“It’d also be terrific to have a medium rare porterhouse steak on Good Friday. Doesn’t make it right, though.”
I was not being a wise guy. I was really inquiring why there cannot be women priests. Throwing another mystery at me doesn’t answer my question. We have so much terrible sin in this world, I would think the opportunity to add quality, moral, caring clergy would be a plus.
It depends where the clergy is grounded, what are their roots, what is the basis of their ordination and what is their theology.
There is a general assumption, at least in Europe and North America, that the Catholic Church’s insistence on a male priesthood is an obscure anomaly, which endures only because the popes have refused to move with the times.
Yet the times have often favored a female priesthood and never more so than when Christ ordained His first priests, nearly 2,000 years ago. Virtually all the pagan religions of His day had priestesses, and it would have been entirely normal and natural for Him to choose women for this task. He had, moreover, a number of excellent potential candidates, from His own Mother, who accompanied Him at His first miracle and stood with Him as He suffered on the cross, to Mary Magdalene or the women of Bethany. Instead, He chose only men, and He remained immovable on this, continuing right to the end to exhort and train them all, leaving thus a Church which turned out to be safely founded on a rock. From those twelve men a direct line of apostolic succession has given the Catholic Church the bishops and priests it has today.
There are at least two good ways to understand it.
First, Christ instituted the priesthood. He instituted it exclusively among males. This is how the Church, both east and west, has always understood it, and why she doesn't see herself having either the right or the authority to change it.
Second, the symbolism of the Mass is nuptial. The priest stands as an icon of Christ the Bridegroom. To try to make a woman image Christ the Bridegroom is just nonsensical and impossible.
Additionally, there's a pragmatic issue. Every Protestant denomination with women clergy is somewhere on a trajectory toward approving homosexual relationships. The other thing they're on a trajectory toward is losing all of their male, heterosexual membership.