Heresy and the Ordination of Women

"Mom? I think I might want to be a priest when I grow up."

It's about 1992. I've just gotten back from Confession.

"But [deadname]," my mother replies, "women can't be priests. You can be a nun, though."

Even at the time, this was obviously unfair to me. Nuns aren't the female equivalent of priests; they're the female equivalent of monks. More importantly, at the time, I still defined myself as a person-who-could-have-children-someday. What, I thought, was the point of surrendering my ability to have children completely if I couldn't even say the Mass on Sundays?

Forbidding women from being priests is downright sexist, and I knew it even back then. My vagina does not render me incapable of making a commitment to a deity. My ovaries are not somehow cursed to prevent me from understanding or fulfilling the various tasks that a priest is expected to perform.

But it's worse than that.

In short: the prohibition of women from the priesthood of several Christian denominations, including but not limited to Roman Catholicism, is, itself, heretical.

Let me explain. I was taught, from an early age, that to become a priest, monk, or nun was a vocation, a calling. You don't just choose one day to go to seminary; you are called. To say that women cannot become priests is to imply that women cannot be called to become priests.

And who does the calling?

No less than God, Themself.

And God, according to Christian theology since at least the Council of Nicaea, is all-powerful. This property of the Christian god is non-negotiable. To believe otherwise is considered an extreme heresy in every currently-surviving denomination of Christianity. All 2,000+ of them.

The Catholic Church has, in its list of excommunicable offenses, "simulating the ordination of a woman." (Imagine what the penalty for actually doing it must be!) Again, by insisting that women cannot be ordained, and that doing so is excommunicable, the Catholic Church is saying, in effect, that God is incapable of calling women and transmasculine people to the priesthood.

Let me run that by you again in case you missed it. The Catholic Church says that God, who is supposed to be completely all-powerful, is incapable of calling a person to the priesthood, if that person happened to be born with a vagina. It is saying that there is a thing that God cannot do.

If God is all-powerful, then God can call whomever he wants to the priesthood, gender be damned. If he can only call (cis, heterosexual) men to the priesthood, then logically he's not all-powerful. You cannot have it both ways.

To be clear: I am no longer a Christian, and haven't been since 2008. I no longer have a dog in this fight. Universally-recognized ordination of women by Christianity does not affect my life one way or another. But when you consider that the refusal to allow women as priests strikes at the heart of the very definition of God as omnipotent, that seems like something the Church really should fix, and soon.