Marian Devotion and Women Priests

Classic Catholic devotion to Mary our Mother immediately rules out the possibility of woman priests. Anyone who loves and (hyper)venerates our Lady intuitively understands that Catholic woman priests are an impossibility. This knowledge is usually not discursive or cognitive: the believer knows with certainty but cannot necessarily explain it to the outsider, the skeptic. You either “get it” or you do not: what is common sense within the gestalt of Catholic faith becomes a logical incoherence and a moral abomination to the modern, secular, late-Protestant mindset. It is like explaining love to one who has never been loved: it is so primal and foundational that it cannot be constructed or explained from other concepts. The demand for woman priests was only possible in a post-Council Church that had largely demoted Mary from her pre-eminent salvific role to a lower status of mere disciple, one of us, not significantly superior in any way.

To the Catholic imagination, Mary is a creature, one of us, but distinguished from all the rest of creation by her perfect, unbroken, whole-hearted union with God. She is the supreme and perfect creature: “our tainted nature’s solitary boast” (Wordsworth.) She is Queen of heaven and earth; the privileged sovereign within creation, always submissive, perfectly, to the Creator, her son and his father; sovereign over the angels, archangels, apostles, martyrs, popes, and saints; Immaculately Conceived; virgin mother; enabler of the redemption by her fiat; bodily assumed into heaven; mediatrix of all graces; and the very heart of the Church.

A Catholic’s attitude towards Mary and the maternal Church is filial: an analogue of his union with God. Mary and the Church inter-fuse each other and nurture us, their children. The child of God-and-Mary-and-Church is therefore, docile, receptive and submissive to Mary-and-Church as they mirror the love and truth of Christ Himself. It is not, then, for the child to instruct and reform our Mother, to dissent.

The liberal, modern and feminist attitude is best understood as non-filial: “I am not a dependent and obedient child; I am an autonomous adult and the equal of anyone. Everyone is the same; no one is different or superior. I am obedient to no one except my own choice.” Modernity, void of the sacred and the enchanted, levels everyone so there is a total absence of authority, hierarchy, obedience, and filiality. Female becomes functionally equivalent of male, child of adult, animal of human. Creation is not surrendered to its Creator; earth not impregnated by heaven; femininity not yielded to masculinity; and child not docile before father and mother.

By sharpest contrast, the Catholic faith elevates, to a sublime position, Mary our Queen and Mother, and with her all women. Motherhood is viewed as pristine and sublime. There is nothing a male does that can compare. In the most intimate manner conceivable, the mother cooperates with God in the conception of a unique, bodied-spirit who will live eternally. This is hardly “reproduction,” a term which applies to photo-copiers and factories, but procreation, miraculous creation from nothing. By comparison, the masculine contribution is distant and marginal. John Paul himself quoted Balthasar on the primacy of the Marian over the Petrine dimensions within the Church. And so, within my own family I now have two nephews studying for the priesthood and a nephew and daughter consciously pursuing the evangelical life of poverty, chastity and obedience. Which pair is closer to the heart of the Church? The seminarians will be invested with the power associated with Church governance, preaching and dispensing of the sacraments. But the consecrated life brings one closer to the Marian heart of the Church. And so, within the kingdom of God, there is a preeminence of the vowed life. This is incomprehensible to the modern mindset.

The Catholic Church cannot and will not, ever, ordain women priests. To do so would be to pervert the inner form, gestalt, soul and essence of the faith. A son or daughter of the Church lives immersed in a web of filial relationships, all of them hyper-gendered. Our hearts surrender to our heavenly Father, Mary our Mother, holy mother the Church, our Holy Father, and all the spiritual mothers and fathers, virgins, brothers and sisters. May we grow always deeper in our filial faith!