People assume as the popes have done that the fact that Jesus had no female apostles meant that he didn't want there to be women priests.
This is not founded upon any of Christ's teachings just human supposition.
Jesus may just as well have picked men so that he wasn't traipsing around Judea traveling with women and men in his "entourage." certainly would have been a major distraction at the time.
It is men who make up the rules of the church and interpret God's intentions and some day men will see the light. Of course, all conservative catholics will be scandalized for a hundred years and line up in the longest line for communion.
If all Scripture is given by God, which the book itself attests, why do you reject the portions in Acts and Timothy that describe the qualifications for deacons and elders, that talk about needing to be the ‘husband of one wife.” Women cannot be husbands no more than they can be fathers.
It’s not so much who he traveled with that’s the issue. It’s who he *ordained*—who he consecrated and set up as leaders of the Church. Jesus picked only men like Peter, and those men picked only men like Linus, Cletus, and Clement. Then those men picked only men. Then those men picked only men. And on and on to today.
Meanwhile nobody among all those men seemed to care about nationality. Peter was a Jew, but he ordained Clement who was a Roman. There were Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, and later on Gauls and Ethiopians. If Thomas indeed made it to India as tradition states, he probably appointed an Indian. You’d think that if there were a problem with nationality, it would have come out somewhere along the line. But it didn’t. So it must not have been a problem.
It’s Jesus’s Church, not ours, and while He gives us liberty in a number of different areas, no one ever thought, for 2000 years, that anyone had any liberty to ordain women to the priesthood. And this was, mind you, smack in the midst of pagan cultures who had priestesses, so I don’t think the opportunity wasn’t there.