Posted by Philip St. Romain on May 17, 19101 at 11:10:44:
In Reply to: Re: Why doesn't the Catholic Church ordain women? posted by Gold Acacia on May 16, 19101 at 15:34:47:
: I'd like to add my 2 cents if it's okay.
OK, G. But most Biblical scholars would concede that some of those teachings were not necessarily from the Lord. Paul himself says as much. They seemed to be accomodations to social conventions.
The primary reason that women's ordination has not been allowed in Catholicism has nothing to do with any of those points--at least not in the published documents. It has to do with the sacramental role of the priest, who stands in persona christi (in the person of Christ) with respect to the Church. The Church, here, is understood as the Bride of Christ, and the priest, in representing Christ, is thought to more clearly represent the spousal counterpart to the Bride because of his male gender. The resistance to ordaining women is that it would confuse this spousal paradigm, which has its roots in Eph. 5 and other scriptures.
Naturally, there have been some well-articulated responses to this objection, the main one being that in Christ there is no male nor female, Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, etc., and that it's wrong to take the image of Church as Bride too literally--or to assign a gender idenfication to the symbolism.
As I mentioned earlier, an open discussion about all this will need to happen sooner or later to come to a fuller consensus than now exists. The present Pope apparently found the topic too divisive and closed down the discussion.