The Sunday opinion pages of The New York Times certainly didn’t disappoint last weekend. Former IRD intern Julia Polese brought to my attention Judith Levitt’s trumpeting for Roman Catholic women’s ordination. The author paints a foreboding picture of a power-mad Vatican. After all, the RCC leadership threatened immediate excommunication to dissident bishops who ordain female clergy. Nevertheless, bishops have tried to pass on the sacerdotal office to women, albeit in anonymity and secrecy. Thus springs the “Roman Catholic Womenpriests.” Levitt reports that a determined minority have pursued this ecclesiastical cause since the post-Vatican II 1970s. She is no longer a practicing Catholic herself but seemed to relish how “deeply it affected me emotionally…[t]he first time I saw a female Roman Catholic priest on the church altar, dressed in traditional robes, performing the Eucharist and all of the rituals that I grew up with.” Likewise, she rejoiced at the since-exploded “discovery of a scrap of papyrus making reference to Jesus’ wife, and to a female disciple.”
Unfortunately for Levitt and her feminist friends, several theological factors stand in the way of women’s ordination in liturgical, sacramental Christian traditions. By this latter phrase, I mean those communions that practice ancient worship forms and affirm such sacramental ideas as the Real Presence of Christ’s Body and Blood in Holy Communion (think Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, high church Anglican, old school Lutheran).
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