Why Ordination of Women Matters
to the Church & World

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WHY IT  MATTERS TO THE CHURCH

The ordination of women to the priesthood matters to the Church because it makes possible: (1) proper discernment, (2) better formation, and (3) increased effectiveness in mission.
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PROPER DISCERNMENT
God’s Holy Spirit animates creation and works through all of us. Excluding a particular group of people from leadership on this or that basis drastically hinders the Church’s ability to discern God's desires. In other words, when groups of people are excluded from full participation in the Church, so are the ways in which God is communicating through those groups. The natural outcome of such lopsided discernment is oppression: these same groups become and remain marginalized, defined by the ruling group as inferior and therefore destined to bear the impact of the structures that marginalize them. By welcoming every group of people into full participation in the Church, the Church can better discern God's communication and better learn how to build relationship with God. This leads to the creation of the world that God desires to see. 

BETTER FORMATION
A Roman Catholic Church that welcomes women as priests will provide much healthier formation for Catholics. Rather than teaching Catholics that women are defective by nature, and therefore deserving of subjugation on the basis of biology, the Church would be a place where all people flourish. Imagine this Church: Women and girls are embraced as fully human with their gifts welcomed at every level. Men and boys are taught to value women and girls as true peers both in and beyond the Church. Women bring their prayer and fresh and inclusive perspectives to theology and doctrine, which naturally brings the Church in better alignment with God's vision of flourishing for all creation. Women and girls are better served by ministers who know their experiences and create safe and healing sacramental spaces. These experiences in Church prepare Catholics to live in the world as the light of God. In a Church that ordains women, Roman Catholics are better formed to be the leaven that uplifts the world, rather than agents of the status quo.  

INCREASED EFFECTIVENESS IN MISSION
The Roman Catholic Church is growing fastest in Africa, and it is also growing in India and parts of Asia. If women can be ordained as priests, this means that women can be ordained as bishops. Imagine a Church led by African women, Indian women, Asian women. These leaders will bring critical perspectives and gifts that will make our Church more effective in mission from the local all the way to the highest levels. The Church will be better able to evangelize by modeling equality, especially in places across the world where the situation of women is truly dire. Further, there seems to be an assumption that a Church that ordains women to priesthood in ultra-patriarchal cultures will not grow because it is “too counter-cultural.” Yet, the reverse is more likely to be true: a Church modeling God's justice and equality is more likely to grow in these places as women discover a place where they are welcomed as fully human, where their gifts are cultivated and celebrated, where their daughters' lives are honored. 

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WHY IT MATTERS TO THE WORLD

The ordination of women matters to those outside the Church not only because Roman Catholics occupy powerful positions of leadership, and because the Roman Catholic Church is one of the most powerful institutions in the world. 
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The Roman Catholic Church is one of the most powerful institutions in the world. It is the largest nongovernmental provider of healthcare in the world,  operates the worlds largest nongovernmental school system, and is one of the world’s largest landowners.  The Holy See also participates in the United Nations as a permanent observer state with influence on issues affecting women. These massive institutions affect Catholics and non-Catholics alike, having a far-reaching impact across the globe. Though Pope Francis has empowered a handful of women as high-level administrators, there is little participation of women at the highest levels of Church, and zero participation of women at the top. 

When women are ordained and participating at every level of the Church, the experiences and perspectives of women and girls will become a true priority and source of life for the Church. The inclusion of women will naturally change the Church's way of proceeding, and in time the worldwide ministries of the Church will become a far more powerful force of equality that uplifts the entire world, especially in those places where women and girls are most vulnerable and oppressed. ​

For all these reasons, ordaining women
would bolster Church authority, ​not diminish it. ​ ​

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WHY IT MATTERS MOST

The most important reason to ordain women is because ​it is what God has always desired.

The whole of scripture proclaims a God of liberation and mercy who desires freedom and flourishing for all creation--especially those most vulnerable, marginalized and oppressed. God has spent thousands of years trying to communicate to human beings in every conceivable way the fundamental truth of God's design: no group of people is superior to any other group of people. Period. 

The teaching of a male-only priesthood violates (and has always violated) at its very foundation the Lord's vision for our lives together as a human family. Re-welcoming women into the priesthood has been a very long-time in the making. Rather than grasp onto its false understanding, the Roman Catholic Church must die to itself so that it can be born anew through the power of the Holy Spirit. ​

This is the paschal mystery. This is our faith.

​#GodSaysNow      #OrdainWomen     #SpeakUpInTheSynod

Above: Bishop Rose Okeno of the Anglican Church of Kenya. Photo used with permission.

PROBLEMS WITH A
​​MALE-ONLY PRIESTHOOD

Instead of embracing God's call to be a prophetic presence to oppressive concepts and structures that subjugate women, the Roman Catholic Church reinforces them by teaching the world that women are inferior to men by biological design. The exclusion of women to priesthood is grounded in sexist theology and morally disfigures the Body of Christ in serious and detrimental ways:

• Adults and children are formed to believe that male bodies have God-given superiority. Thus, women's bodies are somehow defective and *must* be subjugated by men in and beyond the Church. This doctrine indirectly encourages abuse of women’s bodies, labor and psyches, and prevents women and girls from truly flourishing. Women are not trusted as agents of God's Spirit, and women are reduced to infants who are incapable of discernment. Men are granted the power of always speaking for women, which means women's needs, experiences and perspectives are overlooked, minimized or discarded. Men also learn false and constraining ideas about what it means to be a man, which also prevents men from fully expressing who they are as God's creation.

 

• Women called to priesthood are prevented from living out God’s desires for them. Women called to be priests miss out on the life God intends for them, and the Church misses out on the many gifts these women would give to the Body of Christ--gifts which are sorely needed for a vibrant and effective Church. These women suffer spiritual and psychological bludgeoning that can lead to profound despair, grief and depression. In the game of exclusion, EVERYONE LOSES: the women called, the institutional Church and the Body of Christ who need them, and our loving God, whose calls sadly go unanswered. 
  
  
• The exclusion of women from priesthood leads to a Church life that silences the experience and perspectives of women and girls almost entirely. How many times have you heard a decent homily about women's experiences by a male priest? People are increasingly unwilling to tolerate the inherent lack of integrity in Church teaching on ordination, and so millions of people continue to leave the Church. Young people, especially, reject teachings that subjugate people on any basis.
  
  
• The exclusion of women from priesthood creates an undue burden on male priests. It is completely unfair to expect male priests to be all things to all people. Further, as numbers of male priests dramatically decline, more and more pressure is being placed on male priests to shoulder an impossible burden. Male priests are working well into the 80s as the numbers of priests continue to decline. 

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• Women and children are not safe within a patriarchy. The exclusion of women from priesthood puts women and children at risk for physical, emotional and sexual harm. We as Catholics must fully reckon with how the lack of women as equal partners in ministry contributed to the sexual abuse crisis. Children were sexually assaulted by male priests, which as then covered up by male bishops. In addition, women share frequently about ghastly experiences in confession with male priests, especially when they have the courage to confess something sexual. Many women, young women especially, simply opt out of confession altogether rather than risk experiencing impropriety, making them excluded from the sacrament. Further, women's bodies and actions are policed within a patriarchy. When women step outside of the prescribed role the Church has for them, any means necessary can be use to put them back in their place. (Ask any woman ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood how she has been treated by people who profess to be Christians.)
  
  
• The Church models and symbolizes the very sexism it attempts to critique in the world. The exclusion of women from priesthood symbolizes, sanctions and compounds the marginalization of women in the secular world. The Church cannot effectively challenge practices of abuse of women, nor the views of male superiority that undergird this abuse. This core hypocrisy undermines the very mission of the Church, stripping the Church of any credibility when trying to address the appalling abuses of women around the world.  

This immoral teaching carries an enormous cost, effectively sabotaging the Church's credibility in the public square as well as its ability to effectively live out it's mission to build a world of justice and flourishing for all creation. 

Explore the theological arguments at
Women's Ordination Conference