Your Eminence:
In an article recently published by a major German Catholic website, you suggested that the question of whether the Church can ordain women has not been definitively settled: “I cannot imagine how a Church can continue to exist in the long run if half of God’s people suffer because they have no access to ordained ministry.” Putting aside for a moment the questions of what, and how, suffering is caused by the Church’s ancient practice of calling only men to Holy Orders, your formulation raises questions about the past, present, and future.
Are you, for example, suggesting that there has been something essentially wrong with the Catholic understanding of Holy Orders for two millennia? How would such a notion square with the Lord’s promise to preserve his Church in truth through the continual outpouring of the Holy Spirit (John 15:16, 16:13)? The question of who can be admitted to Holy Orders has never been understood as a secondary matter of ecclesiastical discipline; it has been understood to engage the very nature of the ordained ministry, which is a constitutive part of the structure of the Church — and the Church is Christ’s creation, not our own. Has the Church misunderstood Christ for two thousand years? Or did Christ get it wrong in structuring the Church and its ordained ministry as they have been structured for two millennia?
As to your inability to imagine a future for the Church in which women are not called to Holy Orders, doesn’t that suggest a rather clericalist understanding of the Kingdom-life we are living now (Mark 1:15)? If the Kingdom broke into history during the Lord’s time among us, and if that inbreaking and its promise of eternal life is the reality in which we live now (however often we forget it), how can “half of God’s people” be cut off from the fullness of life in the Spirit? And what does your fear for the future say about your understanding of the inbreaking of the Kingdom in the past? Was Our Lady cut off from living the fullness of the Kingdom-life proclaimed by her son because he did not call her to Holy Orders? Were Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, and Edith Stein, all patron saints of Europe? Was your mother? Was mine?
Then there is the present. The Catholic Church takes divine revelation seriously, which means that God’s creation of human beings as men and women — equally human, distinctively human, and complementarily human — was not simply a matter of the Creator working through the mechanisms of evolutionary biology. Genesis 1:27 — “Male and female he created them” — is not mere description; it is revelatory of deep truths built into the human condition. That is why the Catholic Church does not and cannot accept the late-modern and post-modern conceit of a unisex humanity in which maleness and femaleness are reduced to differentiated plumbing.
In the fifth chapter of the Letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul describes the Lord’s relationship to his Church as spousal: the Lord loves the Church as a husband loves his wife. The ordained priest, as the Catholic Church understands him, embodies that spousal relationship of Christ to the Church. Priests are not just members of a clerical caste licensed to conduct certain ecclesiastical functions. Rather, the ordained priest is an icon of Christ the High Priest, the spouse of the Church.
Unisex cultures find that idea hard to grasp. So do cultures that imagine that two men or two women can “marry” each other. But the Church is not obliged to surrender to the confusions of any culture. And it certainly cannot sacrifice to those confusions its conviction that God disclosed important truths about our humanity when the Holy Spirit inspired the author of Genesis 1:27 to write what he did, and when that same Spirit inspired St. Paul to write Ephesians 5.
St. Paul also described this spousal relationship of Christ to the Church, which is crucial to the Catholic Church’s understanding of who may be called to Holy Orders, as a “great mystery” — meaning a deep truth of faith that can only be grasped in love, however carefully we try to understand it intellectually. Permit the suggestion, Your Eminence, that the Church’s pastors should avoid causing further confusion (and, indeed, whatever suffering is caused by those confusions) by helping God’s people embrace the mysteries of faith in love, rather than by suggesting that what has been settled by divine revelation and the authoritative teaching of the Church (in the 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis) is not, in fact, settled.
Yours in the fellowship of Easter faith – GW
(Note: George Weigel’s column ‘The Catholic Difference’ is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.)
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2 Tim 4:3-4 “For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine but, following their own desires and insatiable curiosity will accumulate teachers
and will stop listening to the truth and will be diverted to myth.”
Mr. Weigel you were to nice to the Cardinal. You should have mentioned
Pope John Paul II declared in 1994 that the Church has no authority to ordain women, a stance confirmed by subsequent popes and a 2025 Vatican commission, which also voted against ordaining women as deacons.
I think the Cardinal should find a new Church.
The Church has no authority over the ordination of women.
?
The Church has no authority to overrule God nor any immutable truth.
Very relevant Scritural citation.
As the late Cardinal Pell observed in a different context, this guy is “explicitly heretical.”
Since Bishop Prevost met with David Axelrod on April 9th and became a political operative of the extreme leftist Democrat Party, I no longer have any confidence in him as a spiritual leader. Same holds true for his henchmen – McElroy, Tobin and Cupich. They’ve forfeited their right to be spiritual leaders as well.
You should not be a Deacon of the Church. If I were a bishop, I’d suspend your faculties.
If I were a bishop, I would warn you of your possible excommunication for indifference towards episcopal heresies.
Me too.
Why don’t you join the Episcopal Church of USA or one of the nutty ultra evangelical megachurches that Hesgeth and other evil Trump henchmen belong to.
With all due respect, Cardinal Hollerich is simply doing a convincing imitation of an illiterate buffoon.
FIRST, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis: “Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful” (John Paul II, 1994).
SECOND, in the spirit of interreligious goulash, the cardinal is also channeling the Shinto masters of old: In an interview with The Pillar, Cardinal Hollerich remarked: “In Japan, I got to know a different way of thinking. The Japanese don’t think in terms of the European logic of opposites. We say: It is black, therefore it is not white. The Japanese say: It is white, but maybe it is also black. You can combine opposites in Japan without changing your point of view.” https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/who-is-cardinal-hollerich.
SUMMARY: Female ordination means transgender Holy Orders.
Yep, any religion will do except true Catholicism.
The door has been closed on ordaining women, but not married men. My Jesuit friend tells me that theologically, ordaining married permanent deacons is not really a big deal. We can explore that.
There aren’t large numbers of married men beating down doors to become priests, though. Even Protestant seminaries have fewer candidates these days.
Priestly celibacy is only a discipline, not a dogma but the real problem is commitment. We’re not committing to marriage or anything else lasting much these days.
The married priest is not a bad idea, would likely bring in some leaders, but presents an issue of financing their families. We need younger priests as shepherds in our communities, not rushing between mass locations, but most parishes can’t compete with the necessary dollars needed for that size of payroll. Not an insurmountable one, but a married priest would not be allowed to use artificial birth control, so how many kids can a parish support? Where will they live?
It’s a horrible idea. We don’t need even more priests ending up being pro-abortion, pro-contraception, and pro-divorce.
How would a priest with 10 kids and a wife that covers her head at mass be any of those?
We don’t need ANY of those type priests that you mention. If any Catholic participates or encourages abortion are they not excommunicated?
You lost us at “Jesuit.” The once brilliant order now pursues the natural order alone, deciding that a supernatural order is not credible and that Hegel and Marx best understand history, not Paul, Augustine or Aquilinas. The sacrament of orders, even for a deacon, is a participation in the Headship of Christ, the groom, in His Church, the bride. This is the fundamental Catholic anthropology which makes any ordination of women impossible. If Rome attempts it we will then have the question of a Council to depose a heretical pope. Pray that current ignorance in some places of leadership (see Jesuit above) do not lead to this critical moment.
I doubt they ever will, the mouth-flappers will gain a few moments in the spot light but it will never happen.
As I posted at Catholic Register: From St JPII Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. How this cardinal (or anyone else), in the face of this strongly and definitively worded statement, can defy the clear teaching of a sitting Pontiff is beyond me:
“Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”
GW, thank you—that’s nice, but please add a charitable warning, and really this should come from the Vicar of Christ to his own cardinal and universal flock. If we believe that Holy Orders is one united sacrament with three major orders (diaconate, presbyterate, episcopate) — not distinct and separate sacraments, then the cardinal and those he’s led astray are in danger of rejecting the deposit of faith, which places their souls in grave danger of damnation.
“Dubium: Whether the teaching that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women, which is presented in the Apostolic Letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis to be held definitively, is to be understood as belonging to the deposit of faith. Responsum: Affirmative. This teaching requires definitive assent, since, founded on the written Word of God, and from the beginning constantly preserved and applied in the Tradition of the Church, it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium (cf. Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium 25, 2). Thus, in the present circumstances, the Roman Pontiff, exercising his proper office of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32), has handed on this same teaching by a formal declaration, explicitly stating what is to be held always, everywhere, and by all, as belonging to the deposit of the faith.”
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19951028_dubium-ordinatio-sac_en.html
IYKYK
Open Response to GW:
“Are you, for example, suggesting that there has been something essentially wrong with the Catholic understanding of Holy Orders for two millennia?”
Essentially no, but in its exclusivity, yes.
“How would such a notion square with the Lord’s promise to preserve his Church in truth through the continual outpouring of the Holy Spirit (John 15:16, 16:13)?”
The same way we square the many other errors the Church has made throughout the centuries. If Church teaching develops, then Church teaching is not complete at every moment of her existence, but is open to further development. And timing is everything.
“The question of who can be admitted to Holy Orders has never been understood as a secondary matter of ecclesiastical discipline; it has been understood to engage the very nature of the ordained ministry, which is a constitutive part of the structure of the Church — and the Church is Christ’s creation, not our own.”
No one is denying that. Some are just denying that gender is an impediment.
“Has the Church misunderstood Christ for two thousand years?”
Although the Church is Christ’s Mystical Body, her understanding of Christ is always imperfect and open to greater depth of understanding, just as a woman comes to understand her husband more fully and perfectly as the years pass.
“Or did Christ get it wrong in structuring the Church and its ordained ministry as they have been structured for two millennia?”
What a terrible anachronism, that is.
“As to your inability to imagine a future for the Church in which women are not called to Holy Orders, doesn’t that suggest a rather clericalist understanding of the Kingdom-life we are living now (Mark 1:15)?”
No it does not. Ordination and clerical status are two different things. The latter can be lost once acquired, not the former.
“If the Kingdom broke into history during the Lord’s time among us, and if that inbreaking and its promise of eternal life is the reality in which we live now (however often we forget it), how can “half of God’s people” be cut off from the fullness of life in the Spirit?”
Paul says: “Do not stifle the Holy Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 5:19). It seems that this presupposes that the Spirit can be stifled.
“And what does your fear for the future say about your understanding of the inbreaking of the Kingdom in the past?”
It says that human beings really do have the power to stifle the Holy Spirit, and that is something to be concerned about.
“Was Our Lady cut off from living the fullness of the Kingdom-life proclaimed by her son because he did not call her to Holy Orders?”
No. Not everyone is called to Holy Orders. But the Lord does call some to serve in a very specific way. And it is very possible that certain others in the Church can be an obstacle to genuine progress.
“That is why the Catholic Church does not and cannot accept the late-modern and post-modern conceit of a unisex humanity in which maleness and femaleness are reduced to differentiated plumbing”.
This is a diversion, and a straw man.
“…Rather, the ordained priest is an icon of Christ the High Priest, the spouse of the Church”.
Yes indeed, and a woman can also be an icon of Christ.
“Permit the suggestion, Your Eminence, that the Church’s pastors should avoid causing further confusion (and, indeed, whatever suffering is caused by those confusions)”
I’m willing to bet that the Cardinal’s remarks did not cause confusion as much as it confirmed the deepest intuition of the vast majority of the faithful. I would bet that they brought more joy and hope than suffering.
This made me laugh out loud. It made me think of exactly how Satan works. Jesus can be explicit and yet Satan will twist and turn and before you know it has led astray the simple minded and those that do not know the Spirit.
Jesus can only heal those who turn towards him. There can be war in heaven and a third of the host can be thrown out, we should not be surprised that there are those who still consciously choose to follow after them and ignore the Truth and the Way.
God bless all those who seek after the One, Holy and True Savior of mankind.
Amen!
Open Response to GW:
“Are you, for example, suggesting that there has been something essentially wrong with the Catholic understanding of Holy Orders for two millennia?”
Essentially no, but in its exclusivity, yes.
“How would such a notion square with the Lord’s promise to preserve his Church in truth through the continual outpouring of the Holy Spirit (John 15:16, 16:13)?”
The same way we square the many other errors the Church has made throughout the centuries. If Church teaching develops, then Church teaching is not complete at every moment of her existence, but is open to further development. And timing is everything.
“The question of who can be admitted to Holy Orders has never been understood as a secondary matter of ecclesiastical discipline; it has been understood to engage the very nature of the ordained ministry, which is a constitutive part of the structure of the Church — and the Church is Christ’s creation, not our own.”
No one is denying that. Some, like the Pontifical Biblical Commission, are just denying that gender is an impediment, at least from the point of view of Scripture.
“Has the Church misunderstood Christ for two thousand years?”
Although the Church is Christ’s Mystical Body, her understanding of Christ is always imperfect and open to greater depth of understanding, just as a woman comes to understand her husband more fully and perfectly as the years pass.
“Or did Christ get it wrong in structuring the Church and its ordained ministry as they have been structured for two millennia?”
What a terrible anachronism, that is.
“As to your inability to imagine a future for the Church in which women are not called to Holy Orders, doesn’t that suggest a rather clericalist understanding of the Kingdom-life we are living now (Mark 1:15)?”
No it does not. Ordination and clerical status are two different things. The latter can be lost once acquired, not the former.
“If the Kingdom broke into history during the Lord’s time among us, and if that inbreaking and its promise of eternal life is the reality in which we live now (however often we forget it), how can “half of God’s people” be cut off from the fullness of life in the Spirit?”
Paul says: “Do not stifle the Holy Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 5:19). It seems that this presupposes that the Spirit can be stifled.
“And what does your fear for the future say about your understanding of the inbreaking of the Kingdom in the past?”
It says that human beings really do have the power to stifle the Holy Spirit, and that is something to be concerned about.
“Was Our Lady cut off from living the fullness of the Kingdom-life proclaimed by her son because he did not call her to Holy Orders?”
No. Not everyone is called to Holy Orders. But the Lord does call some to serve in a very specific way. And it is very possible that certain others in the Church can be an obstacle to genuine progress.
“That is why the Catholic Church does not and cannot accept the late-modern and post-modern conceit of a unisex humanity in which maleness and femaleness are reduced to differentiated plumbing”.
This is a diversion, a straw man.
“…Rather, the ordained priest is an icon of Christ the High Priest, the spouse of the Church”.
Yes indeed, and a woman can also be an icon of Christ.
“Permit the suggestion, Your Eminence, that the Church’s pastors should avoid causing further confusion (and, indeed, whatever suffering is caused by those confusions)”
I’m willing to bet that the Cardinal’s remarks did not cause confusion as much as it confirmed the deepest intuition of the vast majority of the faithful. I would bet that they brought more joy and hope than suffering.
We read: “If Church teaching develops, then Church teaching is not complete at every moment of her existence, but is open to further development. And timing is everything.”
Timing is NOT everything; but in your mind contradiction seems to be…and, in “The Development of Christian Doctrine,” Cardinal Newman (“the father of Vatican II”), explains the difference between your “development” and mutation:
“I venture to set down seven notes of varying cogency, independence, and applicability to discriminate healthy developments of an idea from its state of corruption and decay, as follows: There is no corruption IF IT RETAINS”:
(1) One and the same TYPE [e.g., doctrine/natural law v. a disconnected degree of pastoral “accompaniment”?],
(2) The same PRINCIPLES [e.g., sound philosophy v. neo-Hegelianism?],
(3) The same ORGANIZATION [e.g., the Barque of Peter v. all religions as equivalent];
(4) If its beginnings ANTICIPATE its subsequent phases [e.g., the male priesthood v. transgender Holy Orders],
(5) Its later phenomena PROTECT and subserve its earlier [e.g., Ordinatio Sacerdotalis v. the magisterum of doubting Thomas James];
(6) If it has a power of assimilation and REVIVAL [e.g., New Evangelization v. der Synodal Weg], and
(7) A vigorous ACTION from first to last…” [e.g., steadfastness v. the bogus principle of gradualism].
Thank you Mr. Beaulieu, you saved me a lot of work.
I’ll make it simple for you, your false renditions of history notwithstanding. Truth never changes. All truth originates, eternally, in the mind of God and God does not change His mind.
Thomas James: “Development of Doctrine” means expansions of understanding and application of doctrine, never its contradiction.
The moral imperative against slaughtering the unborn represents an elaboration of the Fifth commandment.
Not complicated when our minds are honest.
All very true Mr. Weigel. And in the past couple of weeks we have had a German bishop say that Homosexuals and Transgenders are part of God’s plan of creation, and a Belgian bishop saying he plans to ordain married men in 2028.
This follows years under the Biden administration with numerous United States Cardinals and Bishops adimately and publicly refusing to obey Canon Law 915 which requires bishops to refuse communion to those who “obstinately persist in manifest grave sin.” And the response from the Vatican has been and will be?
Pope Leo inserts himself into international issues of which he is gravely deficient in functional proficiency, but neglects to call to order rogue clergy of leftest heretical stripe.
What does this say of him?
We are scandalously poorly served.
Why doesnt some pope with gumption put a nail in this coffin? End the discussion of women priests in clear and plain English. The fact that the discussion has been lingering for so long has now prompted the more leftist Bishops and Cardinals to threaten this open ordination of women. How is this good for the church?
I am a woman and in no way feel disenfranchised because of the church’s current position refusing women ordination. Is there a real need for this? many of our convents can use some women to step forward to fill the ranks. Why do they want to be priests?One could even question the housing logistics which could be a problem if this would take place. Not to mention the expense of seperate housing.
Have attended some religious ceremonies in other denominations as a guest, where the ceremony was conducted by a woman “priest”. No thanks. For me, it was a distraction and a major turn off.
Does this Cardinal have women beating down his door demanding this? I doubt it. Just because a few people are LOUD doesnt mean what they are demanding is right.
“Why doesnt some pope with gumption put a nail in this coffin?”
One did. Petulant children refuse to listen.
Right. JPII did, and two thousand years previously, Jesus did.
I am a life-long practicing Catholic, almost 80 years old, a mother and a grandmother. My spiritual life has not suffered because we have no women priests. To my mind, the big question is :Why do women want to be priests? You do not have to be a priest to bring people closer to God – witness Mother Teresa in our own day and the women proclaimed Doctors of the Church who still inspire us.
What are we really talking about here ? -power, prestige, self-esteem, recognition?
The actual number of women who want to be priests is incredibly small. Sinead O’Connor was such an individual. After ripping up the Pope’s picture in 1992. Her homelife was a complete disaster. She gave an even worse homelife to her own children, as attested to by her son’s suicide at age 17. Everything about her was an intellectual, moral and spiritual chaos. She slept around and declared herself partially homosexual. She penned a screed “No Man’s Woman” but attempted suicide when Peter Gabriel refused to have her as anything but a transient receptacle. One of her “marriages” lasted 11 months.
In 1999 she was “ordained” by some organized apostate “Bishop”, and in 2018 converted to Islam and then went on anti-Christian and anti-Jewish rants. She died at 56 of COPD, a likely sign of chronic inhalation of “products of combustion”.
This is who wants to be a female priest.
Errata:
“After ripping up the Pope’s picture in 1992, in 1999 she was “ordained” by some organized apostate “Bishop””
She’d have lots of stories for her homilies!
I’m not sure if this comment will be censured or not, but the most stable female out there, at certain times, can be totally irrational. Of course, retired men can have their moments as well.
Surprisingly, so can the young.
It’s pride. You will find that the same people calling for female priest also want to change the church teachings on marriage, divorce, and morality. Female priesthood is just a way to open the door.
Alas,Fides et Ratio in Catholic theology espoused by Pope John Paul II in one of encyclicals has vanished from within certain clerical circles.
There was once Objective Truth and Logos, involving rigor, logic and intellectual gravitas.
Replaced by a sentimental Catholicism focused on emotional experience, subjective feeling, and absurd empathy.
Personified in the new Archbishop of Canterbury Mullally of the Anglican ecclesial communion .
If we follow the logic of Lewis’s ‘Abolition of Man’, this vacuous theology will vanish and be replaced as suggested in Fr Ratzinger’s 1960’s prophecy
Dear cardinal: if you are going to continue undermining centuries of church teaching, you are no longer spiritually and morally qualified to lead the flock. Please resign immediately.
“As for a man who is factious, after admonishing him once or twice, have nothing more to do with him.” Titus 3:10
“Save yourselves from this crooked generation.” Acts 2:40.
When Christ is no longer the one you follow, ideologies quickly move in to fill the vacuum.
This Hollerich guy is beyond tiresome. Just sayin’.
Hollerich’s religion is sanction of the human condition rather than sanctification by Christ.
The Cardinal is free to join the Anglican Communion. He could, in theory, have everything he claims to want by tomorrow yet he doesn’t. Why? Because then he would simply become another liberal Anglican cleric, one voice among many rather than a figure of influence within the Catholic Church. That raises a serious question about his motivation. Too often, what drives these efforts for change appears less like pastoral concern and more like ego.
There is also a troubling pattern of intolerance. Those pushing for reform frequently show little hesitation in marginalizing the millions of Catholics who remain committed to the Church’s traditional teachings. They seem to forget that millions of us actually believe this stuff.
As a former Anglican, I have seen this dynamic firsthand. Dialogue is encouraged, up to the point where it produces the desired outcome. Once that happens, the conversation abruptly and aggressively ends. Those who continue to uphold traditional doctrine are no longer engaged but sidelined, dismissed and ostracized.
A case in point is the recent appointment of a female Archbishop of Canterbury. This was done despite deep and ongoing opposition from large parts of the global Anglican Communion, and with full awareness that it would intensify existing divisions. For many, it confirmed a pattern: once a particular direction is chosen, dissenting voices—especially those holding to traditional teaching—are no longer meaningfully engaged but increasingly sidelined.
At that point, “dialogue” begins to look less like genuine discernment and more like a mechanism for enforcing change. It becomes, in effect, a form of spiritual bullying.
I would greatly appreciate it if liberal clerics would stop trying to change my religion! He should also know that I’m not a bad person for believing what the Church asks me to believe.
Where was Weigel over the last 13 years? The questions he now asks could have and should have been applied to Francis.