Difficulties
I find it easy to see why people have difficulties understanding certain things properly today. I am thinking, for example, of the doctrine of the reservation of Orders (i.e., that the Church has no authority to confer Holy Orders on women). This topic has come to mind because of the recent attempted ordinations in St. Louis.
This issue in particular is very hard to understand because of several cultural factors, especially: Nominalist philosophy, Pragmatism, Neo-Manichaean notion of the body’s relation to the person, etc. I am not surprised or upset in the least when people have questions about why women cannot be priests. It is certainly difficult to explain sometimes (I once had to explain it to a devout little girl in about twenty seconds on her way into the church with her mother).1
The problem in understanding this issue seems to me to be related to why we are finding it increasingly difficult to conceive of the family as a natural (much less a divine) institution. If sexual differentiation doesn’t matter for the priesthood, then it doesn’t matter for marriage either, and we are seeing all kinds of related issues on that front. The deeper problem is one of human nature. People no longer want to see sex as an essential part of a person. Rather, we like to separate the person from his body in our minds such that sexual differences are treated as purely incidental, accidental, and as not having to do with a person’s identity.
Of course, the consequences of this split between a person and his body are frightful. Sexuality is no longer thought of as involving a real relationship but is seen as merely physical, etc. Obviously, marriage and priesthood suffer. The whole sacramental system begins not to make sense, and even the Incarnation begins to mean nothing to us.2
1 She asked her question with an adorable expression: “Can girls be priests?” She was very young, so I felt kind of bad telling her “No.” I didn’t feel bad because of the truth but because I was afraid she would confuse priesthood with devotion to the Church and thus feel dissuaded from piety. In fact, I tried to go the route of explaining that God made people different and so we have to love him and serve him in different ways. If I had more time, my plan was to ask her about families (although, this is risky since you never have any idea what a child thinks constitutes a normal family), then to ask her what we call priests (”Father”), trying to explain that the Church is like a mother and a priest is like the father of a parish. I didn’t get the chance to get that far because they were on the move, though.
2 Incidentally, when did believing God simply because he is God stop being considered a good thing? There was, for example, an article on the attempted ordinations which asked, “What would Jesus do?” The question seems strange, since the Church has always held the opposite answer from the article by asking the question: “What did Jesus do?”
