Feminine (not Feminist) Responsivity to and Receptivity of the Masculine Priesthood

You have to either love it...or hate it: the male priesthood. In the world in which I came of age, everyone loved priests: every boy wanted to be one at some time or another. Women, but especially mothers, especially adored priests. The admiration and affection was reciprocated: every priest loved his mother, motherhood in general and women. The greatest joy for a mother was to have her son become a priest. Cathoic culture largely energized out of a sexual but chaste dynamic of mutual attraction and admiration between priests and mothers. The weak spot in all of this was that lay men, fathers and husbands, were busy with other things and largely marginalized in regard to church life. Priests, many of them veterans of the war, were remarkably secure in their masculinity as well as their chastity and were tenderly, deeply appreciative of femininity and maternity. And so there was a marvelous interaction of affirmation and admiration: the woman in awe of the male priest and the priest honoring the femininity of mothers. All of our great Catholic women saints, canonized and uncanonized, reflected this profound self-confidence in their value as women and responded gratefully, appreciatively to the masculine priesthood: Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day, Catherine Doughterty, Adrienne von Speyr, St. Faustin, St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, and the list goes on. The idea that a woman would be a priest was as thinkable as that a man would be inseminated by another man, would conceive, give birth and nurse a child. The profound sense of gender difference was infused with admiration and reverence. This changed in the gender revolution of the 60-70s with the emergence of feminism as resentment: resentment at difference, disparagement of femininity as such, and envy of the status and privileges of masculinity. Flight from Woman, the profound book by Karl Stern, illuminates modernity as a disgust with femininity as such. With this contempt for femininity, women had no option other than a mimetic rivalary with men: we want everything that you men have, especially the priesthood. Paternity, as life-giving and protective, became reconstructed as paternalism, as oppressive, selfish, destructive. I have spent my entire 65 years with pious, practicing Catholics and I have never met a woman that wanted to be a priest. I doubt that the thought would even occur, in a real way, to any of my daughters, sisters or friends. Neverheless, an ideology of deconstructed gender, of homogeneity, and an unrecognized disparagement of the feminine spread like a pandemic throughout the 70s so that today many well-intended, intelligent Catholics despise their Church's priesthood as chauvinist, misogynist and unjust. The truth is the opposite: the Catholic Church is the strongest champion of women and of femininity. Indeed, the Church understands herself, and each of us individually, men and women, as feminine...and passionately loved by Christ our Groom, especially through his donative, sanctifying, authoritative masculine priesthood. You have got to love it!