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Battle of the Sexist
January 10, 2006 - 9:39 p.m.

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I had two candidate interviews today...basically I sat down with individuals from the Niagara diocese and we chatted about my vocational call, my experience in the church so far, etc. It's where you get that awful question - why do you want to be a priest? I say awful because it's not always an easy thing to vocalize. How do you say, "I hear God calling me to be a priest," without sounding like a nutter?

Anyhow, in the process I was asked why I chose not to try the very Anglo-catholic seminary that's just outside of Milwaukee. I was living in that city when I first discerned a calling, so why not head for the obvious choice?

The major problem, for me, was that the seminary in question does not recognize the validity of women's ordination...and don't even start with homosexuals. Women are admitted to the school because the Episcopal Church says that they bloody well will be, but the school retains control over on-campus worship and doesn't allow women to celebrate the Eucharist. It doesn't matter if the woman in question happens to be a bishop, she can't celebrate Mass at the graduation of one of her postulants.

The problem I have, beyond the obviously repugnant discriminatory practice, is in the theological excuse they use to back it up. "Jesus was a male and the priest represents Jesus so the priest has to be male." Let's not even get into the specious theology of making the priest into Christ...how about the fundamental assumption, built into this argument, that Christ only assumed male humanity? If maleness is somehow requisite for priestly functioning, then maleness must be intrinsic to Christ's incarnation.

This raises a rather sticky issue when it comes time to form one's resurrection theology. You see, catholic (small "c" means more than just Rome) theology asserts that when Jesus was crucified, he took his humanity with him. His humanity died and was raised from the dead. If you want to pinpoint the exact moment, this is how and when salvation was accomplished...humanity as a whole was pulled through death and into resurrected life like a thread pulled by a needle. Because Christ died and rose as a human, we have access to that same resurrection.

But if Jesus was only male, if the divine Word made flesh only incarnated male humanity...then is salvation open to women? To paraphrase Trinity College's own Canon Eugene Fairweather, what is not assumed is not saved. If maleness was essential to Christ's very nature - so essential that women are biologically incapable of serving at the altar - then only men are saved because Christ only took one body to the cross and it was a male body.

I doubt that even the most conservative of seminaries would support this conclusion, which is the rankest heterodoxy, yet they support an arbitrary doctrine that leaves open no other theological conclusion.

On the other hand...if Jesus' maleness was incidental then the body he took to the cross could have as easily been female...no matter what gender Christ assumed, the essential element in the crucifixion and resurrection was that Christ died and was raised as a human. In the economy of salvation, gender is incidental.

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