Who is a Catholic Priest?
It looks like the kind of question that should have a simple answer, and for most of history it did. These days it isn’t so simple, and the difficulty has everything to do with a relatively new habit: judging everything from the outside, as if we lived our lives from outside our own heads rather than inside them.
Take, for instance, the question many Catholics now ask: why can’t women be ordained? From the outside, the answer seems obvious. There is nothing a man does at the altar that a woman couldn’t do — and that is perfectly true, so long as the only legitimate vantage point is the one occupied by the scientist of religion, who studies believers the way an entomologist studies ants. From there, the case is closed.
But that vantage is impoverished. Treating human beings as biological machines or clever animals — describable entirely from the outside — fails to honor their dignity, and it isn’t even the sharpest tool we have for understanding ourselves. A better approach is to step inside: to empathize, to analyze souls by putting ourselves in another’s shoes, and to use the external view only as a complement. That is what I’ll try to do here.
When the Lord Jesus walked this earth, he kept the constant company of His apostles. They were never detached scientists analyzing God incarnate; on the contrary, the Gospels show them being trained to see people from within — from the heart — rather than from the surface, as the Pharisees did. Much of the tension between Jesus and the Jewish authorities turned on precisely this difference.
The man the apostles were chosen to know most intimately was, of course, God himself. This is where the first Catholic priests were born: a chosen few who came to know the Lord Jesus from the inside, who saw first-hand — long before they fully shared it — His consuming passion for the salvation of souls. He gave His life for that passion without hesitation. God himself chose to be tortured to death to show how much it matters to Him to win us as His friends. From this the succession of priesthood began, and it continues today.
It is no small thing to give your life for someone who loves you. It is truly extraordinary to give it for those who hate you — who hate you, above all, because your very existence shines as evidence that there is a way out of their self-deception, a way out of their death in sin (see John 3:19–20; Romans 5:7–8). To be a priest is to be this. If you are a Catholic priest, the light of self-sacrifice that extinguishes the darkness of a life lived in the lie of sin now shines through you, with Christ as its source. That is what makes you a source of sacramental reunion — and it is also what makes you the same target of hatred Christ was, for your existence alone. This is what you must be ready for.
One may object that not every priest today is like this — that not every priest even knows he is supposed to be like this. I agree — it is a tragedy. The less people understand what a priest is, the fewer vocations to the priesthood are realized. But this is not because the bar is set too high; it is because many aim at the wrong place.
The ministerial priesthood was never meant to be the calling of every Christian, nor does it stand above the other vocations. It is one of several necessary organs in the Body of the Church. Catholic teaching distinguishes two participations in Christ’s one priesthood (CCC 1546–1547): the common priesthood, which all the baptized share, and the ministerial priesthood, which is one calling among many. It is in the common priesthood that anyone — ministerial priests included — can strive to excel: in a life of faith, hope, and charity, a life lived according to the Spirit. There, every believer is called to become an instrument of God, putting the gifts received from Him fully at His disposal.
The baptismal priesthood is the universal call to sanctity, and it falls on the priest no less than on the layperson. It is tempting to imagine the opposite — that ordination is a kind of sacramental vow to take holiness seriously, leaving the rest of us excused from any such ambition. Many people quietly think this way; some priests do too. A great deal of clericalism, and much of the serious abuse that has scarred the Church, has grown out of this misconception. But in this respect — the call to sanctity, the share in Christ’s priesthood through baptism — we are all created equal, men and women alike.
But men and women are not equal in every respect. Woman, for instance, is not simply an improved version of man, equipped with the organs that facilitate the gestation of a fetus. That may sound like a caricature, but I use the harsh language deliberately, to highlight how easily our culture slides into the cold, external view of the human person. Phrases like this are now common when motherhood is discussed.
As a man, I cannot fully empathize with what it is to be a woman — to be, by her very nature, a potential mother. It is something I can admire and love, but never quite enter. And I am convinced that the potential for motherhood permeates the whole of what it means to be a woman. Equally, I believe a woman cannot fully empathize with what it is to be a man. If she could, then to be a man would amount to nothing a woman is not already — and one could imagine, without much regret, a future in which technology made men obsolete.
I could never make peace with that, but I cannot be entirely certain either. This is the point where the world without God offers a cold, emotionless answer, while the world with God — warm, loving — leaves you to faith and empathy, but not to certainty.
God became man, and the priest makes Christ’s real presence available at the altar. Do we understand the difference between man and woman well enough, today, to say it makes no difference who stands in that place? Or is the question itself a symptom — a sign that we have grown used to seeing the world in the flattened, external way I described at the beginning of this piece?
Christ chose twelve men. Not one woman. And He was not a teacher trying to keep His audience: when He established the Eucharist, He asked His Jewish disciples — for whom the dietary laws were sacred — to eat His flesh and drink His blood, and most of His followers walked away at that moment (John 6:66). A man willing to lose almost everyone over a hard teaching was not a man trimming His choices to fit the expectations of His culture. The all-male Twelve was a choice.
I don’t believe our society can afford to view motherhood — including pregnancy — the way it now does. And I don’t believe it is right to have women — every one of them a potential mother — to bear the particular hatred that, as I said earlier, falls on the priest for His existence alone.
I am not certain about the ordination of women. Perhaps no certainty is available, by God’s design. But I am fairly certain that now is not the time to change it. We are asking the question from a low place, not a high one.
I offer this as a kind of scientific observation — in the older and truer sense of the word, where science meant the patient description of something open to repeated observation by anyone willing to look. Falsify it if you can, from within your own conscience.
This article applies the method described in my book.