd par excellence is the Good Shepherd Himself, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and it’s His perfect example which gives us the clearest reason why women can’t be priests.
During His earthly ministry, Jesus of Nazareth chose twelve men to be his apostles—and the fact that they were all men is more than mere happenstance.
Contrary to (blasphemous) claims that even Jesus Himself was a product of His misogynistic times, the fact that priests of both the Old and New Covenants were all men was itself a countercultural defiance of the prevailing norms of the ancient world.
In those days, women were much more associated with spiritual matters than men—from the Oracle of Delphi and the Vestal Virgin priestesses of the Greco-Roman mystery religions, to the temple prostitutes of the Levant and enchantresses across Eurasia, feminine communion with gods and goddesses was commonplace. while the menfolk were expected to toil over more practical concerns of warfare and statecraft.
Regardless, Jesus did establish an all-male priesthood, sending them forth in His Name to baptize all nations and beginning a line of apostolic succession that has survived from A.D. 33 all the way to the present day—and not one of them a woman.
To understand why this had to be the case, it’s crucial to understand just what exactly a priest is: in addition to the important work of teaching, preaching, and forming souls, the primary purpose of the priesthood is to offer sacrifice to God on behalf of the people he represents.
In the Old Covenant, burnt offerings were presented at the Temple in Jerusalem by the High Priest on behalf of the people of Israel. In the New Covenant, Catholic priests re-present Christ’s eternal sacrifice on the Cross during Mass on behalf of the congregation.
To do this—to consecrate the Eucharist (and indeed administer all the sacraments)—the priest acts in persona Christi, in the person of Christ. And because Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is both fully God and fully Man, only a man is capable of taking on this role.
Denying the necessity of this is to deny the significance of the Son of God’s Incarnation2 in time as a male human being!
But even the first person of the Trinity3, God the Father, while fully spirit, is titularly male—not biologically, but analogously—and this too tells us something important about His nature. Because contrary to current year popular belief, men and woman are fundamentally different (male and female he created them) and thus have different vocations as ordained by God.
God is Our Father not because mothers are inherently inferior, but because (as Mark Brumley of Ignatius Press puts it):
As a human father is the "source" or "principle" of his offspring (in a way that the mother, receiving the father and his procreative activity within herself, is not), so God is the "source" or "principle" of creation. In that sense, God is truly Father, not merely metaphorically so.
Vocations and sacraments aren’t a zero sum game. Just because women (and most men!) don’t get to enjoy the graces of Holy Orders (at least not directly) doesn’t make them inferior or defective, just as the priests who do bear the fruits of that particular sacrament aren’t lessened by their incompatibility with, say, Holy Matrimony.
This logic applies beyond the sacramental to the physical as well: men aren’t diminished by their inability to breastfeed, and the sane among us don’t bewail the unfairness of a woman’s doomed dreams of becoming an NFL quarterback! Thus to bewail the impossibility of women joining the ranks of the clergy is like judging water for its inability to be dry. It’s an ontological non sequitur.
But of course this is modernism in a nutshell. No immutable truths, only will to power and voluntaristic power grabs, all based on grievance and envy.
Following that line of logic, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that our God is not the Catholic God of universal truth, but a nominalist Deity where things are only true because He says that they are true. Even then, where is the obedience? Where is the childlike “I won’t do it because He told me not to” piety in these women who demand to have the stole placed around their shoulders? To pick and choose which truths to follow is the same wide path that every heretic in history has taken, all of whom espoused the exact same profession of faith: I believe all the truths of the Holy Catholic Church…except THAT one…
The faulty premise that women are barred from the priesthood on nefarious grounds of oppression, misogyny, and unbalanced power dynamics shows a lack of trust in the inherent goodness of God and the Church He gave us.
Ironically enough, there seems to be a sly bit of misogyny underlying the feminist idea that women are only of value insofar as they’re capable of doing that which is intrinsic to men (rather than embracing those feminine gifts which God has bestowed exclusively to them).
The demand for women in the priesthood is a side effect of society’s failure to venerate women. By degrading the classic attributes of femininity as outdated and sexist (homemaking, childrearing, etc.) it’s no wonder that many women feel pressured to conform to more masculine vocations—and to be a priest is one of the most masculine vocations there is (no matter how much its public perception has been brought low by decades of effeminate clergy).
The priest is this video defends the Church’s stance on purely secular grounds, comparing it to a social club4 with a set of take-it-or-leave-it rules. But the irony is that it’s the secularists who make their counter argument on religious grounds—not based on Christian scripture or tradition, but on the tenants of The Cult of Modernity, which stipulates that all other belief systems must adhere to its dogmatic demands or face anathema by way of cancellation and excommunication from polite society.
But if all these historical, theological, and ontological arguments aren’t enough, we need look no further than the practical evidence before for our very eyes. What are the fruits of women’s ordination?
Enter the cautionary tale of the Episcopal Church. It approved women to the clergy in 1976, permitted abortion in 1994, and authorized same-sex weddings in 2015. These events are not unrelated—indeed, perhaps the best thing to come out of the last few decadent decades is the irrefutable evidence that the so-called slippery slope fallacy was actually a gross understatement.
To be blunt, a woman wearing vestments is an act of liturgical drag, of sacerdotal transvestitism, no different in its strangeness than a man wearing a dress. It’s telling that so-called female priests never fully commit to the bit and refer to themselves as priestesses, thereby tacitly admitting to the role’s inherently male nature.5
In a world of Rabbi Rachels and Pastor Penelopes, the Catholic Church alone stands surrounded by a mob intent to bludgeon it to death with the hammer of cultural conformity. There’s some kudos to be given to Islam for mostly managing to retain its masculine street cred, but with things like Queers for Palestine, hijab-wearing feminists, and the recent liberalization efforts of Saudi Arabia, one wonders if, years from now, we might not hear the call to prayer led by Imam Irene.6
Trusting in the indefectibility of the Catholic Church, I can say as an act of faith that we’ll never have to hear a homily from Father Francine, and Pope Joan will continue to be nothing but an old wives’ tale.
But I do fear what price the Church will pay for such a conviction in the years to come, whether in the form of social exclusion, legal persecution, or even outright martyrdom, as increasingly zealous secular fundamentalism continues to tighten its androgynous hands around the throat of Holy Mother Church.
Why the Church Doesn’t Ordain Women
Fulton Sheen — Why Women Can't Become Priests or Give Homilies
Lest I get an earful from the many female farmers here on Substack, of course women can tend their own flocks (like Jacob’s shepherdess wife Rachel), just on a smaller scale (particularly in a domesticated, fenced-off farm setting)
I’ll let the speculative theologians suss out the soteriological implications if—in an alternative universe (intending no irreverence in this hypothetical)—God had chosen to incarnate as a woman. But I’m not convinced such a thing would even be metaphysically possible: because surely then, He would have to be begotten, not made, before all ages, in the Trinity as God the Daughter…
The Holy Spirit is sometimes invoked as the feminine aspect of the Godhead, but this strikes me as a feminist grasping at straws, attempting to walk away with some sort of consolation prize from the perceived injustice of God’s exclusively masculine self identification
Even secular institutions like men’s clubs and lodges are beleaguered by demands for inclusivity, with only the most prestigious (and therefore most impenetrable) organizations holding on to their “no girls allowed” charters by a chauvinistic thread
If women’s ordination is demanded on the grounds of equality, surely it would be logically consistent to allow men to don the habit and join a convent as a nun. Sadly, it wouldn’t be surprising to see such a concession (particularly from the clerics clad in rainbow stoles) but one wonders how the female priests who claim to adhere to otherwise orthodox beliefs would wiggle out of that one
The more pedantically inclined might point out that the analogy breaks down as imams and rabbis are spiritual leaders and teachers but don’t offer sacrifice as a priest does, but by attempting to poke holes in my thesis they end up conceding the very point being made: that a priest is much more than just a preacher occupying a pulpit.
Brilliant!