Thanks! I always appreciate book recommendations.

A good book to read re: the Church’s teaching on this issue is Sara Butler’s The Catholic Priesthood and Women. She was asked by John Cardinal O’Connor to write it even though at the time she was sympathetic to women’s ordination and thought it best that he ask someone else to do the project. He persisted and while doing the research she came to see why the Church reserves priestly ordination to males. The book has a great bibliography, too.

It may be that women have a greater role to play in the temporal governance of the Church. However, they must find another way to do so aside from the priesthood.

“Having gone to Catholic elementary school in the 1950s and been taught the nearly 2000-year-old Catholic position on the Jews, I would never have guessed that it would change so dramatically in my lifetime. Likewise the Catholic position on freedom of religion.”

Might I suggest that the nature of the priesthood entails irreformable dogmatic teaching in a way that our interreligious attitude toward the Jews, or the relationship between Church and state, do not?

Much less was changed in Nostra Aetate about the Church’s position on the Jews than meets the eye, in any case. And as for Dignitatis Humanae, it explicitly affirmed that the Council left “untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.”

If you think otherwise, it turns out that you may have something in common with the SSPX after all.

“I am no expert on the arguments against ordaining women, but what I know does not seem to be all that convincing.”

Well, for starters, have you read Inter Insigniores, issued by the CDF under Paul VI’s imprature?

The power to bind and loose does have limits, and it does not extend to overturning the teachings or precedents of Christ.

Chris,

Having gone to Catholic elementary school in the 1950s and been taught the nearly 2000-year-old Catholic position on the Jews, I would never have guessed that it would change so dramatically in my lifetime. Likewise the Catholic position on freedom of religion. And if you read the article Woman in the hundred-year-old online Catholic Encyclopedia, I think you may agree that the attitude of the Church has changed so much in the past hundred years that it is impossible to predict what it will be in another hundred:

We doubt this will cause him to change his mind, or that of any of his progressive supporters at NCR. They’re not convinced because, for the most part, they really won’t listen. But failing that, they could at least ponder the rapid disintegration of Christian denominations that have embraced ordaining women. Judge them by their fruits, as would Gamaliel. You will find them wanting.