Women priests call 'irrational'

THE demand for women's ordination is an "especially irrational manifestation of self-defeating feminism," according to a long article in the Vatican daily newspaper L'Osservatore Romano.
The article, a reprint of a work by a French theologian, Fr Louis Bouyer, also claimed that the traditional ban on women's ordination rested on a "superabundance of Biblical teaching and Christian experience."
Fr Bouyer's thesis generally. reflects the thinking of Pope Paul, who on several occasions has clearly opposed women's ordination. It runs counter to the recent findings of the Pontifical Biblical Commission which has stated that scriptural evidence alone does not stand in the way of ordaining women.
In his article, Fr Bouyer attacked feminists who, he said, "do not see other means for making women equal to men than through mascUlinisation of women." He said that ordination of women "would only be an especially irrational manifestation of a type of essentially self-defeating feminism."
Fr Bouyer asserted that the Christian ban on women priests did not result from an "acritical acceptance" of Jewish practice, but rather from a "very deliberate and especially constant `no' " on the part of the Christian community.
Women priests were commonplace in the ancient world, according to Fr Bouyer, and the early Christians could have chosen to ordain women without breaking any social taboos.
Fr Bouyer said it was "absurd" to explain the Jewish and Christian ban on women's ordination as "stemming from an idea that women are inferior, since the Bible and the Gospel themselves championed their equality in a world where priesthood was never reserved to men alone."