Actually theologically impossible according to Catholic dogma.
When people talk about better roles for women in the church and keep talking about female ordination it's like getting mad at the Sun for not rising in a different direction and not being purple.
Even when the concept was seriously looked at the theological impossibility was always mentioned and never overcome.
The Mary Magdalene thing is not related because she wasn't one of the Apostles ordained. And she's been referred to as the Apostle to the apostles since st. Hilary I believe.
This is something the church can't change. You understand even a council lacks the authority to change it.
Even if every single Bishop in the Catholic Church wanted to do it there is no mechanism to allow it.
I understand that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger believed that the Church had no authority to ordain female clergy, and thus could not do so even if it wanted to, because God would have had to have directly granted that authority, and in Ratzinger's view, he had not. However, I do not agree with Ratzinger's interpretation of events. I don't disagree with him lightly, as he is obviously an expert in his field, but, nevertheless, I do disagree, and so do others.
To say arguing in favor of female ordination is the same as arguing that the sun should rise in another direction or be purple presupposes a certain subjective theological agreement to Ratzinger's doctrine. After all, the sun being yellow or orange and rising in the east are objective verifiable realities. We can not objectively verify in a way that would universally be satisfactory to all that the Church has no authority to ordain female bishops, priests, and deacons. It's a subjective interpretation. There's a certain line of reasoning used to support it, but that line of reasoning is debatable, as most things are.
I was never aware of that F and B .
In 1976, the Pontifical Biblical Commission issued the following as part of it's report:
"It does not seem that the New Testament by itself alone will permit us to settle in a clear way and once and for all the problem of the possible accession of women to the presbyterate.
However, some think that in the scriptures there are sufficient indications to exclude this possibility, considering that the sacraments of Eucharist and reconciliation have a special link with the person of Christ and therefore with the male hierarchy, as borne out by the New Testament.
Others, on the contrary, wonder if the church hierarchy, entrusted with the sacramental economy, would be able to entrust the ministries of Eucharist and reconciliation to women in light of circumstances, without going against Christ's original intentions."
This indicates that a debate was on-going at high levels in the church as recently as 1976, within two years of the end of Pope Paul VI's reign. I did take special care not to say that Pope Paul VI himself was in favor of female ordination, because he was not. I just said that this matter wasn't considered settled at that time, which it wasn't (Some tried to claim it was, even at the time, but very prominent churchmen held the door open or were in favor of women priests, and Pope John-Paul purged some of them and let others go through attrition- i.e. they reached mandatory retirement age, submitted their resignations, and the Pope replaced them with people who thought more like him).
Though the book isn't about this topic in general, Archbishop Rembert Weakland wrote a book called A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim's Church, where he relates a story of having to fight very hard to keep his suffragon bishop in good standing with Pope JP2 after said bishop said something positive about female ordination. Actually, that book is a good one in general to get an alternate narrative about what happened to the Church during and around JP2's Papacy. I mean an alternate relative to the one you would usually hear. I am not necessarily endorsing either narrative, but we've all heard the one, it makes sense to hear the other for the sake of completeness.
Now, that said, I do want to include as a caveat here that Archbishop Weakland left office under a cloud of scandal, which he does address in the book. When he was a priest, he had a brief consensual homosexual relationship with an adult in the 70s. It didn't come out until many decades later, and he said he believes it was a sin because it violated his vow of celibacy. So, the man may not be a Saint, but he was in some key places at some key times in the life of the Church, both in general as the head of a key religious order who had frequent audiences with Paul VI, and then later as the bishop of a diocese who was a member of the United States Council of Catholic Bishops, at a time where he could still see what it was like when it was established, and then he could see what became of it over the years. It's an interesting read.
Here is a priest (unrelated to the above) who resigned as a matter of conscience over the tightening of the screws (to use a metaphor) on the issue of women priests:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/femclrg2.htm
In his letter, he mentions a book he wrote where he make an argument in favor of female priests,
which was given an imprimatur by the Church in the 70s.
