Why Doesn’t the Church Allow Women to Be Priests?

The debate over whether women should be ordained priests keeps coming up, gathering steam through the unfolding of the Vatican’s Synod on Synodality.

People in favor of such ordination often claim that the Church has discriminated against women throughout its history and needs to make amends. (We should acknowledge that some Church leaders have engaged in discriminatory behavior against women. Even St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle’s biology about women, said things that we should distance ourselves from.)

Others point to the fact that, in the early Church, women engaged in many ministries, although not as ordained ministers.

Pope St. John Paul II declared that the Church’s ordinary magisterium has settled the question, restricting ordination to men alone.

This isn’t because the Church is anti-women, as some people think. Here are some reasons why ordination to the diaconate and priesthood are reserved for men alone.

Jesus chose only men as His apostles.
The apostles were the first priests and bishops of the Church. All 12 were men, called by Christ out of their daily lives to be the foundation of His Church.

One view is that Jesus didn’t include women because He was restricted by the cultural norms of first-century Palestine.

But Jesus is God, so nothing can restrain Him. He acts with complete freedom.

Also, no one can seriously accuse our Lord of looking down on women. He challenged cultural norms by interacting with women, including them among His closest friends, and—above all—making His mother the greatest saint of all time!

Equality doesn’t mean sameness.
Every aspect of creation reflects only a sliver of God’s glory. Every created thing is a finite being, which means it can’t communicate the entirety of God.

God made men and women equal but different. They both are created in the image of their creator and participate in human nature, but they reflect different aspects of God’s love. Far from being something bad, this should lead us to rejoice!

For example, mothers experience a bond with their babies that men will never feel, while men who are ordained priests are blessed to act in the Person of Christ during Mass.

A final point to remember is that none of us—man or woman—needs to suffer sadness seeing the gifts God has bestowed upon another person. He has given us what is best suited to us in our journey to heaven. We all have a chance at getting there. Once we do, what we did on this earth will matter less than experiencing full communion with the Holy Trinity.