I thought St. JPII said the Church can't ordain women to the priesthood simply because it doesn't have the authority.
Oh, there were documents that said that the church not only did not have the authority to ordain women as priests, but also said that it lacked the authority to ordain women as deacons in the sense that men are ordained as deacons as well (Which obviously is not something that is considered definitive anymore!
). There was a whole kind of little subset of theological thought set up that tied up all ordained ministry- bishops, priests, and deacons- intrinsically together and said that what applied to one had to apply to all in this matter.
However, things change. The truth is that limbo was the sensus fidelum of the western church for nearly 1,500 years; and while it hasn't technically been overturned, you'd be hard pressed to find a recent doctrinal pronouncement or a top Cardinal (Well, you might find one, or two, but not a majority or even a large minority) who believes that's where unbaptized babies go.
The whole theology of excluding women from ordained ministry tends to come down to two basic points - 1) Jesus and the Apostles didn't do it, and 2) That the priest stands in persona christi (in the place of Christ) on the altar when consecrating the Eucharist, and that because Christ was male, the priest must be male. However, to be honest with you, I don't think these statements hold up as strong enough reasons to bar women from ordained ministry.
Looking at the first reason, Jesus tended to advance women's rights in the Gospels. That wasn't explicitly what he was there to do, and I'm not sure he'd be what is called a feminist by modern standards when we look at what he did early in the 1st century AD, but he did more for women than a lot of people did. For example, Mary Magdelene was a close adviser to him and traveled with him- that really would not have been something a lot of religious leaders would have done, and he was criticized for it. Also, there is the story of Martha and Mary, where he says the women not doing the housework and instead studying religion, which was traditionally a male role, had the better half, and defended her against accusations that she should instead be helping with the food and drink. His first appearance after the resurrection was to a group of women- who then went out and preached the word of it to the male Apostles, which, if you think about it, is often part of the job of a priest, and, also a deacon (Who reads the Gospel at mass when present, traditionally).
So, he made some inroads for women there. However, Christ did have a purpose that transcended radical gender equality, and that purpose may have been impeded if he had pushed the issue too hard in that culture at that time. He wanted a Church to last forever- so he needed it to survive in a male oriented Jewish clerical culture first, and other male oriented cultures in his present and future.
However, we see Christ pointing toward increased gender equality incrementally. One might say he was
progressing toward it incrementally. So if we look just at what Christ did and say "The end" and stop moving forward, we probably wouldn't want women in ordained ministry, but if we look at direction Christ was moving relative to his society, and then continue moving that forward, we would definitely want to ordain women, following the way he was pointing.
I put the word progressing in italics, because often when the word "progressive" is talked about, whether theologically or politically or whatever (And you can be progressive in one area and not the other- I've heard of progressive theologians who vote conservatively, and theological conservatives who vote progressively), people wonder what is it and how does it differ from the term "liberal". Well, mostly the terms are interchangeable, but with "liberal", the root of that is libertine, and means including more people and allowing more things, whereas with "progressive", the root word is progressive and means progressing in the direction of greater civil rights and so on and so forth. In practice, these are usually the same thing (Example: We allow more things, we might allow women priests. We progress in the direction of more women's rights, we might allow women priests.), but there is kind of a small spark of difference that can sometimes be important (I actually wanted the name of the forum to be Progressive Catholics originally when it relaunched like a year ago, though Liberal is fine with me, too.
But I did have some reasons for that).
Okay, so then we have issue number two, which is that the priest is sort of the stand in for Christ, and some would say, well, Jesus was a man, so we need a man to do it. However, Jesus was also a Jew, do we need a Jew to do it? Obviously not- even though all the Apostles at the Last Supper were Jews, too. Jesus probably had long hair and a beard. Do we need someone with long hair and a beard to consecrate the Eucharist? Obviously not, even though it's probably a reasonably good bet that most or all of the people at the last supper might have had beards and long hair. He was probably short by modern standards, do we need to find a short guy? Should we find people with matching hair and eye colors?
There's a sort of arbitrariness to saying that it's important to have people of the same gender as Jesus to consecrate the Eucharist, because Jesus was a lot of things, not just his gender, and we don't really try to match up anything else when selecting who to ordain.
A woman can be a spiritual father as easily as a man, in the sense that we might use the term "spiritual father". Sure, father has the connotation of a man, but we're not actually asking our priests to do things or act in a way that a women couldn't do. If part of the job was a priest was to impregnate people, I'd say, okay, we've got to find men, but it's not.
I also think also the reason a lot of Jewish men, who were the people who Jesus initially relied on to grow the Church, tended to think women couldn't serve as clerics was because in ancient Judaism, women were ritually unclean for a few days a month. We Christians don't believe that about women these days. We're farther from Judaism, and, frankly, more advanced than ancient Israel was on gender issues ethically (Modern Judaism may have similarly advanced) than perhaps the earliest Christians were.
And of course any argument centered upon consecrating the Eucharist is inapplicable to the permanent deaconiate anyway, as deacons of either gender can't consecrate the Eucharist in the Catholic tradition, unless we want to say that being a deacon is intrinsically a step on the road to a person becoming a priest, which is something we've pretty much said "Not always" to, by bringing back permanent deacons instead of only having transitional deacons. We have plenty of male deacons now who were ordained without the intent of becoming priests, and who never will become priests.
So, while I support the idea of female bishops, female priests, and female deacons, there is a middle ground between what I support and the opposite idea that some others support than women can serve in none of those ministries. There are some grounds on which someone could support female deacons, but not female priests or bishops, and they would have some words to back up drawing the line there, kind of in the middle- maybe not words I'd agree with, or that a conservative against female deacons would agree with, but words that aren't completely ridiculous.
