Does Christ want women to be priests?

Have you read my new book? What they don’t teach you in Catholic College. Women in the priesthood and the mind of Christ (John Wijngaards, Acadian House Publishing 2020)

Rome maintains that the exclusion of women from holy orders is based on an irrevocable decision by Jesus himself. But is this really true? Sure, all the twelve apostles were men, but did Christ intend to exclude women for all time to come?

When someone is still alive, it is easy. We can ask him or her to explain what precisely he or she has in mind. After a person has died it becomes much more difficult. Sometimes we can determine their mind by uncovering explicit or implicit decisions in the person’s own life. At times we only have pointers. Let me illustrate the problem and possibilities in a hypothetical human example. Allow me to go into some detail. For reading someone’s mind is complex.

Imagine Marcel Dubois being a wealthy French merchant living in Marseille. Through contacts in the French colonies he got to know about leprosy. Being a philanthropist he decided, let us say, in 1876 to establish the Marcel Dubois Leprosy Fund. Marcel invested millions of his own money in the fund. He laid down that the income of the fund should specifically be used to provide medical support to lepers. After he died, administering the fund was delegated to a board of trustees.

In the course of time the trustees faced problems. They were asked to support a political campaign to make the eradication of leprosy a top priority in Sri Lanka. They turned the request down because the founder had explicitly rejected any political involvement.

Also, it was discovered that apart from the provision of medical aid, there was a need to offer psychological care to family members of lepers. The question was raised: can the Marcel Dubois Leprosy Fund finance such care given the fact that the founder had allocated the money for medical purposes? The trustees examined the question at length. They found that Marcel, while still alive, had given a grant from the fund to a mother who was looking after her leprous child. They came to the conclusion that in giving this, Marcel himself had already implicitly decided the validity of grants for psychological care in the context of leprosy.

Through a better understanding of how the infection can be prevented, leprosy was beginning to be eradicated worldwide. The leprosy fund was building up a surplus. The question that arose was: could the fund support medical relief for other diseases, let us say AIDS? The trustees found no implicit decisions on this in Marcel Dubois’ actions, but they discovered pointers that seemed to indicate his consent.

Determining the mind of Christ

How does this apply to the question of determining ‘Jesus’ mind’ on the ordination of women? Like in the example discussed above we should explore a number of questions:

· Did Jesus at any time explicitly rule out women’s taking part in the ordained ministries? I prove that the answer is a categorical NO.

· Are there pointers in his life that show Jesus would have been open to women ministering as priests? I give abundant evidence in the book of Jesus’ extraordinary respect for, and openness to, women.

· Did Jesus take implicit decisions that show he wanted women to be included in the ministry? Yes, he did. He established a rite of initiation, the sacrament of baptism, that is the same for men and for women. And women were there at the Last Supper when he commissioned all his disciples: “Do this in memory of me!”

· Last not least, can we determine Christ’s mind for the Church today, what he wants in our own time? Yes, we can. Jesus was not just a human founder. He poured his own Spirit into us. He promised that in future eras to come that Spirit would reveal his mind to us.

“I still have many things to say to you
but they would be too much for you now.
When the Spirit of Truth comes
she will lead you to the fulness of truth,
since she will not be speaking as from herself
but will say only what she has learnt [from me].
She will explain to you
things that lie in the future.” (John 16,12-14)

What they don’t teach you in Catholic College is now available in bookshops, from the publisher and on Amazon, both in print and as an eBook. It is also available as an Apple iBook.

John Wijngaards

Here are some links to where the book can be ordered:

Acadian direct (direct from the publisher – US)
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Waterstones
Apple Books on your iPhone or iPad