Catholic Church must re-examine teaching on women’s ordination says Irish theologian

The Church’s claim to have no authority to ordain women as priests has been likened to the “tardy” Christian response to the “scandal of slavery” by Irish theologian Fr Gerry O’Hanlon SJ.

The author and member of the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice described the core arguments for the exclusion of women from the priesthood as “unpersuasive”.

He was speaking as a woman, Bishop of London Sarah Mullally, was chosen as Archbishop of Canterbury for the first time.

O’Hanlon said it was time the Church “stopped beating about the bush and undertook a fair and open re-examination of current teaching”.

The Jesuit urged the hundreds of delegates, including bishops, who are due to attend the pre-synodal assembly of the Irish Synodal Pathway in Kilkenny later this month to request the Vatican to revisit the question of the ordination of women.

The preparatory document for the Irish pre-synodal assembly, Baptised and Sent, shows that the role of women, including ordination, is still a lively and contested topic, he noted.

Speaking at the launch of Soline Humbert’s memoir A Divine Calling about her vocation to priesthood, he said if God were truly behind this exclusion and this could be convincingly shown, then many would accept it. But “failing a persuasive explanation, one must suspect bias”.

Highlighting how the Pontifical Biblical Commission in the 1970s found that there was no Scriptural warranty for the Church’s position on excluding women from ordained ministry, he noted that theologian Karl Rahner, in the late 1970s, argued that the burden of proof should be with the Church to show this. “This burden has not been discharged,” Fr O’Hanlon said.

Describing himself as “disturbed, ashamed even” that it is taking so long to address the issue of female ordained ministry, he highlighted an article on the permanent diaconate in The Tablet last year by Cardinal Walter Kasper.

In it the German prelate wrote, “There are good reasons that make it theologically possible and pastorally sensible to open the permanent diaconate to women…each local church would be free to decide whether to make use of this possibility or not.”

Fr O’Hanlon said, “Let’s grasp this nettle and act from the gospel refrain: do not be afraid.”

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