Priesthood: Efficacy and the Integrity of Symbol

This evening I am having a nice little tropical styled drink and have looked back at my book shelf and pulled Manfred Hauke's book Women in the Priesthood off for a brief read. I have yet to read completely through this large book but I am determined to start at the beginning and read it straight through in the very near future. That being said, I think his chapter 'The Behaviour of Christ' is fascinating and there is so much within this chapter that has never been discussed by our General Synod in any sort of a theological debate. Why move on such important issues and the efficacy of sacramental integrity without dealing with how serious Christ's own behaviour in the Gospels was for determining the importance of sacramental efficacy through symbols? I'll probably never get that answer but let's look at an objection to not allowing women's ordination in relation to sacramental integrity.

Objection: That God became man in the form of a male may well be of sacred historical significance. But why must the representative of Christ be a male? In the secular realm, for example, a woman can represent a male head of state, and do not 'profane offices', too, 'function at the level of the symbolic'?

Reply: The relationship between Christ and his official representatives is not merely an external legalistic but rather 'a sacramental significative one,' with the signifier being, however, the whole living person.' This imaging relationship has its foundation in the sacrament of ordination to the priesthood, through which, in a way that goes beyond baptism to the priesthood, by virtue of its character indelebilis, an ontological approximation to Christ is realized. Just as Christ, as mediator of salvation, 'can exist in his totality only if his masculine identity is included, so things stand too regarding his priestly representative.

Already at the level of philosophy of religion, we can establish that symbolic connections are much more important for the priesthood than for profane occupations; in Christianity however, we find not only symbols, but effective symbols, that is, sacraments. Similarly to the way that bread and wine were singled out by Christ as redemptive symbols, so, too, were the apostles as fully authorized office bearers.

The efficacy of the sacrament, moreover, depends on the integrity of the symbol. To be sure, we find ourselves living in an age of rationalism, but if the Church were to adapt herself to this temporally conditioned deficiency in symbolic thinking, then she would be incapable of bringing the world the very thing that it particularly needs today. At the same time, she would clog up the channels of her own life, name, of grace, which ought to be effectively embodied in a mankind that God has created as a priori suited for that. (pp 338-39.)

Does anyone see this as a very important point or is it just me and perhaps this nice cool beverage of mine?