Why Rowan Williams is Wrong: Priesthood as a First-Order Issue

After reading a number of different comments about Rowan Williams' speech in Rome a week or so ago I thought it might be interesting to raise the issue to a proper theological discussion rather than keeping it in the politically correct realm of politics and church. Is Rowan correct that 'priesthood' really is a secondary issue and not a key point of division? One of the primary issues that Rowan is calling into doubt is the issue of authority and how the Church makes decisions. What is being called into doubt in the below quotation is the Magisterium's authority. Rowan says,

As to authority: the summary on pp.137-8 of Harvesting puts it very well in describing convergence around the belief that 'the ministry and the ministries in the Church are not an end in themselves'; the Church is called to obedience, and thus to the discerning conservation of the authentic gospel in its teaching and preaching. But is that obedience, discernment and conservation in some sense the task of the entire body of the baptised or essentially that of a group designated as having binding power?

But Rowan takes this further in his speech as he talks about ecclesilogy with a centralised power that is not recognised by other parts of the church. The issue of ecclesiology and Ordo is so intertwined that I find it difficult to separate the two when discussing one or the other. Rowan gives a challenge,

And the challenge to recent Roman Catholic thinking on this would have to be: in what way does the prohibition against ordaining women so 'enhance the life of communion', reinforcing the essential character of filial and communal holiness as set out in Scripture and tradition and ecumenical agreement, that its breach would compromise the purposes of the Church as so defined? And do the arguments advanced about the "essence" of male and female vocations and capacities stand on the same level as a theology derived more directly from scripture and the common theological heritage such as we find in these ecumenical texts?

Let us take this a stage further. All ordained ministers are ordained into the shared richness of the apostolic ministerial order – or perhaps we could say ministerial 'communion' yet again. None ministers as a solitary individual. Thus if the ministerial collective is understood strictly in terms of the ecclesiology we have been considering, as serving the goal of filial and communal holiness as the character of restored humanity, how much is that undermined if individuals within the ministerial communion are of different genders? Even if there remains uncertainty in the minds of some about the rightness of ordaining women, is there a way of recognising that somehow the corporate exercise of a Catholic and evangelical ministry remains intact even when there is dispute about the standing of female individuals? In terms of the relation of local to universal, what we are saying here is that a degree of recognizability of 'the same Catholic thing' has survived: Anglican provinces ordaining women to some or all of the three orders have not become so obviously diverse in their understanding of filial holiness and sacramental transformation that they cannot act together, serve one another and allow some real collaboration.

This is the entire point. The 'same Catholic thing' is not intact because sacramentally it is impossible to ordain women to the priesthood. What Rowan seems to be willing to do is to undermine the 'value' of sacraments and symbol. Not only does he undermine the value of sacraments with this question he also removes the purpose of symbol in sacrament that accomplishes the primordial function of language to the interior witness of priesthood. It is in symbol that the real speaks and if he can change the symbol in one sacrament, then why not all the others? What of their 'realness' will be gone and hence the 'realness' of Christ if the symbols change? Symbol is the very thing that communicates and unfolds the primary dimension of language and sacramentally the fundamental metaphor of sacramental reality. Sacrament is how Christ becomes human to us and reveals his truth.

What happens when you change or alter the sacramental symbols is that you remove the symbolic efficacy of the rites. As Chauvet reminds us, 'a communication is supremely effective because it is through language that the subject comes forth in its relations to other subjects within a common "world" of meaning.' What Rowan wrongly does in his question and in his views reduces ordination to some sort of a 'socio-linguistic process' transforming sacramental grace in priesthood into nothing more than a secular-humanistic form of anthropology and in actuality diminishes the complete 'otherness' of God. Sacramental grace can only be maintained IF we obtain its reality extra nos and in Christ. That is, this grace is established by Christ and not from our 'meeting of minds' in diversity and hence this is why Rowan slips into a form without reality in his position.

In my estimation, it would do Rowan Williams well to remember what Pope Paul VI said when Anglicans began ordaining women,

the Catholic Church holds that it is not admissible to ordain women to the priesthood, for very fundamental reasons. These reasons include: the example recorded in the Sacred Scriptures of Christ choosing his Apostles only from among men; the constant practice of the Church, which has imitated Christ in choosing only men; and her living teaching authority which has consistently held that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is in accordance with God's plan for his Church.

Finally, it becomes obvious to me that Rowan's position also begins to undermine the Church as Body and hence the Sacrament par excellance. Rowans states,

All I have been attempting to say here is that the ecumenical glass is genuinely half-full – and then to ask about the character of the unfinished business between us. For many of us who are not Roman Catholics, the question we want to put, in a grateful and fraternal spirit, is whether this unfinished business is as fundamentally church-dividing as our Roman Catholic friends generally assume and maintain. And if it isn't, can we all allow ourselves to be challenged to address the outstanding issues with the same methodological assumptions and the same overall spiritual and sacramental vision that has brought us thus far?

The late Pope John Paul II reminds us in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis that

In fact the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles attest that this call was made in accordance with God's eternal plan; Christ chose those whom he willed (cf. Mk 3:13-14; Jn 6:70), and he did so in union with the Father, "through the Holy Spirit" (Acts 1:2), after having spent the night in prayer (cf. Lk 6:12). Therefore, in granting admission to the ministerial priesthood, the Church has always acknowledged as a perennial norm her Lord's way of acting in choosing the twelve men whom he made the foundation of his Church (cf. Rv 21:14). These men did not in fact receive only a function which could thereafter be exercised by any member of the Church; rather they were specifically and intimately associated in the mission of the Incarnate Word himself (cf. Mt 10:1, 7-8; 28:16-20; Mk 3:13-16; 16:14-15). The Apostles did the same when they chose fellow workers who would succeed them in their ministry. Also included in this choice were those who, throughout the time of the Church, would carry on the Apostles' mission of representing Christ the Lord and Redeemer.

There lies the fundamental difference between a Catholic and Rowan's position. Christ did not call for a function to be carried out in the Church but a Sacrament to communicate effectively his love and redemption for the world in a real and symbolic manner. Thus to change the symbol in the sacrament of ordination is to change the faith in its very principle and it would do us all well to remember that the faith is communicated to us by sacrament and not simply by derivation; as if ordination can be viewed as something akin to grammatical inflections. Our existence as being Christian and living the faith in the realm of the real is always structured sacramentally and this cannot be changed and at the same time maintain the reality that the sacrament of Holy Orders seeks to communicate.

To be continued.

Fr. Dwight Longenecker picks up on the discussion at his blog.