PONTIFICIA UNIVERSITAS GREGORIANA

FACULTY OF THEOLOGY

DEPARTMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY

Virgo Sacerdos

Mary and the Priesthood of the Faithful

License Thesis for Christopher Smith

Moderator: RD Dario Vitali

Rome, 2005

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DEDICATION

To the Madonna della Fiducia, Our Lady of Confidence, Patroness of the Pontifical Roman Major Seminary, in thanksgiving for her maternal guidance for my vocation.

In gratitude to the Most Reverend Robert J. Baker, Bishop of Charleston, for his permission to undertake the license in dogmatic theology at the Gregorian University.

In thanksgiving to Reverend Don Dario Vitali, my thesis director, for his encouragement andhelp, and to Mr Gregory DiPippo, for his patient and erudite editing.

La Sacerdoce de la Vierge

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PREFACE

WHY THIS THESIS?

In the Pontifical Roman Major Seminary at Saint John

Lateran in Rome it is the custom for seminarians on the eve

of their diaconate to choose an image for a commemorative

holy card of their ordination. In 2004, the author of this

present thesis made a search for paintings of the Blessed

Virgin at the Wedding at Cana, where she says, Do whatever he

tells you.1 Among the images found on an internet search was

La sacerdoce de la Vierge, an early 15th century painting from the

school of Amiens, France, featured on the frontispiece of

this thesis. The accompanying note on the

www.womenpriests.org website describes, “Our Lady, wearing a

classic chasuble and stole, stands at the altar, presumably

ready to distribute Holy Communion. She seems to hold a

paten in her right hand, and with her left she holds the

hand of the child Jesus.”

1 John 2,5

4

The discovery of these and similar images lead

inexorably to many questions. This thesis takes as its

starting point the figure of Mary as Priest with a survey of

some historical texts and images that refer to Mary as

Priest and the subsequent controversy over devotion to Mary

under that title. An analysis of these images and texts in

the light of archaeology and philology is then used to help

clarify what these references to the priesthood of Mary

really mean. The first chapter ends with a discussion of

theses for and against the appellation of Mary as priest

garnered from the previous analysis.

After having examined and evaluated the evidence

pointing to the priesthood of Mary, we then seek to clarify

certain dogmatic statements about the threefold ministerial

priesthood as well as what has come to be known as the

common priesthood of the faithful. No discussion of these

dogmatic formulations is complete, however, without

anthropological reflection on masculinity and femininity as

related to the ministry and especially as applied to the

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exclusion of women from the ministerial priesthood in the

Roman Catholic Church.

The contention of the author is that the existence of

these images and the debate over the exact nature of the

Marian priesthood is both a cause and an effect of the role

of analogy and allegory in theology. An exploration of the

import of analogy and allegory in theology is crucial in

deciphering the data so as to give possible interpretations

that could affect how the Marian priesthood and other

questions of theology are viewed. An appreciation and a

restoration of this allegorical and analogical tension in

theology can be fruitful for more, however, than the

question of whether Mary was a priest or not. It can be

used to open up a meditation on the very nature of the

Church herself and the place of the priesthood – both common

and ministerial – within her so as to be an offering for an

ecclesiology of ministry.

The Swiss theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar in his work

The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church presents a discussion

of the Marian and Petrine aspects of the Church. Explaining

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how the faith embodied in Mary’s Fiat is the model of

Christian being and acting, while the faith expressed

through the appointment of peter was all-embracing as well

but also unique, Von Balthasar in a footnote adds, “In

analogy, but only in analogy, this is shared by all the

pastoral care of all the bishops and their priests – and

again an analogy . . . by all the faithful.”2 Here Von

Balthasar admits of the possibility of a relationship

between Mary/Peter and common priesthood/ministerial

priesthood, but without developing that theme. It is the

intent of this thesis to bring out certain elements of that

relationship can be useful for establishing notes for an

ecclesiology of ministry.

2 H. VON BALTHASAR, The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church, San Francisco 1986, 206, note 66.

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CHAPTER ONE

THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY: A PRIEST?

1. A Survey of Texts About the Priesthood of Mary

When we encounter the Blessed Virgin Mary in the

Gospels, she is the almah in prayer, surprised by the

message of the Angel, the Mother of Sorrows weeping under

the Cross, the disciple of Jesus in the Upper Room at

Pentecost. The tradition of the Church has never ceased to

meditate on this woman who, despite the fact that she does

not appear often in the Scriptures, is decisive for

salvation history. Countless faithful and theologians have

lauded her with titles, privileges and prayers throughout

the ages, proving that de Maria numquam satis. But one title

of the Virgin Mary that has been controversial is that of

Virgo Sacerdos, the Virgin Priest. Was Mary, in addition to

being the Mother of God and of the Church, also a priest?

The www.womenpriests.org website has an entire section

on Mary as a priest3 and includes rich documentation from

3 www.womenpriests.org/mrpriest

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2000 years of Church history of saints, theologians and

spiritual writers who refer to Mary as a priest or

accentuate elements of a priesthood belonging to her. It is

not our contention here to reproduce the body of these

texts, many of which are taken from Rene Laurentin’s

extremely well documented book on the topic, Maria-Ecclesia-

Sacerdotium.4 We shall, however, examine some of the most

important texts as they will be appropriate to our thesis.

All translations of such texts in this chapter are of the

author of this work, either from Laurentin’s French

translation or from the original text, unless otherwise

noted.

Feminist Theology Using as Loci Theologici Various Texts Referring from

Christian Antiquity

John Henry Newman and the Anglican divines of the

Oxford Movement sought to recover within the Church of

England its evangelical vitality. The beginnings of serious

patristic scholarship became increasingly important to the

4 R. LAURENTIN, Maria-Ecclesia-Sacerdotium. Paris 1952.

9

Tractarians as they attempted to prove that the Church of

England enjoyed divine authority because of its unity and

continuity with the great Fathers of the “undivided” Church.

In Tract I, Newman explains, “There are some who rest their

divine mission on their own unsupported assertion . . . I

fear we have neglected the real ground on which our

authority is built – our apostolical descent.”5 Newman

expresses the Catholic idea that the consensus patrum is an

important component in the regula fidei, an idea that was taken

up as well by the Catechism of the Catholic Church which states

that the Church “is the place where we know the Holy Spirit

in the Scriptures he inspired [and] in the Tradition, to

which the Church Fathers are always timely witnesses.”6

For that reason, any discussion of the ordination of

women in the Catholic Church must have reference to the

whole of Catholic history. Proponents of women’s ordination

must therefore examine closely texts and images of female

priests throughout history to gather their real meaning and

5 Cited in Alec VIDLER, The Church in An Age of Revolution: 1789 to the Present Day, London 1961, 50.6 CCC 688.

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their relevance to the Church today. Some of these

proponents are far from having an orthodox Catholic

understanding of the priesthood as described by the

Magisterium. But there are some who believe that, even if

history cannot be a witness to Catholic female priests,

there is another way that can point to a new development

whereby Catholicism can integrate women into the priesthood

without betraying Scripture or Tradition. These theologians

point to Mary: if she, the most famous woman in

Christianity, can be proved to have been a priest, then it

would be incoherent to deny to women Holy Orders.

Newman’s Tract XC, written to convince the Anglicans

bishops of their apostolic succession, was rejected by those

same bishops. He came to see the Via Media of classical

Anglicanism as a mere paper theory and came to the

conclusion that the Church of Rome was the living voice not

only of the Fathers but of the Holy Spirit Himself. Many

advocates of women’s ordination see in Newman’s careful

exposition of the development of doctrine a possibility by

which the Catholic Church can one day ordain women. Our

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study seeks to examine the reasonability of one of their

claims: that Mary was a priest, ergo women should be priests.

We will also consider whether a correct understanding of the

relationship between Mary and the priesthood can be a reason

for or against the admission of women to Holy Orders in the

Catholic Church. If so, then we can follow Newman in the

confidence that the Church of Rome has preserved the

authentic faith. If not, then some kind of Via Media must be

found, and Newman’s intuition is naught but straw.

The Earliest Patristic Texts About Mary as Priest

The title Virgo Sacerdos can only be traced to the 17th

century, but the mystical identification between Mary and

the Church that is prevalent in the Fathers has undertones

of a relationship between Mary and the priesthood. The

earliest hymns of 1 January, which as well as being the

Feast of the Circumcision always had a Marian character,

call Mary which in the English New Testament is

rendered helper, good friend, but in classical Latin as pontifex

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and ecclesiastical Latin as antistes. Echoing Wisdom 8.4,7

she is called , rendered in Latin

in 1652 by Reysmiller as sacerdotissa scientiae.8 The two terms

indicate in the usage of the time authority and supernatural

knowledge, but do not warrant subsequent Latin translations

that will have an immense influence on the hymning of Mary

in a sapiential key as a priest.

We will examine two patristic texts of authors who

themselves probably sang the above January hymn to Mary.

1. The first text is attributed to Saint Epiphanius of

Salamis († ca. 400), but is more probably attributed to one

of two other homonymous successors as Bishop of Cyprus (†

680, 869 respectively). The text appears in five

manuscripts, the most complete being from a parchment of

1173 in the National Library in Paris, as follows:

9

7 8 LAURENTIN, 23-25.9 PG XLIII, 485 et ss., cited in LAURENTIN, 29.

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The theologian Matthias Scheeben believes that the real text

is “Mary is the treasure of the Church who conceived the

great mystery and presented the heavenly bread, the Christ,

for the forgiveness of sins.” The famous, “I call the

Virgin both priest and altar, she, the ‘table-bearer’” is a

gloss. But there is no internal or external evidence to

support this thesis. The other texts take for

She conceived the great mystery becoming She received the great

mystery, for (the great mystery which calls the Virgin priest

becomes I call the Virgin priest) and or for temple

becoming priest). Needless to say, the meaning is altered

extensively.

2. The other text is attributed to the Second Homily on the

Nativity of the Blessed Virgin of St John Damascene, but should

rightly be attributed to a sermon of St Theodore Studite in

816 in which Mary is hymned with reference to Canticle of

Canticles 7.1, “Hail, daughter, young sacrificial priest,

whose purity is loveable and whose vestments are incredibly

beautiful, in the eyes of him who says in the canticles:

‘How beautiful are thy feet in thy sandals, o daughter of

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Amminidab.”10 is a neo-classicist expression

whose closest translation in a modern language would be the

German Jungfrau Liturgin. Migne’s Latin translates it as Dei

sacerdos juvencula, when a more accurate translation would be

Levite (English) or ministra (Latin).11 Furthermore, the term

is a hapax inspired by Proverbs 9.212 calling

to mind the image of one dressing a table, but then she is

called that same table.

The two texts that are invoked as the most important

patristic proofs of the priesthood of the Blessed Virgin are

apocryphal, corrupt and vague.

The Theology of These Patristic Texts

The necessary textual criticism of these important

texts should not, however, dissuade us from examining the

theology behind them and their less than optimal recensions.

The patristic age furnishes us with much food for thought on

the relationship of Mary to the Incarnation/Eucharist,

10 PG CVI, 698 A.11 LAURENTIN, 28-31.12 She hath killed her beasts; she hath mingled her wine; she hath alsofurnished her table.

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Sacrifice and Priesthood which are of great importance to

our theme. In the patristic period there is a convergence

of two lines of association that Laurentin makes explicit in

his book.13

Christ is: prophet king priest victimaltar mediator

Mary is: prophetess queen victimaltar mediatrix

There was the sense of an incompatibility between the role

of Mary and that of the priest. The early Church was

radically opposed to having priestesses so as to not

resemble the pagan cults. While the Middle Ages will put

Mary as the head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the early

Church was careful not to identify Mary with the hierarchy

in any way for the reasons that we will explore below.14

Mary and the Incarnation/Eucharist

The two dogmas, Christ is the Bread of Life and Christ was born of

the Virgin Mary become intimately related in Greek homilies of

13 LAURENTIN, 85.14 LAURENTIN, 93.

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the 4th century, but the rapport between them remains

unspecified. The Logos takes His flesh from the Virgin, the

Fathers say; only rarely do they imply that Mary gave her

flesh to Christ. A parallel is drawn between the

Incarnation, where Mary is minister and the Eucharist, where

Christ is minister. Mary is seen as the type of the Church

and Christ as type of the priesthood. The first time that the

parallel between the Incarnation and the Eucharist is read

in terms of an analogy of priesthood is in the 9th century

when the Livre d’heures de Charles le Chauve implies that the

response of the faithful to the Orate fratres at Mass is a

reprise of the words of the angel Gabriel to Mary at the

Annunciation, the Holy Spirit descending on Mary and the

faithful to bring Christ to earth.15 The Fathers do not see

a direct parallel between Mary’s role in the Incarnation and

her role in the Eucharist.

Mary and Sacrifice

15 LAURENTIN, 38-45.

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Hebrews 5.116 defines the priesthood in terms of

oblation of sacrifices. The sacrifice of two doves that

Mary presents at the temple for her purification becomes for

many authors an important reason to see Mary in terms of a

priesthood of sacrifice and oblation. St Cyril of

Alexandria comments, “See her offer () to the

Father, as one of us, conforming herself to the shadows of

the law and sacrificing () according to custom.”17

However, in the Septuagint does not signify the

priestly act of offering, but rather the act of bringing the

offering. Thus Mary brings her son to the temple, but it is

he who sacrifices (). The idea that it is Mary who

sacrifices her son at his presentation and her purification

does not appear before the 12th century.18

The idea that Mary was involved in sacrifice comes from

her association with the Temple. St Maximus of Turin (5th

century) calls her Maria Virgo, minister de tempulo Gierosale and this

16 For every high priest taken from among men is ordained for men inthings pertaining to God, that he may offer both gifts and sacrifices forsins.17 PG LXXVII, 1045 AB, cited in LAURENTIN, 48.18 LAURENTIN, 48-49.

18

theme is taken up by St Tharasius († ca. 800) who speaks of

her “ministry greater than that of the high priests”

().19 Her association with the

liturgy of the temple brings other Fathers to call her by

the names of ritual objects associated with the temple: rod

of Aaron, altar of holocausts, altar of incense, thurible,

table with the loaves of proposition, Holy of Holies and ark

of the covenant.20

The Old Testament liturgical images of Mary contribute

to the conception of her as mediatrix, as the same Pseudo-

Epiphanius declares, but her mediation is still seen as

owing to her maternity, not to her priesthood. The confused

and vague use of Temple images to describe Mary in terms of

her of her maternal service, and not in terms of

, of sacrificial priesthood of the type the Letter

to the Hebrews describes.

Mary and the Priesthood

It cannot be proved from the New Testament or Tradition

that the Old Testament priesthood was transferred to Mary as

19 PG XCVIII, 1500B cited in LAURENTIN, 50.20 www.womenpriests.org/mrpriest/titles.htm; cf. also LAURENTIN, 76-80.

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its last representative. But the role of Mary in the

Incarnation establishes the link between the priesthood of

the Old Testament and that of Christ. Since Mary was of the

priestly tribe, she transferred, according to St John

Damascene, the levitical priesthood to the new royal

priesthood, from the lineage of Levi to that of David.21

For this reason St Andrew of Crete declares that Mary is the

“sacred sanctuary () of Christ who fulfils in

the sanctuary of heaven the priestly functions of

Melchisedech.”22 We can see this line of reasoning in the

previous citation of St Theodore the Studite. He calls Mary

because she is the daughter of Aminadab.

There are two Aminadabs in the Bible, one a Levite (1

Chronicles 6.22) and the other an ancestor of Christ (Ruth

4. 19-20) of the tribe of Judah. In Mary converge the

priestly and the kingly lines, and so it is natural for St

Theodore the Studite to call Mary “the anointing with which

the royal priesthood was anointed.” Jesus figures in this

royal priesthood in his flesh and the anointing of Mary is

21 PG XCVI, 669A, cited in LAURENTIN, 66.22 PG XCVII, 864-865A, cited in LAURENTIN, 66.

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seen as her giving her flesh to the Son of God; this is seen

in those images in which Mary clothes her Son with priestly

and royal garb, like the ephod and other vestments of the

high priest.

For the Fathers Mary is related to the priesthood as a

mother who gives her priestly and royal lineage to the Son

of God through her flesh. The emphasis is still on her

maternity, and not on any sense of her priesthood other than

the fact that she was of the tribe of Levi. The emphasis on

Mary’s ancestry is emphatically Christocentric, to establish

Christ’s royal priesthood and not Marian, in the sense of

Mary’s royal priesthood.

The Middle Ages and the Development of the Idea of a Marian Priesthood

The early Church did not develop a notion of the Marian

priesthood because of its reflection on the relationship

between Mary and the Eucharist, sacrifice, and the

priesthood. But in the Middle Ages we see the beginnings of

new reflections that will in a later age bring to fruition

important attitudes which, in turn, will bring about the

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theology of a Marian priesthood. While the first millennium

of Christianity hymned Mary through an allegorical lens on

biblical revelation, the first half of the second millennium

of Christianity meditated on Mary through a philosophical

hermeneutic of the data of faith. A primary consideration

of Medieval theology was the order of being, and the

excellence that belonged to the sacrament of Holy Orders and

the excellence that belonged to the Blessed Virgin would

become founts for a theology that put into relief a more

intimate connection between Mary and the priesthood. The

ideas of oblation as sacrifice, Mary as Coredemptrix, and

the sacrificing priesthood are the major Medieval

contributions to the idea of the Marian priesthood.

Oblation as Sacrifice and Mary as Co-Redemptrix

The sacrificial definition of priesthood in Hebrews

will be read in the Medieval period in parallel to other

scriptural texts: the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple in

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Luke 2.2223 and the death of Jesus in John 19.25-27.24 The

two verbs tulerunt and stabat came to indicate that Mary’s

presence at the Presentation and the Crucifixion was an

external sign of an interior offering. Mary’s role as

sacerdos in oblatione mentali, as Ubertin de Casale would name it25

was read against a background of Mary as Coredemptrix.

The import of Mary’s oblation in the Presentation is

described by Fulbert of Chartres (960-1028) as not just

something for everyone, but for a few (non omnibus sed paucis)

for the reconciliation of us all (ad nostram omnium

reconciliationem), something that is not a mere prefiguration

of the reconciling sacrifice of Calvary, but as already the

beginning of the God-Man as victim whose sacrifice is

accepted by the Father in the offering made by His Mother.

The Compassion of Mary in the Presentation and Crucifixion

23 And when the days of her purification according to the law of Moseswere accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to theLord; 24 Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother'ssister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene.Cleophas: or,Clopas. When Jesus therefore saw his mother, and the disciple standingby, whom he loved, he saith unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son!Then saith he to the disciple, Behold thy mother! And from that hourthat disciple took her unto his own home. 25 LAURENTIN, 137.

23

is related to her oblation. The Benedictine Abbot Arnaud of

Bonneval (†1156) explains, “The Virgin conceived the only

Son of the Father in spirit as much as in body. Human and

divine, celestial and terrestrial are reunited . . . Mary

immolates herself spiritually in Christ and implores Him for

the salvation of the world . . . There is but one will of

Christ and Mary, and both of them offer together (pariter

offerebant) a single holocaust, she in the blood of her heart

and He, in the blood of His flesh.”26 For this reason, there

were two altars of Calvary, the heart of Mary and the body

of Jesus.

It may seem that the phrase pariter offerebant would be the

strongest phrase up to this point of an identification

between Christ and Mary in terms of oblation and hence

priesthood. The perfect obedience of Mary to the will of

God could be interpreted in terms of an equal capacity of

sacrifice and oblation. But Arnaud himself counters this

objection, “But it remained the privilege of the High Priest

alone (Hebrews 9.12) to bring the offering of His blood to

26 PL CLXXXIX, 1726C-1727A, in LAURENTIN, 146.

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the interior of the Holy of Holies and He could not share

that dignity with any other.”27 The net distinction between

Mary’s oblation and that of Christ is not confused in these

authors: had they been the same, Mary would have died along

with Christ. The consummation of the Redemption was

effected by the High Priest alone, and even though Mary was

intimately united with her Son, she was not so much so as to

take His place on the Cross, which she could not do.

Between Christ and Mary in the Redemption there is a unity

of will, intention and sacrifice, but an essential difference

of degrees of participation in the end and effect.

This soteriological perspective on the mystery of the

union between Christ and Mary was not the only one in the

Middle Ages, however. Saint Bonaventure offers an

ecclesiological perspective that further develops the

instinct of Arnaud. He sees a chronological progression in

terms of sacrifice: those of the Old Testament, those of

Mary, and those of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The Old

Testament is a type of Mary who in turn is a type of the

27 PL CLXXXIX, 1693-1695A, cited in LAURENTIN, 147.

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hierarchy. The sacrifices, including that of Christ, are

read according to their reality in the economy of salvation:

the sacrifices of the Old Testament as figurae, of Mary as

veritas inchoata, of Christ as consummatio and of the priests as

sacramentum.28

Bonaventure’s fourfold schema of the sacrifices can

also be applied to the notion of priesthood itself. If only

Christ the High Priest can effect the Redemption by his

sacrifice as Priest and Victim, then he remains the

consummatio of the priesthood itself, while Mary serves as a

sign to that priesthood with her own oblation and

ministerial priests serve as the sacrament of the one

priesthood of Christ. Applying Bonaventure’s schema to the

priesthood itself unites Arnaud’s soteriology with

Bonaventure’s ecclesiology and helps us to understand how

Mary can be Co-Redemptrix but not Priest of the New

Covenant.

Sacrificing Priesthood

28 LAURENTIN, 159.

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Mary did not exercise the office of priesthood because

she was chosen to be Mother, not Priest. But the obvious

analogy between the role of the priest at the Consecration

and that of Mary at the Incarnation led the writer of the

Mariale super “Missus est” (which was falsely attributed to Saint

Albert the Great, but was proved in 1954 to actually be the

work of another unidentified author), to scrutinize further

this closeness. For him, since Mary is not under the

submission of anyone, she constitutes a supreme order and

power above the heavens and the Church below. Pseudo-Albert

reasons that, since the ecclesiastical hierarchy is modeled

on the divine hierarchy, then Mary is the highest and most

worthy in the ecclesiastical as well as the celestial

hierarchy an she perforce possesses all of the dignities and

properties of those inferior to her.29 Furthermore, since

the character of a sacrament is a mark of excellence, then

the character of the sacrament is inherent as well in the

Blessed Virgin.30

29 Q41 a3, cited in LAURENTIN, 188.30 Q41 a4, cited in LAURENTIN, 188.

27

Pseudo-Albert does not place Mary and the priesthood

side by side as veritas inchoata and sacramentum, but as dominium

by means of sovereign humility and ministerium by means of

humble servitude. Since his first principle is “the

superior contains the perfections of the inferior,” he

cannot see how to reconcile Mary’s preeminence as Mother of

God with the patristic contention that it was not Mary who

exercised the official functions of Christ after His

Ascension, but the apostles. The only way for Pseudo-Albert

to escape this is to say that, if the superior contains the

perfections of the inferior then it also excludes the

imperfections of the inferior; thus, Mary did not receive

Holy Orders because then she would have had to accept the

imperfections of that state.

Pseudo-Albert states that there is absolutely nothing

lacking to the fullness of grace of the Blessed Virgin, but

we are left questioning him, “If Mary did not receive the

sacramentum of Holy Orders, how can she receive the res et

sacramentum of Holy Orders?” Is her priesthood, then,

eminent formally or only analogically? We think it important

28

here to note that, while the sacraments are the principal

means of grace, God is not bound by the sacraments;

therefore the fact that Mary did not receive orders does not

exclude her from receiving the graces that Orders brings for

the economy of salvation, nor does it imply any kind of

inferiority on the part either of Mary or the sacrament of

Orders.

Pseudo-Albert marks a transition point in our

discussion: pressing analogy to its limits, he actually

succeeds in making an equivocation out of an analogy. The

rich tension that the patristic analogy between Mary and the

priesthood possesses dissolves as he attempts to constrain a

mystery within a metaphysical construct, hoping thus to

produce a univocal answer to a question that, at least from

the time of Pseudo-Epiphanius to Pseudo-Albert himself,

seems to sing chords of analogy. This dissolution will have

important consequences for the subsequent development of the

idea of the priesthood of Mary, as we shall see.

The Beginnings of the Modern Era and the Theology of the Priesthood of Mary

29

Pseudo-Albert the Great was constrained to make Mary

higher than the priesthood and possessor of all the graces

of the priesthood because of her eminence in dignity and her

role in the redemption. Many of his successors asked, “Does

the participation of Mary in the redemptive sacrifice of

Christ imply some kind of priesthood?”

The Council of Trent clarified Catholic teaching on the

relationship between the Cross, the Mass and the priesthood.

The Lateran canon Giovanni Battista Guarini presents in his

Della gerarchia ovvero del sacro regno di Maria Vergine of 1600 a concise

chart of its teaching as follows31:

CHRIST ON THE CROSS CHRIST IN THE MASS is offered

in bloody sacrifice in unbloodysacrifice

under His own appearance under the accidentspassible impassiblein the wayfaring state in the

completed stateliving ruling from the

right hand of God

31 G. GUARINI, Della gerarchia ovvero del sacro regno di Maria Vergine, Venice 1609, 197-198.

30

The parallel between Christ on the Cross and Christ in the

Mass will be the basis for a parallel between the priesthood

of Mary and the priesthood of the ministers who celebrate

the Mass. Drawing on that parallel, Rutilio Benzoni, the

Bishop of Loreto, would say that Mary “received the

anointing of the royal priesthood to offer” Christ.32

It would remain to the Jesuit Ferdinand Chirino de

Salazar (1575-1646) to explain how. The intimate communion

of action and belonging between Christ and Mary leads him to

ponder, “To offer Christ to us and for us belongs to the Virgin

alone, to the exclusion of anyone else, for as much as others can

purpose to offer to the Father Christ and His merits, it is

not according to the mode in which the Virgin offered, as

something which was hers.”33 The Marian dominium of Pseudo-Albert

is exaggerated by Salazar to such a degree that he

hypothesizes, “If the will of Christ has not been expressed

then the will of Mary would suffice to interpret the will of

the Son.”34 Salazar explains that “the sacred unction of

32 R. BENZONI, Commentarium ac disputationum in B. Virginis Canticum Magnificat. Libri quinque. Venice 1606, Book III 243.33 F. SALAZAR, In proverbiis. Paris: 1619, VIII.215,I,624c.34 SALAZAR, 216,I,625A.

31

the divinity constituted Christ Priest and Pontiff; and the

Virgin, impregnated (imbuta) with that unction, much more

excellently and eminently than other souls, obtained a

priesthood more excellent and more eminent.”35 She

possessed the highest degree of the priesthood which was

exercised in diffusing the plenitude of the grace of Christ.

Salazar presents us with the first clear instance of a

Marian priesthood. It will be Ippolito Maracci (1604-1675)

who will call it mystical: “Mary received priestly anointing

not exteriorly but interiorly.”36 He uses the adjectives

mystical, spiritual, interior to distinguish from legal. For Maracci,

the Marian priesthood has two functions: ascendant, sacrifice

and descendant, giving of sacred things and two phases:

terrestrial, in the Purification and celestial, on Calvary. He

makes precise how Mary is a priest by using Pseudo-Albert,

“The Blessed Virgin, anointed not externally but interiorly,

was consecrated as a priest, not according to the law but

according to the spirit.”37

35 F. SALAZAR, Canticum canticorum Salomonis allegorico sono et prophetica, mystica et hypermystica expositione productum, Lyon 1643, 94, cited in LAURENTIN, 252.36 LAURENTIN, 333.37 PL CCXI, 774A.

32

At this point a further reflection is necessary: if we

take as our notion of priesthood that of Hebrews, then the

priesthood of the New Covenant is the one by which the law

is superseded by the spirit by the sacrifice of the Priest-

Victim Himself. If we accept the logic of the Incarnation,

then the body/soul or material/spiritual structure of man is

redeemed by and integrated into Christ by that sacrifice.

Therefore, what sense does it make to posit a legal,

external priesthood of the clergy as opposed to a spiritual,

interior priesthood of the Virgin Mary? An opposition of

such weight would assign the sacrament of Order to the Old

Covenant superseded in Jesus, and thus the apostolic

ministry handed down by the visible sacrament of Orders in

apostolic succession is contrary to the new dispensation of

grace. We see here a double tendency: a Protestantising one,

whereby an invisible, charismatic Church of the perfect

asserts its rights over a visible, hierarchical Church that

is not of divine institution; and a Paganising one, whereby

Mary is placed outside of the economy of salvation as

somehow over and above Christ Himself. If the dominium of

33

Mary is extended to such a degree that her priesthood

renders that of the apostles and their successors instituted

by Christ superfluous, then Mary is made into a goddess of a

Church so spiritualised that she little resembles the Virgin

of Nazareth in prayer with the Apostles in the Upper Room

and resembles even less the authentic teaching of the Church

on Mary, the sacraments and the priesthood.

Is it perhaps for this reason that some advocates of

women’s ordination appeal to a notion of Mary as priest? If

they see Mary as do Salazar and Maracci, then one wonders

why they seek for women to be priests as much as to be Mary,

whose priesthood in that sense is much more powerful?

The Connection Between Marian Piety and Devotion to Mary as Priest

In 1709 the title Virgin Priest makes its way into the

liturgy in the hymn for Vespers for the Presentation in the

proper Office of the Society of Saint Sulpice, a hymn

written in 1706 by a twenty-five year old subdeacon named

Urbain Robinet.38 The title Virgo Sacerdos was actually coined

38 Our guide is the Virgin Priest/With joy do we hasten to follow her.Dux est Virgo Sacerdos/Fas sit quo properat sequi.

34

thirty years earlier by another young subdeacon, Jean-

Baptiste de Santeul of the Abbey of Saint-Victor in a hymn

composed in 1685 but never accepted in the liturgy.39

Olier, the founder of the Sulpicians, saw a parallel between

the feasts of the Purification of Mary and the Presentation

of Jesus (2 February) and the Presentation of Mary (21

November) as the key to interpreting the priesthood in terms

of oblation. For him, “the Holy Virgin . . . was

consecrated priest in anticipation of the sacrifice she would

have to offer on Calvary.” It was “the spirit of the priest

which made her to enter into the temple, to live among the

priests where she possessed the spirit in fullness, and

where she exercised along with them, the ministry of the

temple . . . o Priest holy and admirable, Priest invisible,

Priest of the Spirit, Priest divine living on earth and going

about the holy services without being seen by men.”40

39 On the altar a triple victim is consecrated/The Virgin Priest immolates her virginal honour/a tender infant, her members/and an old man, his life.Ara sub una se vovet hostia/Triplex: honorem virgineum immolat/Virgo Sacerdos parva mollis/Membra puer, seniorque vitam.40 LAURENTIN, 377-378.

35

Olier, whose new institution was meant for the training

of priests, saw in Mary the perfect model for the

priesthood. The ready spirit with which Mary offered her

child in the Temple was seen as the model for behaviour of

the young Levites who were living hidden lives in the temple

of the seminary as preparation for the role of dispenser of

graces. The quick acceptance of the title Virgo Sacerdos

testifies to the power that the search for a Marian piety

for the priesthood had in advancing the notion not only of a

priesthood conformed to Mary’s humility and obedience, but

also of the Marian priesthood itself.

2. Virgo Sacerdos in Art and Popular Piety

Laurentin, who, before completing his Maria-Ecclesia-

Sacerdotium wrote an extensive thesis on the iconography of

Mary as Priest for the University of Paris, states, “We look

in vain for the “Medieval chasuble” of which certain authors

speak. It is a Praying Virgin conformed to the Roman canons

of the first centuries and especially inspired by a mosaic

of the Lateran. She has neither stole, nor maniple; her

36

pallium, largely open in front, has nothing in it of a

chasuble. And finally, the Virgin is veiled. A single

detail could recall from afar priestly vesture: it is a type

of dalmatic passing under the pallium.”41 These depictions

are of one who prays more than one who celebrates.

There are numerous depictions in Christian antiquity of

the female allegorical figure Ecclesia Orans. Many scholars,

taking as their inspiration the patristic connection between

Mary as Mother of the Church and Mary as model of prayer,

see Mary in this figure. In the door of Santa Sabina on the

Aventine Hill, this female figure is represented with the

name Maria above her head. Flanked by Saints Peter and Paul,

she is seen as Mother of God who in her posture of prayer

represents the Church, Spouse of Christ.42 It is the same

kind of imagery that inspired the retable at the Cathedral

of Seville, Spain, which depicts Mary seated on a cathedra

surrounded by the apostles, with the inscription Mater

Ecclesiae.43 Saint Augustine’s discussion of Mary as type of

41 LAURENTIN, 533.42 H. GRISAR, Roma alla fine del mondo antico, Roma 1908, 258, figure 76.43 T. KOEHLER, “Maria mater Ecclesiae,” in Marie et l’Église dans la pensée médiévale, vol. 3, H. Barbe, ed., Paris 1953, 133-157.

37

the Church is seen in depictions of her from the earliest

centuries as Sponsa Domini and Queen, both as consequences of

her maternity.

Many proponents of Mary as Priest, however, see in

these images more than just Mary as Mother. The

www.womenpriests.org website has 14 images that it claims

show Mary in priestly vestments.44 Four of these are of

Mary in the position classically known as Orans: two mosaics

in the Oratories of Saint Vincent and Saint Venantius in the

Lateran Baptistery (6th and 7th c., respectively), an

eleventh-century mosaic in the Archbishop’s Chapel of

Ravenna and a bas-relief sculpture (6th or 7th c.?) in Ravenna’s

Church of Santa Maria in Porto. Another four are of Mary

with Jesus, in three of which Mary is seated on a throne: a

twelfth century mosaic from the dome of the basilica at

Torcello, a thirteenth century painting from the Church of

the Madonna del Serbo at Campagnano, the absidal mosaic of

Santa María de Táhull in Barcelona, and an eighth century

44 www.womenpriests.org/mrpriest/gallery1.htm

38

fresco in Sancta Maria Antiqua in Rome.45 The claim is that

the items of dress of the Virgin Mary in these depictions

all point to priestly status or at least priestly dignity,

chiefly because of the supposed chasuble (or dalmatic) and

pallium that she wears in them.

A closer examination, however, reveals that viewing the

costume of Mary in these portrayals as eucharistic vestments

proper to an ordained minister is untenable. The German

archeologist DeGrüneisen in his magisterial study of Sancta

Maria Antiqua points out that the jeweled crown, or loros,

and the cross indicate that the costume is completely

imperial and indeed, the representation of Mary as Queen in

the Chapel of Saints Quiricus and Julitta in that church is

the same as the sixth century mosaic of the diademed

Byzantine Empress Theodora at San Vitale in Ravenna.46

Subsequent images are inspired by Mary as Queen vested in

Byzantine imperial dress, not the eucharistic dress of

45 the www.womenpriests.org website incorrectly dates this image to the fourteenth century, despite the fact that Sancta Maria Antiqua had been abandoned for 500 years in the fourteenth century 46 C. CECHELLI, Mater Christi. Rome 1946, 81.

39

priests, for which no evidence is offered saying that

chasubles and pallia of the kind were exactly in that style.

What the website considers to be a chasuble is actually

a or which is a mantle from the

Hellenic tradition. What is said to be a pallium, taking

the Greek omophorion as the sign of Episcopal office is

actually a maforion, which is the continuation of a veil that

Byzantine matrons wore.47

There are two images, however, which might suggest a

more priestly symbolism, but which are not mentioned by the

website. A sixth century fresco in a Coptic church in

Bauii, Egypt and a sarcophagus from Tebessa in modern day

Libya both depict a woman with a chalice. The first,

however, has the Byzantine diadem and royal vesture and the

second an indigenous tiara. Both point to Mary as type of

the Church represented as Queen in imperial dress.48

3. The Controversy over Devotion to Mary the Priest

47 CECHELLI, 108.48 CECHELLI, 111.

40

In the period between 1872 and 1916, the devotion to

Mary as priest underwent a resurgence of interest.

Monsignor Van den Berghe’s book Mary and the Priesthood had a

lot to do with propagating the devotion. New religious

institutes were formed under the patronage of Mary as

priest, images became widespread and theologians and

spiritual writers found much in the devotion to recommend it

to the faithful.

Pope Blessed Pius IX seemed favourable to it, as did

many theologians of the period. Pius IX lauds Msgr Van den

Berghe for having presented “Mary to the pious faithful and

principally the clergy as a model to imitate . . .

especially as associated (associé) with the divine

sacrifice.” In the same letter he speaks of Mary as

“strictly united to the sacrifice of her divine Son, she who

was called Virgin Priest by the Fathers of the Church.”49

Pope St Pius X granted an indulgence of 300 days for a

prayer which ended with the invocation, Maria Virgo Sacerdos, ora

49 LAURENTIN, 522-523.

41

pro nobis.50 The same pontiff encouraged Father Hugon in his

work on the title, which was held to be purely metaphorical.

But not everyone was convinced. One of the greatest

exponents of the doctrine of Mary as Co-Redemptrix came out

against Mary as Priest. Cardinal Goma y Tomás, the

Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, at the

International Eucharistic Congress in Amsterdam in 1924,

thunders, “Mary is not a priest. Neither the Scripture nor

tradition recognises in Mary the formal reason of the

priesthood. There is but one victim in Christian law;

unique is its oblation and one is its priest. We, the

priests of the Holy Church, do nothing else but repeat the

same oblation with the same victim, as participants in the

priesthood of Christ.”51 Monsignor Dubourg, Archbishop of

Besançon, responded to the Bishop of Città di Castello’s

calling of Mary as Priestess without being a priest, “Mary was not a

priest and the term Virgin Priest sometimes attributed to

her is not rigorously exact.52 50 Acta Sanctae Sedis 40 (1907), 10951 I. Goma y Tomás, Maria santísima, Tomo I, Estudios y escritos pastorales sobre la Virgen. Barcelona: Casulleras, 1941, 53, cited in LAURENTIN, 517.52 M. Dubourg, Regards sur le ministère sacerdotale. Conférences à mes seminaristes. Besançon : Cart, 1942, 295, cited in LAURENTIN, 520.

42

The negative judgment of many pastors about the title

moved the Holy Office to issue a letter on 15 January 1913,

although it was not published until 8 April 1916 under Pope

Benedict XV, “The image of the Blessed Virgin Mary adorned

with priestly vestments is to be reproved (esse

reprobandam).”53 Cardinal Merry del Val, who was responsible

for the letter, also wrote the Bishop of Adria in response

to an article on True devotion to the Virgin Priest in the magazine

Palestra del clero de Rovigo reiterating that not only the image,

but the very devotion to the Virgin Priest “was not approved

and cannot be propagated.”54

The clearest indication of the will of the Holy See is

to be seen in the notes that Father Frey, Rector of the

French Seminary in Rome, took at an audience with Pope Pius

XI on 4 October 1938, “Mary is the Mother of the First

Priest, the Mother of Christ. Without a doubt, she herself

was not a priest and the [title] Virgo-Sacerdos is to be taken

in a very metaphorical sense . . . the priest has powers she

53 AAS 8 (1916), 14654 LAURENTIN, 529.

43

never had.”55 The title is not prohibited, and the hymn of

Saint-Sulpice was never abolished. Nevertheless, this non-

official papal pronouncement makes clear the metaphorical

nature of the title. The Holy Office and the popes put the

faithful on guard against a simple equating of Mary with

what is normally envisioned by the word priest.

4. If Mary was a Priest, What Kind of Priest?

Reasons Supporting the Thesis of Mary as Priest

Even if much of the supposed artistic evidence for the

existence of the priesthood of Mary seems to be contrived,

the recurring themes of sacrifice and priesthood that run

through the literature on Mary throughout the centuries lead

some to think that Mary was a priest. The objection is, How

can Mary be said to possess a “true, highest, divine,

transcendent and most singular priesthood” and is even

called “archpriest, superpriest and Bishop of Bishops”56

55 LAURENTIN, 530.56 B. LEONI, Sacerdozio o Maternità di Maria nella Chiesa? Casale Monferrato 1958,30.

44

without actually being a priest? It seems that the only

reason given that Mary was not ordained a priest was that

she was a woman, but does this not seem to create some kind

of mystical priesthood that really has no meaning in the

ecclesial community? And does granting Mary such a singular

privilege of being a priest without actually being a priest

not establish an arbitrary reasoning for why women cannot be

priests? Does it not contradict the typological

interpretation that the Fathers always give to texts that

occur in the Old Testament that are seen as fulfilled in

Mary, such as Proverbs 8.23, ab aeterna ordinata sum? How can

one be said to possess the priesthood but not be a priest?

Those in favour of the Marian priesthood often point to

Pseudo-Albert’s Mariale as a way of reopening the discussion

on Mary as priest as a means of reopening the discussion on

women’s ordination. Pseudo-Albert says, “The Blessed Virgin

Mary did not receive the sacrament of Holy Orders”57 because

she was a woman, and women do not receive Holy Orders “on

57 ALBERT the Great, B. ALBERTi Magni, Ratisbonensis Episcopi, Ordinis Praedicatorum, Opera Omnia, ed. Augustus and Aemilius Borgnet, Paris 1890-1899, vol. 37, q. 41 ad 11, cf. 79-87.

45

account of the unworthiness of their sex, of their greater

weakness regarding sin, and on account of something

following from these, the incongruity of their holding

authority.”58 But Pseudo-Albert says that even if she did

not receive the sacrament, “she possessed in full whatever

dignity and grace is conferred by them.”59 However, we may

rightly ask, if a sacrament produces what it signifies, then

how can one have the effect of the sacrament without having

received the sacrament? How can Mary have “possessed the

dignities and graces of the individual Orders equivalently

and with excellence”60 as Pseudo-Albert claims without

having received the sacrament? If one can receive the

fruits of a sacrament without receiving a sacrament, what is

the point of Christ’s institution of the sacraments?

An objection to which Pseudo-Albert the Great responds

bases Mary’s supereminence on the fact that, since the

hierarchy of the Church is formed on the model of the

celestial hierarchy, and all superiors possess the

58 ALBERT, q. 41, ad 4.59 ALBERT, q. 41. ad 11.60 ALBERT, q. 41, ad 16.

46

characteristic of their inferiors and more excellently, then

Mary possesses all Orders and is hence the supreme person in

the hierarchy.61 A similar objection states that if women

cannot receive Holy Orders because they are cursed and were

the beginning of sin, then she at least should be ordained

because she was free from that curse and the beginning of

life.62 Furthermore, if the role of the priest is to

generate spiritual children, then she possesses that role

more than anyone else, because if it were not for her, then

there would be no spiritual children to beget, so why

exclude her from the role?

Objections to the Thesis

It must be said that a mere repetition of the dictum,

Mary is not a priest because she is a woman is no longer a sufficient

response to the above objections. The most important reason

for claiming that Mary was not ordained priest comes, not

from an argumentation based on the privileges and dignity of

the Virgin Mary but from the fact that nowhere in scripture

61 ALBERT, q. 41, obj. 3.62 ALBERT, q. 41, obj. 7.

47

is she said to be a priest. She is not sent out along with

the apostles and her role in the Gospels is not in any way

like that of the apostles even if she is certainty a

disciple of Jesus. Her absence in the Upper Room on Holy

Thursday points to her not being ordained but her presence

in the Upper Room on Pentecost points to her being a part of

the Church, in a position of leadership tat has nothing to

do with ordination.

Pseudo-Albert tells us, “She offered her Son, who was

also the Son of God; and she did this not by changing bread

and wine into his body and offering him under a different

species, but according to the bodily form of his own flesh

and his own blood, under the proper species in whom she had

conceived him.”63 Mary does offer Jesus, much like a priest

does, but not in the same way a priest does, not in the way

that constitutes a priest a priest. In other words,

“although all the constitutive elements of Christ’s

priesthood are found in Mary, nonetheless it is not proper

to say that she is a priest, for the elements are not in her

63 ALBERT, q. 51.

48

in an absolute and independent way. She would have been a

priest if she had been the only one to offer herself with

him and by a title equal to his. But it was Christ who

primarily offered himself. She only united herself to His

oblation. Christ’s merit was infinite. Mary’s was

necessarily limited . . . all that Mary is, she is in

reference to Jesus.”64 To say that the ordination of Mary

is a necessary consequence of her merits and dignity is to

confuse Mary’s spiritual union of herself with Christ with

Christ’s all-sufficient sacrifice of Himself. Mary

therefore is not vicaria but coadjutrix et socia. Blessed Pius IX

called her divini sacrificii socia; Saint Pius X would write, she

“merits for us de congruo what Christ merited for us de

condigno.” Mary is intimately involved in the plan of

salvation, in a way that is associated with priestly acts,

but, examining the nature of her sacrifice we can say that

it is different from that of Christ and so she cannot be

said to vicariously make present that sacrifice, which is

the sine qua non of Catholic priesthood, but that makes her no

64 J. SAMAHA, The Priestly Function of Mary’s Mission, unpublished.

49

less a part of the sacrifice. In other words, she did not

say Mass but she did receive Holy Communion. “The Blessed

Virgin was not drawn into ministry by the Lord, but into

partnership with him and to his assistance,”65 for which

rank is unnecessary.

The fact that Mary was not ordained to the ministerial

priesthood does not in any way diminish her belonging to the

royal priesthood of the faithful. In fact, in uniting the

sacrifice of her life in perfect obedience to the will of

God she received all of the graces in a most perfect manner

from the sacrifice of Christ re-presented in the Eucharist;

this parallels how the common priesthood receives those

graces wrought by that sacrifice to the extent that their

obedience and disposition to grace is perfect. The

sacraments are channels of grace, but there is not a rigid

correspondence of individual graces to individual sacraments

that excludes the transmission of graces by other means.

For example, one can exercise the virtue of chastity without

having taken and being bound to a vow of chastity.

65 ALBERT, q. 42.

50

Likewise, Mary can possess the graces of the priesthood

without receiving the sacrament. But she possesses those

graces because the way in which she exercises her union with

Christ is singularly related to her divine motherhood: “if

one can give her the name of priest, it is not because she

is ordained by the apostles, it is because the priestly

dignity is contained in an eminent manner in her dignity as

mother of God.”66

Mary in the Context of the Apostolic Priesthood and the Church

Acts 1.12-14 tells us that the apostles “all continued

with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women,

and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren.”67 The

apostles are set out first, as a distinct group, and then

the female and male disciples are mentioned, as well as Mary

by name. The first ecclesial act was not the Eucharist, but

prayer and the election of a bishop, an act in which the

apostles collaborated in prayer and discussion with all of

66 JB PETITALOT, La Vierge Marie d’après la theologie, Paris 1876, 60.67 Acts 1,14

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the disciples. Mary is mentioned by name, and evidently her

presence is held to be of great importance.

The followers of Jesus in the Upper Room are living in

first century Palestine. All around them the pagans have

priestesses. But as the Didaskalia attests, “If we do not

allow women to teach, how can anyone agree that they . . .

should assume the office of priest?”68 In early antiquity

there existed a Christian sect which considered Mary as

priest and ordained women priests, the Collyridians, who

offered “up a sacrifice of bread rolls in the name of the

Ever-Virginal (that is, of Mary) [and] ordain women, through

whom they offer up the sacrifice in the name of Mary.”69

This led Epiphanius to respond, “If women were to be charged

with the entering the priesthood or with assuming

ecclesiastical office, then in the New Covenant it would

have devolved upon no one more than Mary to fulfil a

priestly function . . . But he did not find this good. Not

68 cited in HAUKE, 415.69 EPIPHANIUS, Adversus haereses 78, in PG 42, 736.

52

even baptising was entrusted to her; otherwise, Christ could

have better been baptised by her than by John.”70

Mary in the Gospels is not treated as a priest, but as

distinct from the apostles, though no less important. The

same Epiphanius who condemns the Collyridians and explained

that Mary was not a priest calls her “both priest and

altar.” He states, “The blessed Virgin possesses another

extreme dignity which can be rightly called that of the

priesthood, namely that of the person who is offering as

second after Christ. For together with the priests who are

performing the sacred mysteries, together with Christ . . .

she always offers the unbloody sacrifice just as at one with

him, she offered the bloody sacrifice.”71 This second after

Christ establishes an important distinction: there is a

ministerial priesthood to which Mary does not belong and

which makes present the sacrifice of Calvary in an unbloody

manner and there is a common priesthood which unites itself

to the sacrifice and Mary, as second after Christ, is its

exemplar because she was also at the bloody sacrifice.

70 EPIPHANIUS, Adversus haereses 79, PG 42, 744.71 EPIPHANIUS, In Canticum vol. 2, 40 cited on www.womenpriests.org

53

The ministerial priest does not offer his own personal

spiritual sacrifice with that of Christ on the Cross, but in

His person makes present the sacrifice of Christ itself. The

common priest offers the spiritual sacrifice of his life to

the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross which the ministerial

priest makes present during the Mass. This is the root of

the distinction between the spiritual priesthood, offering a

spiritual sacrifice of praise and one’s life like Mary did,

and the ministerial priesthood, rendering the unique and

perfect sacrifice of the Cross present by the

transubstantiation of bread and wine into the Body and Blood

of Christ.

The concept of Mary as priest identifies the

sacrament/sacrifice accomplished by Jesus with our

participation in it, thus ultimately confusing the

confection of the sacrament of the Eucharist with its

reception, and obliterating the distinction between apostle

and disciple which is inherent in the Gospel itself. The

conception of Mary as ministerial priest may give some

persons hope for a female priesthood, but it actually

54

downgrades the motherhood which was the source for the

singular priestly dignity of Mary as well as the common

priesthood which sees itself as the recipient of the graces

of the Redemption rather than the efficient cause of the

Redemption.

Mary’s role within the common priesthood, however,

places her among the redeemed and within the Body of Christ

and, taking seriously her maternity, makes her not only

Mother of God but Mother of the Church. This makes the

common priesthood not into some kind of lower caste in the

Church, but a true royal priesthood intimately associated

with the work of redemption wrought by Christ.

55

CHAPTER TWO

THE FAITHFUL AND THE MINISTRY

5. Dogmatic Considerations About the Threefold OrdainedMinistry: Bishop, Priest and Deacon

The Three Orders in the Light of Contemporary Exegesis of the Scriptures and the

Fathers

56

The word priest does not have a uniform meaning in the

Sacred Scriptures and the threefold ordained ministry of

bishop, priest and deacon that, especially since the

promulgation of Pius XII’s encyclical Sacramentum ordinis of 30

November 1947, theologians take for granted in discussions

about Holy Orders, is not set out with absolute clarity

either in the Bible or in our records of the earliest years

of the Christianity. Any discussion of the priesthood of

Mary must begin with a consideration of the priesthood in se

and its relation to other forms of ministry in the Church.

The biblical data on the priesthood, being the starting

point of our consideration, has been studied considerably by

contemporary exegesis, even if the modern exegetes’

contemporaries in speculative theology have not written very

much about the nature of the priesthood. Some exegetes

maintain that the manner in which the priesthood has been

exercised for most of Christian history is far from the

Biblical ideal, and results from the grafting of a

Hellenistic mentality onto a simple Hebraic idea of service,

57

and further, that this grafting has destroyed the original

meaning of the priesthood.

The priesthood of the Old Testament can be said to

begin with the Levitical priesthood of the Mosaic period.

At the beginning, priests and levites of the Old Covenant

are indistinguishable; only with the legislation of the Book

of Numbers do they appear as two different ranks in which

the levites are helpers to the priests.72 These men who

belonged to the tribe of Levi were set apart for worship in

which context lay their principal function. But the work of

the Old Testament priesthood was not merely to officiate

over the sacrifices of the people to God; their role was

also to represent God in the midst of the people. When the

priest blessed, it was YHWH himself who blessed.73

Jesus was not of the tribe of Levi and the New

Testament from the very beginning underscores the novelty of

the Christ Event in its relationship to the priesthood. The

priest Zechariah is struck dumb at the announcement of the

72 For the priests, Ezekiel 44.15-31 and Numbers 18.7-20; for the Levites Ezekiel 44.11-44, Numbers 18.21-32.73 G. CAVALLI, “Il Sacramento dell Ordine”, in Sacramentaria speciale II. Bologna 2003, 210-211.

58

birth of John the Baptist, the precise moment when God

reveals the beginning of a new covenant that will contain a

new priesthood. This event should be contrasted with the

second visitation of the angel Gabriel, which is made not to

one of God’s official ministers, but to a young woman ready

to accomplish the will of God.74 The silencing of the

Jewish priesthood is accomplished by the word of Mary’s

assent to becoming the mother of One who will institute a

new kind of priesthood.

In the Gospels, Jesus presents himself not as a

priest75, but as one greater than the priests, and it is for

this reason that the priests conspire to kill him. Jesus’

ministry is much more that of a prophet than of a priest,

but the evangelists also recount various priest-like actions

of His, such as raising his hands in prayer and blessing.76

Already the first generation of Christians read these

gestures as priestly. While only the Letter to the Hebrews

74 Luke 1,8-10. 29-45.75 Cf. Hebrews 7,14. For it is evident that our Lord sprang out of Juda; ofwhich tribe Moses spake nothing concerning priesthood. 76 Luke 24,50-51. And he led them out as far as to Bethany, and helifted up his hands, and blessed them. And it came to pass, while heblessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven.

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specifically speaks of Jesus in a priestly sense, “Christian

reflection on Jesus succeeds in gathering the sense of his

priesthood, considered not in relation to the ritual

priesthood of the temple and its sacrifices, but in relation

to the offering He made of Himself on the cross, once for

all time.”77

The Letter to the Hebrews provides us with the most

comprehensive understanding of Jesus as priest and victim, but

it furnishes an entirely new concept of priesthood. Instead

of the Old Testament idea of priesthood as separation and

elevation, it offers an idea of priesthood as solidarity and

abasement. Christ is therefore a priest “crowned with glory

and honour; that he by the grace of God should taste death

for every man.”78 While the Old Testament priesthood

mediated between God and man by representing God in divine

worship and blessing the people, Jesus bridges the gap

between heaven and earth by identifying priest and

sacrifice.

77 CAVALLI, 214.78 Hebrews 2,9

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That unique priesthood of Jesus, however, was not to

remain singular to Him; the priestly mission of Christ

required others to represent Him. The New Testament

presents three groups of persons: the Twelve, the Seventy,

and the Seven. The Twelve apostles were to be the true

Israel of God,79 called and set apart as his representatives

sent to the world to preach the Good News, to baptize, to

celebrate the Eucharist, to impose hands and to communicate

the Holy Spirit. The Seventy disciples receive their

mission from Jesus to go about His work with and under the

apostles. The Seven “men of honest report, full of the Holy

Ghost and wisdom”80 were entrusted with the task of

collaboration with the apostles, in prayer, in preaching the

Word, in their service ( at tables, and in building

up the Christian community in charity.81 Participation in

these offices was effected by the laying on of hands

79 Matthew 19,28. And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, Thatye which have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shallsit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones,judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

80 Acts 6,3.81 CAVALLI, 217-218.

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(impositio manuum)82 which came to signify the

transmission of a specific gift (munus) and mission, such

that the ministry was seen as vocation, consecration and mission in

the service of Christ and the Church.

The terminology of the New Testament with regard to

these three groups and their successors as bishops, presbyters,

and deacons is a sign that these new ministries are

understood in the light of the Old Testament. The use of

the term cleric arose about the same time as that of the term

priest (), and the distinction of a priestly order from

that of the laity (plebs), first emerges in Tertullian and is

fully developed only by the fourth century.83

Despite the gradual development of terminology to

describe the ministry, it is clear that Jesus established

the Christian priesthood at the Last Supper, its principal

characteristic being to offer sacrifice.84 Furthermore, in

breathing upon the apostles after the Resurrection with the

82 I Timothy 4,14. Neglect not the gift that is in thee, which was giventhee by prophecy, with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery. 83 CAVALLI, 206-207.84 J. TIXERONT, L’ordre et les ordinations. Paris 1925, 32.

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words, “Receive ye the Holy Spirit,”85 Jesus gives them the

power to forgive sins, making them vessels of divine grace.

But is the Christian priesthood as established by Christ in

the New Testament merely, as Edwin Hatch maintained in his

1880 Oxford lectures, a class of men deputed to liturgical

functions and to keep vigilance over ecclesiastical

discipline, a class of delegates and functionaries?86 The

theologian J. Tixeront responds to Hatch that such a

nominalist idea of the priesthood as nothing more than

“preaching, memory and representation” is not present in the

writings of any of the many generations of writers

successive to the apostles.

Tixeront brings out a point that is a crucial for

understanding the Catholic teaching on the priesthood and

which has repercussions on the debate about women’s

ordination, as we shall see. The community approves those

who offer themselves for the ministry, as in the case of the

first deacons, but the institution comes from above, not

85 John 20,19-23.86 TIXERONT, 36.

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from the community.87 There is from the very beginning a

“special and independent power of the hierarchy” which is

seen already clearly in the Apostolic Constitutions: “The layman

should honour and reverence the bishop as a father, a lord

and a god after God the Almighty, as a father and a king, as

the priest and intermediary of God, to whom account must be

given if God is not to be resisted and the Lord offended.”88

Evidence for this fact is that, even though in the

early Church there existed cases of laymen performing

baptism and preaching (that of Origen being the most

famous), testimonies of laymen and women celebrating the

Eucharist come exclusively from texts in which certain

authors describe the behaviour of Gnostics or pseudo-

Gnostics. Irenaeus of Lyon mentions how women consecrated

chalices of wine mixed with honey in the Gnostic rites

surrounding the Eucharist of Marcion,89 and Firmilian of

87 Acts 6,1-6.88 Didascalia of the Twelve Apostles in the Apostolic Constitutions as translated by F.Nau (Paris, 1912), cited in TIXERONT, 38, translated by Christopher Smith.89 Adv. Haereses, I.13.2, as in TIXERONT, 41.

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Caesarea calls similar actions by a prophetess a simulation

of consecration (facere simularet).90

There is an important text, however, that purportedly

speaks of laypeople celebrating the Eucharist. Tertullian,

in a discourse on why priest widowers should not remarry,

says, Nonne et laici sacerdotes sumus? Scriptum est: Regnum quoque nos et

sacerdotes Deo et Patri suo fecit.91 But he is using the term priest in

an analogous sense, much as he uses the word brother in his

De monogamia, to express the fellowship of the spirituals as

having a priestly and fraternal identity, in

contradistinction to the hierarchy he was already

criticising during the semi-Montanist period during which he

wrote these treatises. The only other text where the

Montanist Tertullian admits of laypersons celebrating the

Eucharist is in absolutely private reunions (ubi tres, ecclesia

est) and even there, he says that the celebrant of such a

rite is “a priest to himself alone.”92 Furthermore, recent

scholarship has shed light on this text as well: Father

90 Inter epist. S. Cypriani, Epist. LXXV, 10., as in TIXERONT, 42. 91 De exhort. castitatis, 7, as is TIXERONT, 43.92 TIXERONT, 45.

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Petau, taking his cue from Tertullian’s Ad uxorem, states

that these celebrations were offerings of already

consecrated eucharistic elements received by laypersons to

be consumed at home93, a type of what today would be called

a domestic Liturgy of the Presanctified or a Communion

Service.

It is not the objective of this study to present an

exhaustive history of the sacramental praxis of the Church.

But it is important to see that the Scriptures provide for a

threefold ministry, one order of which is the priesthood,

which exists by divine institution to offer sacrifice and

forgive sins; these actions have never belonged to the

laity, because it does not possess that priesthood.

Dogmatic Definitions on the Three Orders

After having seen the biblical and patristic testimony

about the nature of ministry in its threefold form, we pass

on to a brief perusal of the dogmatic definitions of the

Magisterium on the sacrament of Holy Orders. First of all,

93 Ibid., 46.

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we should consider the propositions that are to be held by

Catholics as being de fide: that Holy Order is a true and

proper sacrament instituted by Christ; that the consecration

of priests is a sacrament; that bishops are superior to

priests; that the sacrament of order confers sanctifying

grace and confers a permanent spiritual character upon the

recipient; and that the ordinary dispenser of all grades of

order, both the sacramental and the non-sacramental, is the

validly consecrated bishop alone.94 Furthermore, it is a

sententia certa that the consecration of a bishop and the order

of diaconate are a sacrament and that orders can be received

validly only by a baptised male.95

These dogmatic formulations are necessary background to

any discussion of orders, as they are binding on all the

faithful.

94 L. OTT, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma. Rockford 1974, 450-460.95 Ibid.

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6. What is a Priest? The Ministerial Priesthood in theHistory of the Church and the Recent Magisterium

The Development of the Ministry in Church History

Already in the fourth and fifth centuries with the

expansion of Christianity, the Church had to guarantee the

quality of her ministers as well as explain the limits of

the validity and liceity of orders in light of contemporary

controversies. Gradually, the ministry came to be

identified with worship, and ritual elements surrounding

ordination became much more important, to such an extent

that the traditio instrumentorum (the handing over of signs

proper to the order) came to be considered to be the matter

of the sacrament. In the scholastic period, ministry came

to seen as potestas in corpus Christi by which priesthood was

defined in terms of its relationship to the offering of the

Eucharist. As a result, the episcopacy was no longer really

distinguishable from the priesthood except inasmuch as it

held a fullness of jurisdiction. The Council of Trent

consolidated this perception of the priesthood in its Decree

on the Sacrifice of the Mass by stating that the priesthood of

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Christ was actualised in the visible and external ministry

of the priesthood. The encyclical Sacramentum ordinis of Pius

XII defined the matter of the sacrament as the imposition of

hands and the words of the consecratory Preface, thus

bringing a close to the “Tridentine iter” of scholastic

sacramental theology as well as bringing the liturgical

praxis of the Church back into line with that of the first

millennium of Christianity. 96

Current Teaching on the Threefold Ordained Ministry

On 11 October 1992, the thirtieth anniversary of the

opening of the Second Vatican Council, Pope John Paul II

issued the Catechism of the Catholic Church as “a statement of the

Church’s faith and catholic doctrine . . . [and] a sure norm

for teaching the faith.”97 The Catechism can be said to the

most succinct presentation of the current Magisterial

96 CAVALLI, 228-230.97 John Paul II, Apostolic Constitution Fidei Depositum 3 as printed in theCatechism of the Catholic Church. Vatican City 1994, henceforth referred to as CCC.

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teaching on the Sacrament of Orders in the light of the

Second Vatican Council.

The Catechism in its exposition of the Sacrament of Holy

Orders affirms that “only Christ is the true priest, the

others being only his ministers,”98 and that Christ has made

of His Church “a kingdom, priests for His God and Father,”

i.e., “the whole community of believers is . . .

priestly.”99 It is notable that the Catechism presents the

conception of the one priesthood of Christ in the section on

the sacrament of Holy Orders, and not in the previous

section of “Christ’s Faithful – Hierarchy, Laity,

Consecrated Life” (CCC 871-933); this placement would seem

to imply that this one priesthood, later described as being

exercised in two essentially different ways, is somehow the

sacrament of Holy Orders. In this case, it would indeed be

difficult to establish that the distinction between

ministerial and common priesthood is integral to the economy

of the sacraments.

98 CCC 1545.99 CCC 1546.

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Nonetheless the Catechism defines Holy Orders as “the

sacrament of apostolic ministry”100 and reiterates the

teaching of Pius XII in Mediator Dei that the minister who has

received sacerdotal consecration represents the priest Jesus

and “possesses the authority to act in the power and place

of the person of Christ himself (virtute ac persona ipsius Christi)101

“in the name of the whole Church.”

The Catechism does not present its teaching on

ecclesiastical ministry in the form of propositions to be

held de fide or as sententia certa as the manualist tradition

does, but reaffirms them in a more discursive manner. It

also adds that the ministerial priesthood “confers a sacred

power for the service of the faithful” which is expressed as

a tripartite gift: munus docendi, teaching; munus liturgicum,

divine worship, also known as the munus sanctificandi (an

appellation that extends beyond the official liturgical

rites of the Church); and the munus regendi, pastoral

governance.102 Priests are described as “prudent co-workers”

100 CCC 1536.101 CCC 1548, cf. Pius XII, Mediator Dei, AAS, 39 (1947) 548.102 CCC 1592.

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“united with the bishops in sacerdotal dignity and at the

same time depend(ing) on them in the exercise of their

pastoral functions.”103

The Catholic teaching on the ministerial priesthood can

be summarized as follows: The priest is a man who receives from

heaven, not from the community, a divine institution by which he is endowed

with the sacred power to offer sacrifice and remit sins in the person of Christ the

Head and in the name of the Church, and also endowed with the gifts of

teaching, sanctifying and ruling.104 This will be our constant

definition of the ministerial priesthood which will guide

our discussion.

7. Christifideles: The Common Priesthood of the Faithful in the

Recent Magisterium

Theological Considerations About the Priesthood of the Faithful103 CCC 1595.104 SACERDOS EST VIR QUI RECIPIT DE CAELO, NON DE COMMUNITATE, INSTITUTIONEM DIVINAM, QUA (TALEM UT) SIMUL DOTETUR SACRA POTESTATE OFFERENDI SACRIFICIUM REMITTENDIQUE PECCATA IN PERSONA CHRISTI CAPITIS ET IN NOMINE ECCLESIAE, AC MUNERIBUS DOCENDI, SANCTIFICANDI, ET REGENDI.

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Saint Peter in his First Epistle, calling to mind

Exodus 19,6, calls the Christians, “a chosen generation, a

royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye

should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out

of darkness into his marvellous light” (I Peter 2,9). Saint

John in the Apocalypse proclaims that Jesus has made His

faithful “kings and priests” (Apocalypse 5,10, cf. 20,6).

But what is this sense of this , royal

priesthood? Where there is a priest, there is a sacrifice,

and it is Paul who gives us a clue as to the sacrifice which

marks the nature of this royal priesthood: “ye present your

bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is

your reasonable service” (Romans 12,1)105 The Christian

forms a new temple and a holy priesthood to offer spiritual

sacrifices of praise ()106 in the

105Greek text:

106 I Peter 2,5: Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house,an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to Godby Jesus Christ. Hebrews 13,15: By him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise toGod continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to hisname.

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service of faith.107 Sacrifice here has the meaning of all that

renders glory to God, as Saint Augustine explains in The City

of God, “A true sacrifice is every good work that is done so

that by holy society we may adhere to God.”108 Saint Leo the

Great affirms this priesthood of spiritual sacrifice when he

says that by baptism, “the Holy Spirit anoints all priests,

so that by this special service of our ministry, all

spiritual and rational Christians may now themselves to be

participants in the office of priest and king.”109 All of

the Christian life is thus seen as a spiritual sacrifice of

a life offered to God, an interior priesthood to which one

is consecrated by baptism. And this can give us a summation

of the Catholic teaching on the common priesthood: All

Christians by their baptism become priests of an interior priesthood, offering a

spiritual sacrifice, which is their own lives.110

107 Philippians 2,17: And if I be offered upon the sacrifice and serviceof your faith, I joy. 108 De civitate Dei X.6, as cited in TIXERONT, 50, translated by Christopher Smith.109 Sermo IV,1 cited in TIXERONT, 51, translated by Christopher Smith.110 OMNES CHRISTIFIDELES PER BAPTISMUM SACERDOTES FIUNT INTERIORIS SACERDOTII, OFFERENTES SACRIFICIUM SPIRITUALE, QUOD EST VITA IPSORUM.

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The Definition of the Laity in Vatican II, the Code of Canon Law,Christifideles Laici and the Catechism

Vatican II’s Constitution on the Church, Lumen gentium,

defines the laity as “all the faithful except those in holy

orders and those in a religious state sanctioned by the

Church [who] . . . are in their own way made sharers in the

priestly, prophetic, and kingly functions of Christ [and]

carry out their own part in the mission of the whole

Christian people with respect to the Church and the

world.”111 It is important to note the fact that the laity

is ontologically defined by a negation, that is, by not

belonging to the ministerial priesthood, as if the two were

separate entities standing next to and absolutely distinct

from each other. But the axiological description of the laity

is identical to the ontological definition of the common

priesthood of the baptized as discussed above in which the

ministerial priesthood stands within and also shares in the

common priesthood. This schematic discrepancy is important:

the first is a juridical conception of the two modes of

111 LG 31 in W. ABBOTT, ed., The Documents of Vatican II. New York 1966.

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exercising the priesthood that emphasizes their difference,

while the second is a sacramental conception of those modes

that emphasizes their unity and their state of being ordered

to one another.

The Catechism goes on to describe the participation of

the laity not in terms of the three munera that the

ministerial priesthood possess, but in the three officia of

Christ as Prophet, Priest and King. The laity participate

in the priestly office by “everywhere offering worship by

the holiness of their lives,”112 in the prophetic office by

teaching “in order to lead others to faith,”113 and in the

kingly office by cooperating “with their pastors in the

service of the ecclesial community.”114

Thus we see that the Council envisions a ministerial

priesthood that enjoys the three munera of teaching,

sanctifying, and ruling, which are the manifestations of the

three officia of Christ as Prophet, Priest and King. The

Catechism, on the other hand, relates the participation of

112 LG 34.113 CCC 904 quoting St THOMAS AQUINAS, Summa theologiae, III.q 71.a 4.resp ad obj 3.114 CCC 910 quoting Paul VI in Evangelii nuntiandi 73.

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the common priesthood to those officia in such a way as to

reverse the sacramental notion and axiological description

of the ministerial priesthood within the common priesthood

which is implied in LG 10, replacing it with a notion of the

superiority of the ministerial priesthood in which the

common priesthood participates, echoing the ontological

definition of the laity in LG 31.

The Second Vatican Council clarified the distinction

between the ministerial and the common priesthood, but the

Magisterium has not subsequently succeeded in explaining the

relationship between them, although theologians after the

Council have tried to fill this void. It is our contention

that this discrepancy contributes to the acrimonious

discussion over women’s ordination, in which many accuse the

Church of claiming that the ministerial priesthood is over

and above the laity, and that theology must “liberate” the

chains that bind an enslaved laity to a domineering

ministerial priesthood. We will return later in this thesis

to possible ways of overcoming this discrepancy, but before

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that discussion, there are other matters that must be

explored.

8. Male and Female He Created Them: Anthropological Reflectionson Masculinity and Femininity as Related to Ministry

Sexuality and the Image of God in Christ

This study takes for granted the orthodox Catholic

belief that God’s self-revelation to man reaches its

fullness in the historical Jesus, who is, as the Nicene

Creed states, “true God and true man.” But we must explore

further a certain datum: that God became incarnate not just

as a human being, but indeed with a particular sex, the

male.

Jesus Christ is the representative of God because “He

who has seen me has seen the Father,” and “I and the Father

are one.”115 But Jesus is not a representative of the Father

only in His divinity but also in His humanity, “for in Him

all the fullness of the divinity dwells bodily.”116 The fact

that God became incarnate to save humankind means that he

115 John 14,9, John 10,30.116 Colossians 2,9.

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came to save both men and women, and in the new Body of

which Christ is the Head, “there is neither male nor

female.”117 The New Testament itself makes no explicit

statement about Christ’s being a man even though every noun

and adjective that refers to Him, including His personal

names, (Jesus, Christ, Son of Man, Son of God, etc.) are

unambiguously in the masculine gender. It is not a matter

of indifference that God became incarnate as a man and not

as a woman because of all the various permutations of human

existence, sexual differentiation is the most deeply rooted

and the most inescapable.

To understand how sexual differentiation is important

to this discussion, e must first understand the symbolic

nature of such a differentiation. The word symbol comes

from the Greek , to put together. H.R. Schlette

defines a symbol as “any being . . . that implicitly refers

to another being in and through some inherent similarity.”118

For this reason, red in a traffic light is more than just a

117 Galatians 3,28.118 HR SCHLETTE, “Symbol”, in Heinrich Fries, ed., Handbuch theologischer Grundbegriffe 4, 2nd ed. Munich 1974, 169.

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sign agreed upon by convention for stopping; there is

something in redness that is suited to caution one to stop.

The psychologist Carl Jung explains the power that the

symbol has over human consciousness: “A symbol, in contrast

to a sign, cannot be artificially produced by consciousness,

but is a form in which especially the unconsciousness

manifests itself.”119

No attempt to consider the divinity of Christ can be

without reference to symbolism, and the religious experience

of a God who enters into relation with human beings is

necessarily tied to sexual references. Pre-Christian

religions often have a heightened sense of the numen of the

divinity as being encompassed in feminine symbolism. But

with monotheism, when the numen takes on a nomen, the

divinity becomes expressed with masculine symbolism.120

The transcendence of the divinity has its symbolic

counterpart in the very genetic makeup of human beings. The

male possesses the asymmetrical XY chromosome and the female

119 Cf. R. HOSTIE, CG Jung und die Religion, Freiburg im Bresgau 1957, 188.120 A. BERTHOLET, “Göttin”, Wörterbuch der Religionen, 2nd ed. Stuttgart 1962,196.

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the symmetrical XX chromosome. “From the male hereditary

factor, it would be theoretically possible, by doubling the

X chromosome, to produce a female chromosomal set, but not

vice-versa. Woman is, in a sense, taken out of man.”121 The

Y chromosome is thus a symbol of transcendence, and the

double XX of immanence, both of which reflect in a very rich

way the transcendence and the immanence of their Creator,

two qualities which are distinct yet one. The symbolic

import of this is very great. A theology that identifies

transcendence and immanence also identifies creator and

creature, male and female, and thus revelation, which is an

act communicating the transcendence of a creator to the

immanence of a creature, is impossible. The self-revelation

of God in Jesus Christ demands that there be sexual

symbolism that is meaningful because it is written into the

very nature of the order of creation.

Jesus reveals Himself as a man. Men, because of their

tendency to “separate the personal and the factual, are more

likely to be suited to communicating the message of God in

121 M. HAUKE, Women in the Priesthood? A Systematic Analysis in the Light of the Order of Creation and Redemption. San Francisco 1988, 181.

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its objective content.”122 In fact, it is the objectivity

accompanying Jesus’ teaching that expresses his power

(), which in turn corresponds to the expansivity of

the masculine. But this teaching has power ultimately

because it is grounded in the fact that Jesus is the Word of

God. Notice that Jesus in not referred to in the Gospels as

the Wisdom of God, with its feminine connotations, but as the

Word of God prefigured in the Old Testament with masculine

connotations.123 The power of the Word is carried on in

Jesus’ actions ().

But the most important action of Jesus was the

Redemption, in which He was both Priest and Victim,

representing God to man, and by His sacrifice (of which the

122 HAUKE, 257.123 Isaiah 55,10-11: For as the rain cometh down, and the snow fromheaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh itbring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread tothe eater:So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall notreturn unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and itshall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. Jeremiah 23,29: Is not my word like as a fire? saith the LORD; and likea hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces? Wisdom 18,14-16: For while gentle silence enveloped all things and nightin its swift course was now half gone, they all powerful word leapedfrom heaven, from the royal throne into the midst of the land that wasdoomed, a stern warrior carrying the sharp sword of thy authenticcommand, and stood and filled all things with death, and touched heavenwhile standing on the earth.

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Eucharist is the memorial and re-presentation) redeemed the

world. With respect to the representation of man to God, the

representative of the community performs an action that

stands outside himself, in moving outward to stand before

God; this standing out, or eccentricity, is proper to

masculinity and marks public (as opposed to private)

worship. A representative of man to God stands out of his

own sphere to offer sacrifice, which is “an external

religious observance in which a perceptible gift is offered

to God by a legitimised servant in recognition of God’s

absolute, supreme sovereignty and, since the fall, in

reconciliation with God.”124 Such a sacrifice is offered by

a priest in a typically masculine attitude. It is for this

that Louis Bouyer stated, “It would have been monstrous if

the Son of God had been born a woman.”125 The transcendent

and eccentric nature of masculinity is just as important to

Christ’s humanity, which he took in order to effect our

redemption, as it is in representing that redemption through

the priesthood that makes it present in the world.

124 OTT, 183.125 Cited in HAUKE, 267.

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Gender and Priestly Representation

But does all of the above necessitate that the priests

who perpetuate the redemptive sacrifice of Christ in the

Eucharist be male, especially since the fruits of such

redemption are destined to man and woman alike, and

incorporate all humanity into the Body of Christ in which

there is neither male nor female?

Manfred Hauke in his study on women in the priesthood

reminds us that the broadest definition of the priest is as

a mediator between God and human beings, and two basic

structures are decisive for the priest’s activity:

1. The representation of the Divinity in relation to man. When theemphasis is on transcendence and the active workings of God,particularly in history, it seems appropriate to reserve the priesthoodfor men, whose relation to the environment is more distanced and morepowerfully efficacious.2. The public representation of man to the Divinity. For this men tendto be more suitable. As the representative of his community, a mansteps, so to speak, “outward” into the presence of God and by virtue ofhis more strongly developed capacities for abstract thought andenergetic will, is more likely to be able to represent the commoninterest and lead the religious group.126

As we have said before, the very nature of human beings

is marked by sexual symbolism. CS Lewis reminds us of this

126 HAUKE, 190-191.

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when he says, “We have no authority to take the living and

sensitive figures that God has painted on the canvas of our

nature and shift them about as if they were mere geometrical

figures.”127 The liturgy, with its symbolism, is the sphere

where the priest as representative of God and the community

makes present the redemption in and through his own personal

symbolism, which is united in an essential, and not an

accidental way, to Christ’s humanity. Secular actions have

no need of such symbolism or representation, but the liturgy

must respect the sexual symbolism of the Incarnate Word if

it is to truly represent the revelation of that Word to

humankind and if the priest, who is that representative, is

truly in persona of the Word.

Since the sign value in the person of the priest is

part of the essence of the sacrament of Holy Orders, the

priesthood cannot escape the natural symbolic structure of

creation which “expresses itself in the differentiation and

interrelation of man and woman,” because the priest is in

his person and by reason of his nature a sign through which

127 CS Lewis, “Priestesses”, 195 cited in HAUKE, 193.

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Christ “accomplishes the life-giving actions of His

Church.”128

The notion of representation is the core of the

Christian office of apostle, who can be defined as “a

representative of Christ who is fully empowered and invested

with authority as such,” possessing a “complete mandate for

commemorative realization of the redemptive actions of

Christ.”129

Masculine and Feminine as Related to the Orders of Creation and Redemption

The Word became took on human nature as a male “in

order to illustrate the representation of the . . . Father

vis-à-vis man and the ‘official’ representation of man

before God. In this Christ is the archetypal image of the

official priest, who, by virtue of his ordination represents

in a special way both the Son of God who became man and his

redemptive work.”130 The order of redemption, however, does

not eliminate the feminine from creation. God assumed His

128 G. MÜLLER, Priesthood and Diaconate, San Francisco 2002, 106.129 P. BLÄSER, Amt und Eucharistie, Paderborn 1973, 13-19.130 HAUKE, 472.

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human nature from a female. It is the receptive and

cooperative attitude of Mary that “embodies the ideal image

of the Christian in the most complete way and provides, at

the same time, a criterion for the sort of effective

activity that is specific to women. The response of Mary

expands itself . . . out of the Church, whose basic

structure is Marian in character.”131 In more succinct

language, masculinity is fitting to the apostles and to the

priests their successors as femininity is to the Church as a

whole.

Androgyny and Theology

This point has not always and everywhere been accepted

so readily. For not a few Christians today, any idea of not

ordaining women “contradicts the gospel’s demand for full

equality of all human beings.”132 In fact, feminist theology

takes at its Urprinzip that “all forms of domination and

131 Ibid.132 LM RUSSELL, The Liberating Word: A Guide to Nonsexist Interpretation of the Bible, Munich: 1979, 73.

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oppression of man by man are social expressions of that

dualism that is rooted more deeply than any others: the

elevation of the male sex above the female.”133 Hence

feminist theology seeks to “liberate” the Catholic

priesthood from its status as a purely masculine preserve.

But in order to do so, Christ must be seen as androgynous.

Their argument is that Christ in his humanity

represents both men and women, and also embodies feminine

characteristics such as kindness and mildness. This

theological affirmation about Christ is read against a

Neoplatonist metaphysic, however, in which the androgynous,

with its corresponding emphasis on the feminine, is held up

as the ideal. This Neoplatonist ideal is present in the

theology of Duns Scotus Erigena, for whom the resurrected

Christ was androgynous.134 Likewise, it is present in the

literary sources of German Idealism and Romanticism, like

Jacob Boehme (d. 1624), whose Kabbalah-influenced Protestant

quietism claimed that Christ reinstated this “original

133 C. HALKES, Gott hat nicht nur starke Söhne, Güterslohe 1980, 30.134 Scotus Erigena, Periphyseon II, 6-10 in Patrologia Latina of MIGNE 122, 532-538.

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androgynous image” in His person,135 thus “canceling out the

opposition between the sexes,” as his follower Paul Tillich

would later relate.136

The androgynous Christ has been especially prevalent in

Russian Orthodoxy; in the writings of the theologian Sergei

Bulgakov it was even taken to such a degree as to merit his

excommunication by the Church. Many such theologians were

attracted by both the pantheistic thought of Schelling and

certain patristic texts which refer to what Saint John

Chrysostom called the “motherliness” of Jesus.137 In

connection with the idea that the Redemption was a kind of

birthing process of the Church, Saint Anselm, commenting on

Matthew 23,37138, says, “But are you not, Jesus, Good Lord,

also a mother?” The English mystic Julian of Norwich,

mostly ignored by her contemporaries but often quoted by

ours, in her Divine Revelations does not refer to the Triune

God, but only the humanity of Christ as feminine. Jesus is135 HAUKE, 268.136 HAUKE, 271.137 In Mt hom in Patrologia greca 58, 700.138 O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonestthem which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thychildren together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings,and ye would not!

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Mother precisely through His suffering and the sacrament of

the Altar. “Mother Jesus” gives us life by dying on the

Cross and nourishes us through the Church.

The vast majority of texts referring to an androgynous

image of Christ, however, are from Gnostic sources. The

Gospel of Thomas expresses the hope of many of today’s

androgynizing theologians, “If you . . . make the masculine

and the feminine into one thing . . . you will enter the

kingdom.”139 These theologians selectively forget that the

androgyny of the Gnostic tradition is one in which the

masculine overwhelms and suppresses the feminine. The

Montanist sect granted women more extensive participation in

the liturgy, precisely because it was suffused with an

androgynous conception of Christ (since the prophetess

Priscilla reported her visions of Christ as a woman) in a

Phrygia still rife with the worship of the mother-goddess

Cybele.

It is an androgynous conception of Christ which lies at

the root of a disregard for the sexual symbolism of Christ’s

139 E. HAENCHEN, Die Botschaft des Thomas-Evangelium. Berlin 1961, 19, 33.

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masculinity, with its consequences for the masculinity of

the priesthood. And it is for this reason that many

advocates of women’s ordination seek to find a female

example of priesthood, hoping thereby to use an androgynous

Christ to “liberate” a masculine priesthood, as we will see.

9. Theological Considerations About the Exclusion of Women

from the Priesthood

The Behaviour of Christ as Norm for Ecclesial Praxis

We have already seen reasons from the orders of

creation and redemption as well as from biblical and

patristic sources for the reasonability of an all-male

priesthood. But the documents of the recent Magisterium

which reaffirm the traditional praxis of excluding women

from the ministerial priesthood, such as Inter insignores of

1976 and the 1994 Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis of John

Paul II, take as their primary authority not the fact that

the Church has no power to introduce this innovation, but

rather the actions of Christ Himself. The behaviour of

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Christ Himself is seen as the foundation of the regula fidei,

the criterion against which all questions must be checked, a

true norm for the practice of the Church.

Some modern theologians contest the claim that the

behaviour of Christ in the Gospels must be the sure norm for

the faith and life of the Church. Karl Rahner states that

since Jesus lived only in imminent expectation (Naherwartung)

of the Parousia, He could not possibly set up a law for the

Church in every time and place.140 This kind of

argumentation is widespread among those who support women’s

ordination, because they claim that Jesus or Paul were

conditioned by their surroundings to such an extent that

they would never have dreamed of instituting women in any

position of authority. The unspoken supposition behind such

a way of argumentation is that Jesus’ knowledge was merely

human and not divine, and as a result, when Jesus’ actions

contradict what any individual thinks, such an individual

can disregard those actions as being merely culturally

conditioned, and hence not part of the regula fidei. The regula

140 K. Rahner, “Priestertum” 125 cited in HAUKE, 474.

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fidei is thus reduced to the individual and becomes totally

subjective.

But is it reasonable to assume that the behaviour of

Christ was culturally conditioned and hence cannot serve as

the regula fidei? Jesus’ attitude towards women, whose names

and personalities figure highly in the Gospel, was

revolutionary. They accompanied Him throughout His life and

ministry and all the way to the Cross, and Jesus aroused

anger by letting Himself be touched by women and for

conversing publicly with women. But the fact remains that,

although women were always present at the Paschal meal and

that women were the first witnesses to the Resurrection

(including Mary Magdalene, the “Apostle to the apostles”),

only the Twelve were at the Last Supper. In selecting those

Twelve as a special group, Jesus passed over not only women,

but the vast majority of His male followers as well. “You

did not choose me, but I chose you”141 means that Jesus’s

choice is significant. The priest who represents Christ and

the Church is a man chosen by Christ, who represents Christ

141 John 15,16

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not as a deputized member of the community, one who

represents Christ in one sense and the Church in another,142

but rather he represents Christ as the Head of the Church.

The accusation that it was the opinion of Christ or

Paul or the early Church about women which was the decisive

factor against barring women from ministerial priesthood is

untenable. The period of the Church from the coming of the

Holy Spirit at Pentecost to Saint Gregory the Great as it

spread through the known world, from England and Ethiopia to

Spain and Armenia, was one in which there was a tremendous

variety of roles played by women and also of opinion

regarding the nature and capacities of women. The one

constant in all of those times and places was the exclusion

of women from the ministerial priesthood; every other

question about women’s role in the Church lacks a uniform

answer.

Saint Epiphanius of Salamis, commenting on the

Montanist practice of allowing women to serve as priests,

which they justified by citing Paul’s dictum in Galatians

142 Just as the baptized may represent Christ as a witness in the world and the Church as a faithful member.

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3.28 that there would be no more male and female, explains

why the orthodox did not ordain women:

If women were meant to be authorized by God to hold thepriestly office, then no one in the New Testament wouldhave been more worthy than Mary to exercise thepriestly ministry . . . She was clothed with such greathonour that she was permitted to prepare a dwellingplace in her womb for the God of heaven and the King ofall, the Son of God . . . Yet he did not deem it goodto confer the priesthood upon her. He did not evenentrust to her the task of baptizing; otherwise Christshould have been baptized by her instead of by John.143

Such reasoning was reiterated by John Paul II in Ordinatio

sacerdotalis when he states that, “The fact that Mary, the Most

Holy Mother of God, did not receive the mission proper to

the Apostles nor the ministerial priesthood clearly

demonstrates that the non-admission of women to Holy Orders

[is] . . . faithful to a plan which must be attributed to

the wisdom of the Lord of the universe.”144

143 EPIPHANIUS, Anakephalaiosis 49 (Bibliothek der Kirchenväter 38, 208) cited in Müller, 155.144 Ordinatio sacerdotalis, 3.

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CHAPTER THREE

THE ROLE OF ANALOGY AND ALLEGORY IN THEOLOGY AND ITSAPPLICATION TO THE QUESTION OF MARIAN PRIESTHOOD

10. An Application of the Fourfold Sense of Scripture to

Theology

The Four Senses of Scripture

Saint Thomas Aquinas in the first question of his

Summa Theologiae asks in article 10, Can one passage of holy

Scripture bear several senses? He answers that, since God “is the

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author of holy Scripture . . . he has the power, not only of

adapting words to convey meanings . . . but also of adapting

things themselves.”145 St Thomas uses this to state that

there is a literal sense and a spiritual sense. Following a

distinction that goes as far back as the Venerable Bede, he

further distinguishes the spiritual sense into three: 1) the

allegorical sense, the typifying and prefiguring of the New

Covenant by the Old; 2) the moral sense, which exemplifies

how we should live, and 3) the anagogical sense, which is

the foreshadowing of eternal life.

The literal sense, which is also called the historical

sense, is from the Greek , to narrate. “It is what

the author intended to convey, to be discovered according to

the rules of literary criticism and in the light of the

circumstances according to the composition of its context

and of its wider setting in Church tradition.”146 In the

spiritual sense, however, which is based on the literal

sense, the important thing is not the meaning of the words

as much as the symbolism of the things they deal with. The

145 ST Ia, 1.10 res146 THOMAS AQUINAS, Summa theologiae, Appendix 12 vol. 1, 140.

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allegorical sense comes from , to speak in such a

way as to imply something other than what has been said.

The moral sense is from , which means turn, direction, way,

bahaviour, custom, character. The anagogical sense is from

to lead from lower to higher, seen as leading us to

our true homeland, the heavenly Jerusalem. The recent

Catechism of the Catholic Church takes up Thomas’ teaching and

makes it the cornerstone of its section on the

interpretation of scripture and, as a way of explaining how

the senses interact in the interpretation of scripture,

cites a medieval couplet: Lettera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria,

moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia.147

The Catholic Church in her Magisterium has always been

very clear that any interpretation of scripture must take

into account all four of these senses. Thomas reiterates

that their author is God Himself and so “the various

readings do not set up ambiguity . . . because . . . they

are many, not because one term may signify many things, but

because the things signified by the terms can themselves be

147 CCC 115-118.

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the signs of other things.”148 The fact that all of the

meanings are rooted in the literal sense highlights the

veracity of an interpretation that takes into account one or

more of the senses.

Thomas cites Augustine’s fourfold distinction of the

senses as historical, “when any matter is straightforwardly

recorded”; etiological, from , meaning the cause at

work, being when “a cause is indicated”; analogical, from

, meaning a resemblance of relations or attitudes,

“when the truth of one scriptural passage is shown not to

clash with the truth of another”; and allegorical, which

Thomas equates with his three spiritual senses. He also

points out that Hugh of Saint Victor enumerated just three

senses, the historical/literal, the allegorical, which

includes the anagogical and the tropological.149

The analogical and the allegorical senses, as explained

by Thomas and Augustine, have an intimate connection. If

the allegorical sense of scripture is, as Thomas says, “the

typifying and prefiguring of the New Covenant by the Old,”

148 ST Ia.1.10. ad 1.149 ST Ia.1.10.ad 2.

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then it is a kind of analogical sense, which Thomas defines

as “when the truth of one scriptural passage is shown not to

clash with the truth of another.” An allegory is an analogy

which shows the resemblance between the Old Covenant and the

New by way of types.

Analogy

Analogy is one of the spiritual senses of scripture,

therefore, which is based on the literal sense. In a

general sense, analogy indicates any resemblance established

by means of a comparison. It is

something according to the same word,

according to a same characteristic which, despite the

difference between two things, cedes it place to another,

weaker resemblance, as Cicero said, a proportio. But analogy

does not mean just any kind of imperfect likeness between

two things, but, as Kant writes, “a perfect likeness of two

relationships between two totally dissimilar things. 150

150 H. FRIES, ed., Guiliano Riva, trans., Dizionario teologico, vol. I, Brescia 1966, 77.

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Analogy may seem to be some kind of mean between

univocation and equivocation. Aristotle in his Poetics

explains that analogy is a type of metaphor by which a

second term is to the first as the fourth is to the third,

using as his example, Old age is to life as twilight is to the day.151 The

Thomists, building on Aristotle’s example, will call such a

metaphor externa analogia proportionalitatis impropriae, distinguishing

the internal correspondence which is properly equal in

relation according to which one speaks not by image and

improperly, but, in the two terms, properly.

The supreme use of such a metaphor comes from Saint

Paul, who in I Corinthians 12,12 speaks of the Church as the

Body of Christ. While they are in the community of God, the

many members constitute at the same time one single body in

the unity of the Holy Spirit and Christ. In this metaphor

we see four essential terms: the concept, the Church; the

image, the body; the term of comparison expressed as

equality of relationship, the unity of the body in

151 Aristotle, Poetics, 1457 b 6-9 e 16-33, as cited in FRIES, 86-87.

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relationship to the multiplicity of its members and

functions; and the transposition of body to Church.

The use of such analogies in scripture is the reason

for which the Catholic Church has also employed two other

concepts alongside the four senses of scripture in the

interpretation thereof: the analogia entis, whereby there is an

analogy between the existence of God and the existence of

man, even when the dissimilarity is always greater than the

similarity, as defined by Lateran IV; and the analogia fidei,

based on Romans 12,6,152 which the Catechism of the Catholic Church

defines as “the coherence of the truths of the faith among

themselves and within the whole plan of revelation.”153 Both

analogies are thus explained by Vatican I, “Reason,

illustrated by faith, when it zealously, piously and soberly

seeks, attains with the help of God some understanding of

the mysteries, and that a most profitable one, not only from

analogy of those things which it knows naturally, but also

from the connection of the mysteries among themselves and

152 let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith; 153 CCC 114.

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with the last end of man.”154 In other words, the Church,

illuminated by the Holy Spirit makes use of human reason in

theology to interpret Sacred Scripture according to the four

senses and with an eye to the analogies which are revealed

in it.

Metaphor

Until now, we have relied on Church Fathers and the

Magisterium to show us how understanding the senses of

scripture is necessary to interpretation of Holy Writ and

how analogy among the spiritual senses is useful for that

interpretation. Aristotle called analogy a metaphor, and

contemporary work in the field of linguistic studies may aid

in helping us to hone our understanding of analogy and its

use in scriptural interpretation.

The definition of metaphor according to the classical

French dictionary Robert is “a figure of language which

consists in a transferal of sense by analogical

154 D 1796.

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substitution,”155 transferring a concrete term in an abstract

context which gives it its figurative sense.156 The linguist

Max Block remarks that a metaphor creates the resemblance

between the two terms rather than formulating a previously

existing resemblance.157 Metaphor, in context, is a tactic

in a general strategy to suggest something other than what

is actually affirmed,158 obliterating established logical

barriers in order to make apparent new likenesses that a

previous classification could not bring about. The famous

semiologist Wittgenstein describes metaphor as a seeing-like,

as half-thought and half-experience, an intuitive experience

by which a term is read in terms of imagination.159

But the fact that the above description of metaphor is

one which stresses the active role of the human imagination

in expressing comparisons does not mean that such metaphors

are any less real or true. On the contrary, metaphor raises

something from what Thomas would call its literal sense to155 Cited in J. MALHERBE, Le langage théologique à l’âge de la science, Paris 1985, 83-84.156 Note that, for Thomas, analogy is a type of metaphor, while for Robert, metaphor is a type of analogy. 157 M. BLOCK, Models and Metaphors, Ithaca 1962, 113.158 MALHERBE, 86.159 MALHERBE, 90.

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what Malherbe illustrates as “a strategy by which language

divests itself of its descriptive function and in order to

accede to a mythical level where its function of discovery

is liberated.”160 The existential truth of the metaphor is

not affected by the tension that exists in the relation

between the two terms. The logical distance that exists

between two terms is preserved in the proximity of metaphor

and not destroyed, just as the literal sense is not

abolished by the metaphorical sense.161

The point is, just because something is expressed by

terms of metaphor or analogy, that does not mean that a

comparison made by means of them has no grounding in reality

much less that is therefore merely an act of human

imagination. On the contrary, the expression of two

realities in terms of a relational analogy or metaphor can

actually help human knowledge discover a deeper level of

meaning in the terms involved because of the relation

between them.

160 MALHERBE, 98.161 MALHERBE, 101.

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Analogy as the Foundation of Theology and the Allegorical Sense of Dogma

The above mentioned canon of Lateran IV states that

analogia entis is the reason why theologians can posit a

similarity between the fact that God exists and the fact

that man exists, even if the dissimilarity between them is

always greater. But it is precisely that analogy which makes

it possible for God to reveal Himself and His truth to man.

In fact, revelation “is unthinkable apart from its basis in

analogy, which is the process of negation and pre-eminence .

. . For revelation presupposes two terms, God and man, which

both meet each other and remain distinct . . . The concept

of analogy denies both that the Word of God is of the same

nature as the word of man, and also that it is a word

without any relation to human words, and thus completely

incapable of setting up a true dialogue.”162 The analogia fidei,

which the Catechism defines as “the coherence of the truths

of the faith among themselves and within the whole plan of

revelation,”163 is the revelation of God to man, which is

impossible without analogia entis.

162 R. LATOURELLE, Theology of Revelation, New York 1966, 366.163 CCC 114.

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The truths contained in divine revelation, which are

revealed only by way of analogia fidei et analogia entis, are called

dogmas, “lights on the path of faith [which] illuminate it

and make it secure.”164 Revelation, Vatican II describes, is

transmitted in two distinct modes, by the Scriptures and by

Tradition. The depositum fidei, the divine revelation which is

transmitted through scripture and tradition, is in its

essence analogical and metaphorical, because it is founded

on the analogy between God and man, but its being such does

not, as we have seen above, take away any of its existential

truth. Therefore, since we can discern the four senses of

scripture, we can likewise apply the same four senses to

dogma as well. Theology, which has as its task the

scientific and prayerful study of the sacred sciences, must

apply the four senses to scriptural texts as much as to

dogmatic formulations in elucidating the revelation of God

to man, the deposit of faith based on the analogy of being

and the analogy of faith.

164 CCC 89.

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Theology as a sacred science is impossible without

analogy, because its subject matter, revelation, is itself

analogy, even as it is grounded in a literal and historical

event, Jesus Christ. For this reason, dogma, which is the

formulation of the Revelation-Event who is Jesus Christ, is

by its nature analogical and allegorical. If the

allegorical sense of scripture establishes the likeness

between the Old and the New Testaments by way of types, the

allegorical sense of dogma establishes the likeness between

the nature of God who reveals Himself from all eternity in

the person of Jesus Christ and the dogmatic formulations

which are the translation into immanent and temporal human

language of that which is by its nature transcendent and

eternal.

The theologian who approaches any formulation of the

Magisterium or any phenomenon of Christian life, must

approach it looking at its literal and historical sense with

a critical eye to discover its real meaning; at its

allegorical sense, by which we “acquire a more profound

understanding of events by recognizing their significance in

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Christ”165; at its moral sense, by which are taught to act

justly; and at its anagogical sense, which indicates its

eschatological and soteriological importance for our present

life in its tension towards eternity.

11. What Do Texts and Images of Virgo Sacerdos Not Mean? The

Literal Sense

The discerning theologian is up against all of the

numerous texts and images presented in Chapter One that

refer to Mary and the priesthood. A more exhaustive study

could indeed be made of further texts and images, and René

Laurentin’s doctoral theses would provide perhaps the best

secondary source to study. But in order to make sense of

what these texts and images mean, either those presented

here or others that may be singled out for scrutiny, we must

first figure out their literal sense in order to pave the

165 CCC 117.

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way for a fruitful explanation of their existence and their

importance.

Priestly Imagery in Texts and Images of Mary

The vast majority of evidence offered for the existence

of women priests in Christian antiquity and for the

reasonableness of the appellation of Mary as priest comes

from images whose symbolism is interpreted in a sacerdotal

key. The www.womenpriests.org website gallery of images of

Mary as priest affirms that Mary is wearing vestments or

other clothing which indicate that she is a priest. Since

we have established that in order to understand such images,

we must explore the literal sense of these images, let us

look closer at the claim that she is wearing garments

associated with priesthood.

The website claims that “from the sixth century we find

in many Churches representations of Mary wearing the

episcopal pallium.”166 But the pallium was not always a

distinctly Christian garment. Predating Christ by two

166 www.womenpriests.org/mrpriest/gallery1.htm

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hundred years, it was worn by Saint Justin Martyr and

Christians of lay and clerical states as a sign of their

fidelity to Christ. The use of the pallium by the laity and

lower clergy was waning by the time the Roman Pontiff began

to grant it as a sign of jurisdiction, and only in the ninth

century did it become exclusively part of the regalia of

metropolitan archbishops, as sign of their jurisdictional

power. The more ancient form of the pallium was some 12

feet in length and 9 inches wide and was used actually to

warm the shoulders. What are called pallia in these images

seem too narrow and small to be episcopal pallia of the

period in which they were made, especially since the pallia

of bishops in other images of the same period, for example,

in the mosaics of Sant’Apollinare in Classe near Ravenna,

are much larger and wider. The putative pallia of the

Virgin Mary are actually closer in form to the zonê worn by

Greek bishops today than a sixth-century pallium.

Therefore, to say that these images point indubitably to

Mary as priest is untenable, for at the time of their

composition, the pallium was in a transitional stage from

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being a garment worn by Christian indiscriminately to being

a vestment specific to jurisdiction.167

In every image presented by the website Mary is said to

be wearing a chasuble. The remote origin of the chasuble,

(from Latin casual, “a little house”) is in the poncho-like

cloak of farmers and other workers, and began to be worn by

all classes of Roman society only around AD 350, six hundred

years after the first recorded mention of it by Plautus.

Only in the fifth century were women, and later all laity,

required to abandon the casula, although there is evidence of

the chasuble and alb being used in the Mass in a

contemporary account of a Mass celebrated by Saint Martin of

Tours in 397. Three centuries later, well after the

majority of the images said to be Mary dressed as a priest

were made, the use of the chasuble was restricted to the

priesthood.168 The chasuble, like the pallium, is not a

univocal garment, and claims that it is in fact a sign of

priestly status are difficult to establish. Images which

167 J. NOONAN, The Church Visible: The Ceremonial Life and Protocol of the Roman Catholic Church, Brooklyn 1996, 359.168 NOONAN, 339-340.

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are certainly of priests saying Mass in specifically

Eucharistic vestments demonstrate that those vestments,

while they do bear a certain resemblance to the commonly

portrayed vesture of Mary in antiquity, are not identical to

them, and the resemblance indicates not priestly status, but

rather the common origin of Roman and Byzantine daily wear

and subsequent ecclesiastical vestments and vesture.169

Women Priests in Ancient Frescoes?

The interpretation of such images of Mary in a priestly

key is not an isolated fact, however. Other images of women

in frescoes and mosaic are seen as evidence of the presence

of women in Holy Orders, and images read as Mary-as-Priest

serve to confirm that hypothesis. But here as well,

supporters of the hypothesis are taking these images and

assuming too much about what they depict based on more

recent phenomenological descriptions of what they assume is

being portrayed.

169 It should be noted also that the use of specific vestments for theEucharistic celebration was not universally accepted everywhere at once,as attested by a letter of Pope Saint Innocent I to the Bishop of Gubbioreproving the novelty of using special vestments at Mass.

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For example, a fresco in the catacombs of Santa

Priscilla is often proferred as evidence for women

celebrating the Eucharist. The image depicts seven women

around a table upon which there are a cup and two plates

with seven baskets on the side. The feminist theologian

Bridget Mary Meehan claims that “scholars agree” that this

is an “early church symbol for the Eucharist taken from the

stories of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes in

Mark 8,8 and Matthew 15,37.”170 She claims that the gesture

of the women is that “still familiar to us as the gesture of

consecration during the liturgy of the Eucharist, while the

two other women have only the right arm outstretched in

concelebration.”171 The fact is, however, that the presence

of frescoes with apparently Eucharistic symbolism in the

catacombs is often misleading. The fresco could depict, not

the Eucharistic liturgy, but the refrigerium ceremony which

was also held along with it in or above the catacombs. As

for consecratory gestures and concelebration, we know very

little indeed about how the liturgy was celebrated in the

170 www.womensordination.org/pages/art_Meehan.html171 ibidem.

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first six centuries of Christian history, and almost nothing

about the precise gestures which accompanied the various

rites. The concelebratory gesture mentioned by Meehan was

introduced into liturgical praxis around the time of Vatican

II and what she deems to be a consecratory gesture can at

best be said to be like the indicatio of the consecrated

elements that is done by the priest in some of the Eastern

rites, a gesture which is of uncertain origin.

Meehan also mentions a mosaic in the Church of Saint

Praxedes in Rome which portrays four women. On the far left

is a woman with a square nimbus and above her head is

written Theodo(ra) Episcopa. Meehan claims that the feminine

ending of the title Episcopa indicates that the subject

portrayed was a female bishop. The Latin episcopus is a

Latinisation of While it is not grammatically

incorrect to say that the Latin term episcopa can be

translated as “female bishop”, it must be remembered that

the Greek term forms part of a class of words which

preserve the masculine ending even when the word is used to

indicate a feminine person or object, and uses the article

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to indicate the gender. Therefore in Greek, female bishop

would actually be 172Therefore, if the mosaicist

wanted to indicate that Theodora was a bishop like any other

bishop, he would be more likely to write episcopus than

episcopa. In any case, it is a well-known fact that this

Theodora was actually the mother of Pope Saint Zeno, in

whose honour the ninth-century chapel in which this mosaic

appears, was built. Another important thing to consider is

that when the Church Fathers speak of the women clergy

ordained by the Montanists, they do not use the term

sacerdotal, presbytera, or episcopa in Latin, but rather sacerdotissa

and episcopissa. This indicates that the –issa ending in Latin

would be more likely to be used in the terminology for

speaking of women in Holy Orders. The Episcopa as “female

bishop” hypothesis does not seem as tenable as the accepted

meaning of episcopa and presbytera and their Greek

counterparts, which indicate the sister or wife of a bishop

or priest.

172 Cf.

116

The argumentation of many advocates of women’s

ordination based on archaeology seems to be spurious. While

it is easy to prove that women called priests existed in

Christian antiquity, because of the testimonies to various

heretical sects ordaining women priests, it is much harder

to establish from images or texts of the Virgin Mary or any

other woman the existence of a ministerial priesthood open

to women in the orthodox world.

Mary Not a Ministerial Priest

Our earlier definition of the priesthood in Chapter Two

stated: The priest is a man who receives from heaven, not from the

community, a divine institution by which he is endowed with the sacred power to

offer sacrifice and remit sins in the person of Christ the Head and in the name of

the Church, and also endowed with the gifts of teaching, sanctifying and ruling.

Leaving the aside the “man” part of our requirement, we can

say that, based on our analysis of images and texts of Mary

as Priest, Mary cannot be said to have received any type of

divine institution described here as part of the definition

of the priesthood, nor does she offer sacrifice or remit

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sins in persona Christi capitis, nor does she seem to have ever

been invested with the three munera. The one thing that

gives us pause is the in nomine Ecclesiae. The same Fathers who

describe Mary as Mother of the Church would also admit that

she stands in medio Ecclesiae as Intercessor, being a saint, but

also as Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix, being the Mother of

God, pro Ecclesia. Her offering of spiritual sacrifices comes

from her position as a fellow disciple of Jesus (in) among

her fellow disciples, and in her singular privilege as the

Mother of God on behalf of all of the other disciples of

Jesus (pro). As Mother of God, she stood in nomine Ecclesiae

under the Cross, offering a real, physical sacrifice of her

Son in perfect obedience to the will of God. But she stands

in medio Ecclesiae in the Upper Room at Pentecost. From this we

can draw a conclusion: that the nature of her offering

sacrifice is dual: a Eucharistic one, by which her spiritual

sacrifice of her Son is united to the bloody sacrifice of

the Cross which is re-presented in the Eucharist, both

offered in different modes in nomine Ecclesiae, and an ecclesial

one, by which her constant intercession from her throne in

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heaven as Queen is effected in medio Ecclesiae, in the Church

which receives her maternal protection.

Mary is not a ministerial priest, but she does share in

the common priesthood. To declare that she was a

ministerial priest, as said earlier, blurs the distinction

between the sacrifice of Christ for the remission of sins

with the union of the believer with that sacrifice.

Claiming that Mary was a ministerial priest not only

obfuscates the Eucharistic nature of her offering sacrifice,

but also its ecclesial nature, because it locates her

privileges not in her maternity but in a sacrament of

Orders, as if the sacrament of Orders necessitated a

privileged status above and beyond the common priesthood,

with no reference to it.

Notice that many advocates of women’s ordination speak

of the sacrament of Orders in terms of power, not in the

sense of sacra potestas, but in terms of earthly power, and

speak of the Eucharist in largely horizontal terms as a meal

whose purpose is to be a sign of fraternal charity.

Downplaying the sacrificial nature of the Mass, they can

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reverse the Eucharistic nature of Mary’s sacrifice to be on

the same level as that of Christ because the offering of any

layperson at Mass is not in any way different from the

offering of the priest at Mass, thus blurring the

distinction between clergy and laity and reducing the

priesthood to a functionary of powers. But ironically,

their approval of the thesis of Marian priesthood takes the

ministerial priesthood out of its ecclesial context and

makes it a matter merely of functions and power. There is

no wonder then that the sacramental character of the

Eucharist and Holy Orders is thereby totally denatured and

desacralised.

12. Then What Do Texts and Images of Virgo Sacerdos Mean? The

Analogical Sense

If we can safely say that the texts and images studied

do not point to Mary as ministerial priest, or at least not

in any way reconcilable with biblical data or magisterial

teaching, we can say that their literal sense is that Mary

was not a ministerial priest. But what do they mean, then?

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Here we can still say that they portray Mary as priest, but

with reference to an analogical sense of priesthood.

Contributions of Analogy to Mariology

The Spanish theologian Cuervo writes, “Analogy is the

atmosphere proper to theology: all concepts of theology, in

fact, are carried out within such an atmosphere, such that

without it breath is impossible.”173 The analogy between

Christ and Mary, between his privileges and hers, was first

elaborated by Saint Ephrem the Syrian, and has been written

about consistently all the way to Vatican II, which states

in Lumen Gentium 67, “The offices and privileges of the

Blessed Virgin . . . are always related to Christ, the

source of all truth, sanctity, and piety.”

The first principle of this analogy is based on Mary’s

motherhood. By her maternity, Mary belongs to the

hypostatic order, and thus finds herself, even if in a

different way, in the same order that Christ her Son is

found. The analogy of order has as its consequence an

173 Cited in G. ROSCHINI, Maria Santissima nella storia della salvezza, vol. I, Isola dei Civi 1969, 171-172.

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analogy of privileges. For that reason, in the “mystical

firmament of the Church,” Mary can be seen as the moon and

Christ as the sun. Christ and Mary are like each other, but

just as the moon receives all of its light from the sun, so

does Mary receive all from her Son.174 Applying this analogy

to the priesthood, we can say that Mary as Mother of the

Church in her spiritual sacrifice, in her common priesthood,

receives light from the sun of the Eucharistic sacrifice of

her Son, the action of Christ as High Priest. The

Eucharistic and ecclesial nature of Mary’s common priesthood

is an analogical reflection of the sacrifice of Calvary unto

the remission of sins, which is perpetuated by the

ministerial priesthood through the solemn memorial which is

the Eucharistic sacrifice. Calvary is the light which

enlightens us as to who Mary is, and the ministerial priest

who makes Calvary present in our midst in persona Christi capitis et

in nomine Ecclesiae in the Mass gives light to and nurtures the

common priesthood.

174 ROSCHINI, 176-177.

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But the analogical principle of the divine maternity is

not the only, even if it is the primary, principle of

Mariology. There remain, according to Roschini, other

principles: 1) the principle of association with Christ; 2) the principle of

solidarity; and 3) the principle of exemplarity. Applying these

principles of Mariology to the question of the Marian

priesthood, we can affirm that Mary, as socia sed non vicaria

Christi, perfectly unites her sacrifice with that of Christ,

and in doing so unites the common priesthood of those

baptised into the Body of Christ with their Head and

Redeemer, the High Priest, revealing an intimate unity

between the common and ministerial priesthood. We can also

state that in some way, since Mary and Christ share the same

human nature, and since the Second Person of the Blessed

Trinity deigned to take on flesh so as to redeem the flesh

and thereby humanity as a whole, the redemptive work of

Christ can be seen as perfectly recapitulated in the

immaculate Virgin Mary. This recapitulation gives her a

solidarity with all of the children of Eve awaiting the

final consummation of the world in which Christ will

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recapitulate in Himself all things and become all in all.175

In this way, Mary united to the whole human race is an

ontological sign of the unity of the human race redeemed in

Christ; she is also an eschatological sign of hope in the

fulfilment of the plan of salvation at the end of time, thus

revealing Mary’s common priesthood as being intensely

cooperative in the soteriological end of the ministerial

priesthood, which is a participation in Christ’s sacrifice

as High Priest. Finally, we can say that Mary as the New

Eve and sign of hope for a new heavens and a new earth is

the exemplar of the common priesthood, as a model and guide,

mediating the grace of Christ and interceding in charity for

her brothers and sisters in medio Ecclesiae.

The Motherhood of Mary as the Priesthood of Humanity

In the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the baptised bring

gifts of bread and wine which are then changed into the Body

and Blood of Christ by the royal and priestly gesture of

Christ the High Priest through his representative, the

175 I Corinthains 15

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ministerial priest. At the Annunciation, God takes the Body

and Blood of Mary, who becomes His Mother and in this action

that Body and Blood of Mary, that human vessel, was judged

worthy of Him Who is Not Contained who takes his human

substance from that vessel. Mary is not an instrument for

the Word to become flesh, as the ministerial priest is an

instrument by which Christ the High Priest makes His Body

and Blood present, but is “the objective human condition of

the Incarnation”176 By her fiat she becomes Theo-anthropotokos,

the God-Man bearer, “the mother of all the living.”177 At

the Cross, she is given to John and by extension, to the

whole human race, and “covers the entire universe with the

grace of her motherly help.”178 The spiritual generation of

children wrought by the sacraments confected by the

ministerial priest is grounded upon the fact that spiritual

children are born, just like Jesus, of the Virgin Mary, as

her spiritual children and she as Mother begets spiritual

children to the Church. The connection between Mary and the

176 P. EVDOKIMOV, Woman and the Salvation of the World, Crestwood 1994, 194.177 Genesis 3,20.178 EVDOKIMOV, 195.

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Church is so intimate that Clement of Alexandria would

exclaim, “There is only one Virgin Mary and I may call her

the Church.”179 The Church is a hagiophany, a manifestation

of holiness, and Mary, the All-Holy, personifies such

holiness. She is the holiness of God in human holiness.

By her maternity, Mary becomes the Mother of all

mankind; the New Eve ushers in the New Adam of Jesus Christ,

and the priestly self-sacrifice of Jesus is made possible by

an analogous priestly sacrifice of His Mother in consenting

to the plan of the Logos to redeem the world. By her

sacrifice she becomes a priest and mother of a new humanity,

by her sacrificial obedience becoming Mother of the Church.

The analogical sense of Mary’s priesthood has no need

to be vested in chasuble or pallium. Mary represents God in

the midst of the people as priests both of the Old and New

Covenant did, not in nomine Christi capitis but most definitely in

medio Ecclesiae, as united to Christ’s priestly sacrifice as

the exemplar, in her own privileged singularity, of the

solidarity between Christ and man redeemed. She is

179 PG 8: 300.

126

therefore the exemplar of the common priesthood,

indissolubly united to Christ and the ministerial priesthood

without confusion, a model and guide to all of the baptised

in the Body of Christ who offer their bodies as a living

sacrifice to God,180 and thus receive the fruits of the

sacrifice of Christ the High Priest by which man is restored

to communion with God.

CHAPTER FOUR

MARY AS EXEMPLAR OF THE PRIESTHOOD OF THE FAITHFUL

13. Ministerial and Common Priesthood in the Post-Vatican IIChurch: The Need for a Theology of the Laity

Lumen gentium 10 and 31 provide us with a problematic

distinction between clergy and laity, but it remains a fact

that Vatican II opened up the way for a fruitful discussion

of the role of laity within the Church. After decades of

intense lay involvement worldwide in the apostolate, with

groups such as Catholic Action and secular institutes, the

stage was set for an appreciative magisterial pronouncement180 Romans 12,1

127

on the Christifideles. Chapter Four of Lumen gentium on the

laity comes after the chapter on the hierarchical office of

the Church, and before the revolutionary chapter on the

universal call to holiness; it underlines the “true equality

with regard to the dignity and to the activity common to all

the faithful for the building up of the Body of Christ”181

and “the dignity as well as the responsibility of the layman

in the Church.”182 Any previous tendency to a clericalist

notion of holiness and responsibility in the Church was

definitively put to rest.

The Council remains, however, clear on the distinction

between clergy and laity, even as it places both within the

People of God as ordered toward each other. A theology of

Holy Orders and a spirituality of the clerical and the

religious state had accompanied the Church for centuries,

and a budding spirituality of the apostolic laity had slowly

developed through seminal authors such as Saint Francis de

Sales and Dom Chautard. But previous to the Council there

181 LG 32.182 LG 37.

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was no theology of the laity articulated in such a way that

it could guide its implementation.

Councils often present documents as syntheses of

previous teaching (one can see Sacrosanctum concilium of

Vatican II as the crown of more than a half-century of papal

teaching on the liturgy and the scholarly contributions of

the Liturgical Movement) but other documents serve as

springboards for something new that brings successes and

failures, clarity and ambiguity as the Church struggles to

receive and implement the teaching. The Decree on the

Apostolate of the Laity, Apostolicam Actuositatem, falls

predominantly in the latter category. The decree reads,

“Bishops, pastors of parishes, and other priests of both

branches of the clergy should keep in mind that the right

and duty to exercise the apostolate is common to all the

faithful, both clergy and laity, and that the laity have

their own proper roles in building up the Church.”183

The 1987 Synod of Bishops noted that a new style of

collaboration between laity, clergy and religious had come

183 AA 25.

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about as a result of the Council, admirably fulfilling

Apostolicam Actuositatem’s call for lay involvement in the

mission of evangelisation and sanctification of the Church.

The subsequent Apostolic Exhortation Christifideles laici

contributed much to the beginnings of a greater

understanding of the specific nature of the lay apostolate

in the consecratio mundi described in embryonic form by Vatican

II. But it became apparent by 1997, thirty years after the

Decree on the Laity, that a combination of laity taking the

initiative in difficult emergency pastoral situations and

ideologies of dubious orthodoxy had resulted in a confusion

about the distinction between ministerial and common

priesthood. The Interdicasterial Instruction on Certain Questions

About the Collaboration of the Lay Faithful in the Ministry of Priests

reiterates the teaching of Vatican II and post-Vatican II

papal and curial texts about the distinction, as well as the

value of lay involvement.

Many laypersons, however, especially women, were

uncomfortable with being recalled to understand the

extraordinary and provisory nature of many roles which they

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had taken on as practically, even if not officially,

ordinary and permanent. Pastoral assistants, extraordinary

ministers of Holy Communion, and lay chaplains in hospitals

and academic environments had taken over much of what was

once done by priests, especially in areas where vocations to

the priesthood had become scarce. To their dismissal of the

Instruction as a masculinist, clericalist attempt to undo

Vatican II, the response was made that the laity had been

unduly clericalised and the clergy correspondingly

“laicised.” The Congregation for the Clergy’s 1994 Directory

on the Life and Ministry of Priests, which had sought to recall the

clergy to their proper mission, had similarly been left

unheeded.

For some, the Instruction seemed to have been issued

without reference to currently lived pastoral situations: it

was fiercely debated, doubted or rejected by many Catholics

as a clericalist power play. The attempts of the Roman

Curia to recall the basic notions of Vatican II and recent

magisterial documents may be laudable, but they have not

been accompanied by a systematic attempt on the part of

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theologians to provide a theology of ministry for both laity

and clergy, and the void is particularly felt. Perhaps the

future will bring a Directory for the Life and Ministry of the Laity from

the Pontifical Council for the Laity, or an interdicasterial

theological pronouncement on ministry: but for now, that

does not exist.

One of the reasons for the negative response was that

some felt that women would thereby even be more marginalised

from ministry in the Church. The exclusion of women from

the priesthood was reaffirmed by Ordinatio sacerdotalis in 1994,

and the apparent restriction of women from other lay

ministries, as they had come to be known, led to further

cries from feminist theologians and advocates of women’s

ordination. The lack of a theology of the laity also

revealed a lack of elaboration of theological principles

about gender as related to life in the Church. While it is

not the task of this thesis to contribute to either, we do

affirm that, even if the debate over women’s ordination

seems to be closed by the Magisterium, theological

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contributions that explain the perennial exclusion of women

from the priesthood must continue.

An ancillary criticism of the recent documents was that

they seemed to downplay the laity’s role. While this

accusation is manifestly false, since these documents

actually present again the teaching of Vatican II, it is

perhaps necessary to reaffirm the fact that the laity do

have a share in Christ’s priesthood, even if different not

only in degree but in essence. A positive theology of the

laity can and must take as its guiding principle that each

member of the laity is also Prophet, Priest and King by his

baptism, and that in a Church viewed as communio, the

participatory levels in the three officia and munera of Christ

are essential to the life and mission of the Church. Only

then will the erroneous distinction of the Decretals of

Gratian that distinguished two kinds of Christian, the

perfect ecclesiastical and the imperfect secular,184 be fully

overcome.

184 Cf. PL 187,884ff.

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14. Dialogue Between the Marian and Petrine Aspects of theChurch: Foundations for a Theology of Ministerial and CommonPriesthood

Von Balthasar’s Discussion of the Marian and Petrine Aspects of the Church

In response to the tendency of certain theologians like

Yves Congar to separate too widely the institutional aspect

of the Church from its status communio, the theologian Hans

Urs Von Balthasar offers a theological meditation on the

Church as having two aspects: the Marian and the Petrine.

He cites René Laurentin, who says, “The first aspect is the

official representation of Christ; this is embodied in Peter

and his successors. The second is the mystical communion

with Christ; it is summed up in Mary.”185 Von Balthasar

prefaces his discussion by reminding us that imaging the

Church in terms of Petrine and Marian aspects cannot be done

in absolute terms any more than any other conception of the

Church can be absolutised. “The Church does not comprehend

her own greatness fully because she knows herself only

through analogy, in images . . . It is therefore quite

185 R. LAURENTIN, Court traité de théologie mariale, Paris 1953, 109.

134

possible for an image that was formerly central now to find

itself relegated to the periphery.”186

The medieval period perceived the Church as the “sphere

of the feminine in all her essential characteristics:

Virgin, Bride, Mother. By contrast, a distinct masculine

character is assigned” by the medievals “to office.”187

Biological fact becomes a source for theological analogy:

“woman must conceive from man if she is to effectively bear

and develop what she has received.”188 Von Balthasar says

that the paternal ministry is rooted in the Church’s

maternity, taking Paul’s feminine images of begetting

children “through the Gospel” as a mother “in travail.”189

We can see this as also meaning that in some way there is an

mutual fecundation between ministerial and common

priesthood. The common priesthood can only bear fruit if it

receives its “seed” from the ministerial priesthood; thus,

the sacraments, which are the concrete application of the186 VON BALTHASAR, 187.187 VON BALTHASAR, 183.188 VON BALTHASAR, 184.189 2 Corinthians 6,13: Now for a recompence in the same, (I speak asunto my children,) be ye also enlarged. Galatians 4,9: My little children, of whom I travail in birth againuntil Christ be formed in you.

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principle of analogy in Christian life, as the Venerable

John Henry Newman said, and are given by the ministerial

priesthood, nurture the common priesthood for its role in

the mission of the Church. Applying Von Balthasar’s

statement that paternal ministry is rooted in the Church’s

maternity (without identifying them, as does Matthias

Scheeben), we can say that in this way the ministerial

priesthood is rooted in the common priesthood. The liturgy

bears this out when a man is called from the assembly by

name to be elected for Holy Orders at the beginning of the

ordination rite. The Church (common priesthood) gives birth

to the ministerial priesthood. By that birth, the two are

of the same race, just as the priestly humanity of Christ

given to Him by Mary makes Him of the same race as Mary and

all mankind. The two are not equated thereby, but “by

accepting office, the officeholder does not surrender his

maternal function of mediating salvation as a believer, but

this becomes secondary to his newly received paternal

duty.”190

190 K. DELAHAYE, Erneurung der Seelsorgsformen aus der Sicht der frühen Patristik, Freiburg im Breisgau 1958, 154.

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The Venerable Bede said, Ecclesia quotidie gignet ecclesiam,191

and thus we can can say that the Church, of whom Mary is

Mother and Archetype, the Church of the faithful in the

common priesthood, daily generates the ministerial

priesthood, which in turn re-generates the Church through

the sacraments. This sacramental-Marian ecclesiology helps

us to understand why Scheeben spoke of a perichoresis between

Mary and the Church so that “one can be fully understood

only in and with the other.”192 Mary’s condition as

Realsymbol of the Church was for this reason enshrined by the

decision of the Council Fathers to abandon a separate

proposed schema De beata Maria Virgine and insert the discussion

of Mary into the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church.

This Marian principle, however, is not merely a

personal prerogative that belongs solely to Mary as some

kind of ethereal image of the Church divorced from the

Church’s reality. Leo Scheffczyk notes, “In the light of

the ecclesiological interpretation of Mary . . . the

personal prerogatives of Mary, which otherwise would be

191 PL 93: 166d.192 cited in VON BALTHASAR, 200.

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understood only in their particular and individual

significance, are amplified so as to include all of the

members of the Church . . . [T]he maternity of Mary is the

real symbol of the human and spiritual fecundity of the

Church.”193

But Mary is not the only Realsymbol of the Church.

Peter with his successors, according to Vatican I,

“represents the Church in his person,”194 and indeed, the

Church cannot be separated from him any more than a building

can stand without its foundation. Peter’s role is to

shepherd the flock: he is concerned with the sinner who

stands outside the Marian center of love which is the

Church. “The ‘eccentricity’ of this office, which, as we

have seen, was given to a (former) sinner, lies in the fact

that law is elicited from within the communio of love as a

result of sin in the world.”195 The “eccentricity” of Peter,

his “going out” to take care of the sheep, is not some kind

of “deficient realisation of the Marian communio in the

193 Leo SCHEFFCZYK, La chiesa, Milano 1998, 108-109.194 cited in VON BALTHASAR, 205.195 VON BALTHASAR, 209.

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Church,”196 but a means by which he exercises the servantship

not in domineering but by strengthening his brethren. While

Von Balthasar is writing principally of the Petrine primacy,

by analogy we may extend his observation to the entire

ministerial priesthood. The common priesthood of the laity

must be that receptive, fertile Marian centre of love in and

through which the ministerial priesthood can evangelise

those outside the fold, and so bring them into the Church

and build up the Marian centre of love, the Church, the

Kingdom of God. Thus we may analogously extend the Petrine

principle from merely a personal prerogative of the Pope to

the entire ministerial priesthood in its function of

teaching, sanctifying and governing the Church, but always

in communion with the common priesthood which fosters the

essentially Marian centre of love that must always be the

criterion for the Church’s life and ministry.

196 VON BALTHASAR, 209.

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The Masculinity of the Ministerial Priesthood and the Femininity of the Common

Priesthood

We have already considered the fact that every human

being is born male or female and that gender is an

irreducible factor of the human condition. The incarnation

means that Jesus’ masculinity has meaning as well, and that

meaning was suffused through every action of Christ, and

every action of Christ is fundamental to the praxis of the

Church. We have already said that masculinity is fitting to

the apostles and to the priests their successors as

femininity is to the Church as a whole. In order to explain

this, we will have reference to another Realsymbol pairing,

this time between Mary and John the Baptist.

The pairing of Mary and Peter is reflective of the

Roman Church alone, but the Eastern Churches show us a

pairing which is no less applicable to the Church Universal.

The iconostasis which separates the common priesthood from

the ministerial priesthood in the Eastern Church has as its

centre an image called the Deêsis (which means supplication), in

which Christ appears dressed as High Priest, flanked by the

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Mother of God and John the Baptist. The two are archetypes

of man and woman in Christ, just as Adam and Eve were the

original archetypes of man and women before the Fall.

In many icons, John the Baptist and the Theotokos wear

crowns, demonstrating “the royal dignity of the archetypes

of the universal priesthood.”197 The two share in the one

priesthood of Christ, and are depicted with Christ at the

iconostasis, where the two modes of that priesthood both

meet and separate, and where the Eucharist is confected and

distributed, where the Eucharist makes the Church. At the

iconostasis, the old fragmentation of the relationship

between Adam and Eve is overcome by the new pair of the

Virgin Mary and John the Baptist, who symbolise in a very

real way that “in Christ there is neither male nor female,”

and in that very symbolism also incarnate the sexually

differentiated reality of humanity and its complement in

various roles in the Church. The images of Mary and the

Baptist in these icons stand face to face, expressing “the

reciprocity of their common ministry.”198 But the Church

197 P. EVDOKIMOV, Woman and the Salvation of the World, Crestwood 1994, 232.198 EVDOKIMOV, 234.

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celebrates their unity in diversity not only

iconographically, but liturgically. The Eastern Church

celebrates the conception, nativity, and the falling asleep

of both of them, bringing “into relief their shared

dignities: royal, priestly, prophetic.”199

But how can John the Baptist be a Realsymbol of the

Church and of the ministerial priesthood if he was not a

priest in the Christian sense of the term and indeed, he

ended any kind of prophetic ministry before the events which

made Christ High Priest? One must remember that John the

Baptist is of the priestly tribe of Levi. He is called the

Last of the Prophets, but in some sense can also be called

Last of the Priests of the Old Covenant and Forerunner of

the royal and prophetic lines that converge upon Christ the

High Priest. By symbolic analogy, we claim him as

Forerunner of the Christian ministerial priesthood. Also,

Mary is of the Levite clan; even if she is not a priest, she

is nonetheless of priestly dignity. Since she is also of the

199 EVDOKIMOV, 235. In the West, this parallel is drawn out by the factthat Mary and the Baptist are the only saints whose nativities are kept as liturgical feasts.

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House of David, she unites in her person royal and priestly

lines. The Church has traditionally understood the words of

Psalm 45, “The queen stands at your right hand,”200 to refer

to Mary; therefore Mary, Priestly and Royal, is portrayed at

the right hand of John the Baptist, Priestly and Prophetic,

and also of Christ, Priest, Prophet and King. We can say

that the “right hand man” of Christ and John the Baptist is

a woman: the Theotokos who stands at the right of her Son.

The Church, the common priesthood of believers, shares in

the royal priesthood of Christ by being at the right hand,

the privileged place, of both Christ and John the Baptist,

the forerunner of the ministerial priesthood; all three are

Priest, Prophet, King in different ways.

The masculinity of John the Baptist shows forth

characteristics of the ministerial priesthood. Jesus said,

“Since John the Baptist came, up to this present time, the

kingdom of heaven has been subjected to violence, and the

violent are taking it by storm.”201 The preaching of John

the Baptist emphasised radical conversion and is the same as

200 Psalm 45,9201 Matthew 11,12

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the kerygma of Christ: Repent and believe the Good News. The

ascetical life of John the Baptist, the voice crying out in

the wilderness, is apocalyptic and eschatological, but his

violence is that of one who is “gentle and humble of

heart,”202 who goes after sinners with zeal to convert them

to God. John the Baptist is a paragon of virility and

virtue; he does not cease to preach the Kingdom until he

gives the ultimate witness to it by his martyrdom. Giving

up his life for his sheep, for the truth, he is a perfect

complement to Peter, who was asked by Christ to be ready to

give up his life for his sheep. The Johannine and the

Petrine are two different aspects of how the ministerial

priesthood is exercised, with virile zeal, violent preaching

and a martyr’s witness, with a view to fulfilling the duties

of a shepherd towards the sheep.

The Virgin Mary, however, is not a witness to Christ

only in her pastoral zeal, but is herself hagiophany and

doxophany: as the first divinised human being, she is the

Gate of the world’s salvation, the union of human and

202 Matthew 11,29

144

divine. Sanctified in her humanity and glorified by the

Divinity, she is hymned by the Eastern Church as the Crown of

Dogmas, “the Holy Book in whom the Word is written by the

hand of the Father.”203

While ec-static man operates on the level of action, en-

static woman works on the level of being and for this reason,

Mary brings forth God who is Ipsum Esse Subsistens. The Russian

Orthodox theologian Paul Evdokimov explains this and its

consequences:

Man, the masculine, the priesthood of orders – all together serve the Church and foster the song of her holiness. A woman cannot be a priest without betraying herself. It is through her being, her nature that she is called to fulfil her royal priesthood in conformity with her charismatic state.The priesthood of orders, as an office of service, and as a functional dignity, is summed up by its aim: transforming all human beings into the royal priesthood. Within the kingdom, all functions cease in the presence of the one priest, Christ. Christ will celebrate the celestial liturgy: but at the head of the people, of the universal priesthood, stands the Theotokos, for she manifests it as thebeing of the Kingdom itself; holiness in aeternum.204

On this earth, the sacraments are the channels by which we

encounter Christ. But at the end of time, all sacraments

shall cease. The priests will be priests forever, in the

line of Melchisedech, but their role will be eclipsed in the

203 Akathist Hymn.204 EVDOKIMOV, 216-217.

145

celestial liturgy by Mary, when the Church and the Kingdom

of God shall be definitively identified, and the two modes

of participation in Christ’s priesthood shall be one as all

things will be one in Christ. The world began with Adam and

ends with Mary at the head of all humanity in praise of the

Lamb, the common priesthood now rendering their service of

praise to God in eternity. John the Baptist, who diminished

so that Christ might become greater, fades into the

background just as the ministerial priesthood ends its

earthly function and is reassumed into the Marian centre of

love, joining with all of the Redeemed in the threefold

Sanctus at the Throne of Grace for all eternity.

15. Mary as Exemplar of the Common Priesthood and Mother ofthe Ministerial Priesthood: an Interpenetratory Ecclesiologyof Ministry

Mary in the Order of Creation and Redemption: Model for the Laity

The previous chapter ended with an eschatological view

of Mary’s role as head of the common priesthood in paradise.

But it would be a mistake to think that Mary has

significance for the laity only in the next world. She can

146

be seen as exemplar of the common priesthood in this world,

as well. In the order of creation, she stands out as an

exception to the heritage of fallen man because of her

Immaculate Conception. The New Eve in a sense ushers in a

new creation, the new era of the Incarnation by which Mary

shows in her humanity how grace can transform a person. The

importance of the dogma of the Assumption is seen not only

in its emphasis on a singular privilege of Mary and its

fulfilment of Old Testament types, but also because it is a

sign of hope in the resurrection of the body and the

glorification of man at the Last Judgment. The foretaste

that Mary gives the believer in the Assumption is that the

reward for a life well lived is eternal life and communion

with God. Mary’s perfection gives hope to man that he too

may fulfil what the Lord commands, Be perfect as your heavenly

Father is perfect. She is a moral model of how to live and act

as a Christian as well as a vision of the final end of the

Christianity, elevation to a state higher than the cherubim and

more glorious beyond compare than the seraphim, as the Divine

Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom sings of her.

147

In the order of redemption she shows how the unique

mediatorship of Christ before the Father, revealed in the

atoning death on the Cross, is something in which man can

participate since it was brought about for man’s sake. Even

if the sacrifice was accomplished alone by the God-Man

Jesus, we can join the sacrifice of our life to that

sacrifice, becoming thereby in our daily lives cooperators

in the building up of the Kingdom of God here on earth. The

analogical sense of Mary’s priesthood as described above

extends to all believers, because it clarifies the fact that

baptismal dignity means not only that one is saved by Christ

from sin and hell, but is actually elevated to a state of

being co-redeemers with Him. The common priesthood is a

real and true priesthood; Mary in her perfect union with the

will of God, and in perfect cooperation with His saving plan

shows the Christian how to live out his vocation to the

royal priesthood by cooperating with his own part in God’s

providential plan for the salvation of the world.

148

The Mutual Ordering of the Common and Ministerial Priesthood: Further

Considerations

This thesis has already brought out copious examples of

how the common and ministerial priesthood are ordered to

each other. We have already examined how the ministerial

priesthood comes out of and serves the common priesthood.

But there is also an important sense in which Mary in her

perfection as model to the common priesthood is a source of

spiritual sustenance for the ministerial priesthood. Much

of the literature examined in chapter one centred on the

relationship between Mary and the clergy. Mary, Regina Cleri,

was shown as a model for priests, in her humility, virtues,

and obedience. But she also, by inspiring the laity to live

out their call to holiness, paves the way for families which

can be seedbeds for vocations to the priesthood and

religious life. Young men called from the ranks of families

living under the maternal protection of Mary are in a better

position to be formed according to the mind of the Church to

be holy priests. Mary can then guide her children, both

clergy and lay, to support each other in their respective

149

roles as two modes of the one priesthood of Jesus Christ to

effect on earth the saving grace of the redemption.

We have said before that the essential meaning of

Mary’s priesthood, as it is developed in the numerous texts

and images which refer to it, is that she is Mother of God

and Mother of the Church. Mary’s priesthood, like that of

all believers, is one of motherhood, of generating and

nourishing. But it is inseparable from Christ’s priesthood

which is given in the ministerial priesthood, and which

provides the Mother with the seed to generate and the food

with which to nourish. Any ecclesiology of ministry that

seeks to relate the two modes of the priesthood without

obliterating the distinction between them must start with

the individual believer and his insertion into the great

mystery of the Body of Christ, the Church. The generation

and nourishment of the Christian, like that of a child,

requires mother and father for a healthy development. Thus,

both the common priesthood and the ministerial priesthood

are essential to the life of the Christian; each mode of the

priesthood complements the other and neither can be reduced

150

as a function to the other. Saint Paul’s discourse on the

various elements making up one body in 1 Corinthians 12,12-

20205 becomes even clearer when seen in this light. The

priesthood of the faithful, and the clergy who minister to

them are like two strains in a polyphonic piece: by

themselves, they do not sound like anything of note, but

together they blend perfectly to delight the ears of Christ

who composed the great work and to the glory of Mary, Virgo

Sacerdos, the conductor who shows the way to bring out their

unity in diversity.

205 For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the membersof that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. For byone Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews orGentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drinkinto one Spirit. For the body is not one member, but many. If the footshall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is ittherefore not of the body? And if the ear shall say, Because I am notthe eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? If thewhole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing,where were the smelling? But now hath God set the members every one ofthem in the body, as it hath pleased him. And if they were all onemember, where were the body? But now are they many members, yet but onebody.

151

EPILOGUE

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS AND FURTHER EXPLORATION

152

A painting of the Virgin Mary with a title that

surprised seminarians studying for the priesthood is how

research for this thesis began. Christian history, like the

Bible itself, is so vast and so profound that even a

seasoned theologian or an embryonic saint sometimes comes

across something wonderful and new in the inexhaustible

treasure that is the Catholic religion. The author had

never imagined that there was such an immense field of study

for a title of Mary which has seemed to have lapsed from the

modern consciousness. While this work only takes into

account a small number of the texts and images that pretend

some relationship between Mary and the priesthood, an

exhaustive study could be done of all of them.

The fact that these images exist means that at some

level the connection between Mary and the priesthood was

part of Catholic piety in a way that has since been lost.

Art criticism could take as a fruitful object of study how

Marian piety is depicted and changes through the ages, and

what factors influence the various trends in depicting Mary.

The resurgence in the late nineteenth century of this

153

priestly conception of Mary seems to have been a natural

development from spiritual writing of previous centuries,

but further examination is required to trace the history of

the devotion to Mary as Priest and why, after an apparently

positive attitude towards it by the Holy See, it was

virtually expelled from Catholic devotion in such a way that

it seems strange to many today.

The debate over the ordination of women to the

priesthood is many faceted, and theologians of various

opinions are searching for ways to probe the reasons behind

the the Church’s traditional praxis of excluding women to

the priesthood. The overwhelmingly positive contribution of

women to the life of the Church is just now being

highlighted in a proper way. But would it not be too much

to say that the attempt to prove that Mary was a priest and

the existence of so many references to the priesthood of

Mary in the Church is in some way an indication of a paucity

of feminine spirit in Catholic spirituality? While

orthodoxy must guarantee that the deposit of faith is handed

down in its integrity from age to age, might not the time be

154

ripe for a re-evaluation of the specifically feminine and

masculine aspects of ecclesial life and theology? The

recent developments in the theology of the body, which take

seriously the engendered nature of the human person, must be

brought to bear, not just on issues of sexual ethics and

life issues, but also on the theology of the Church. The

members of the Church are not just Christian, or lay or

clerical, but also male or female, and the relationship

between all of those factors is something which the Church

in the twenty-first century must explore.

Investigation into the meaning of ministry and the

sacrament of Holy Orders has been going on for a very long

time indeed. As these investigations shed more light on

what the scriptures and the early Church mean by the

priesthood, we can modify our contemporary understanding of

it in the light of that scholarship. But that will entail

consequent re-examination of the functions and essence of

the laity as well, and of course, will also require a new

appraisal of the relation between Mary and the ministry.

155

Modern theologians have often pointed out that man

today is no longer accustomed to thinking in terms of symbol

and allegory. The way the medieval man of Christendom

viewed the world appears incomprehensible to the secular

culture of today. But the essentially analogical system of

sacraments which form the fabric of the Church’s life should

not be seen as a hindrance to the evangelisation of the

modern world, but rather as an opportunity to aid man in

recovering those symbols which the psychologist C. Jung says

are embedded in our very consciousness. Just as the Gospel

must awaken moral thinking where the conscience has been

muted, the Church must renew appreciation for the analogical

structure of man by returning to analogy in its theology.

In this, many heated controversies in the contemporary

religious world can be laid to rest, as univocal oppositions

can be reviewed under the veracity of analogy.

The parallel between common and ministerial priesthood,

between the clergy and the laity, has only now come to the

fore as a locus for Catholic theology. The unfortunate

developments of the post-conciliar period which have

156

resulted in a clericalisation of the laity and a

“laicisation” of the clergy have lamentably detracted from

the building of a positive and non-polemical theology of the

laity. The same period has seen an eclipse of Mary from

theology that has only begun to end in the past few years.

The typological theology of Marian privilege as related to

the Church, while it is present in Vatican II, has not been

sufficiently explored. The parallel between Mary’s role in

the Church and that of the laity, seen in terms of their

participation in the priesthood of Christ, is not, to the

knowledge of the author of this thesis, a part of the

theological heritage of the Church in any directly

perceivable manner. But perhaps an attempt to meditate on

that possibility will have positive effects not only for the

ecclesiology of the future, but for the entire life of the

Church. It will remain to another time or to another

student of the wisdom personified in the Blessed Virgin and

handed down through the Holy Catholic Church to continue the

work started so hesitantly in these pages.

157

Saint John Lateran, RomeApril 2005

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P. BLÄSER, Amt und Eucharistie, Paderborn 1973.

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G. GUARINI, Della gerarchia ovvero del sacro regno di Maria Vergine,Venice 1609.

M. HAUKE, Women in the Priesthood? A Systematic Analysis in the Light of theOrder of Creation and Redemption, San Francisco 1988.

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G. MÜLLER, Priesthood and Diaconate, San Francisco 2002.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION 2

PREFACE: WHY THIS THESIS? 3

CHAPTER ONE: THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY: A PRIEST? 6

1. A Survey of Texts About the Priesthood of Mary

6

Feminist Theology Using as Loci Theologici Various Texts Referring from Christian Antiquity

7

The Earliest Patristic Texts About Mary as Priest

8

162

The Theology of These Patristic Texts

10

The Middle Ages and the Development of the Idea of a Marian Priesthood

14

The Beginnings of the Modern Era and the Theology of the Priesthood of Mary

19

The Connection Between Marian Piety and Devotion to Mary as Priest

22

2. Virgo Sacerdos in Art and Popular Piety

23

3. The Controversy over Devotion to Mary the Priest

25

4. If Mary was a Priest, What Kind of Priest?

28

Reasons Supporting the Thesis of Mary as Priest

28

Objections to the Thesis 30

Mary in the Context of the Apostolic Priesthood and the Church

32

CHAPTER TWO: THE FAITHFUL AND THE MINISTRY

36

5. Dogmatic Considerations About the Threefold Ordained Ministry:

Bishop, Priest and Deacon 36

163

The Three Orders in the Light of Contemporary Exegesis of the Scriptures and the Fathers

36

Dogmatic Definitions on the Three Orders

42

6. What is a Priest? The Ministerial Priesthood in the History of the

Church and the Recent Magisterium

43

The Development of the Ministry in Church History

43

Current Teaching on the Threefold Ordained Ministry

44

7. Christifideles: The Common Priesthood of the Faithful in the Recent

Magisterium 46

Theological Considerations About the Priesthood of the Faithful

46

The Definition of the Laity in Vatican II, the Code of Canon Law, Christifideles Laici and the

Catechism 47

8. Male and Female He Created Them: Anthropological Reflections on

Masculinity and Femininity as Related to Ministry

49

Sexuality and the Image of God in Christ 49

Gender and Priestly Representation

53

164

Masculine and Feminine as Related to the Orders of Creation and Redemption

54

Androgyny and Theology

55

9. Theological Considerations About the Exclusion of Women from the

Priesthood 57

The Behaviour of Christ as Norm for Eccesial Praxis

57

CHAPTER THREE: THE ROLE OF ANALOGY AND ALLEGORY IN THEOLOGY AND ITS

APPLICATION TO THE QUESTION OF MARIAN PRIESTHOOD

61

10. An Application of the Fourfold Sense of Scripture to Theology

61

The Four Senses of Scripture

61

Analogy 63

Metaphor

65

Analogy as the Foundation of Theology and the Allegorical Sense of Dogma

66

11. What Do Texts and Images of Virgo Sacerdos Not Mean? The Literal

Sense 69

165

Priestly Imagery in Texts and Images of Mary

69

Women Priests in Ancient Frescoes?

71

Mary Not a Ministerial Priest

73

12. Then What Do Texts and Images of Virgo Sacerdos Mean? The Analogical

Sense 75

Contributions of Analogy to Mariology

76

The Motherhood of Mary as the Priesthood of Humanity

78

CHAPTER FOUR: MARY AS EXEMPLAR OF THE PRIESTHOOD OF THE FAITHFUL 80

13. Ministerial and Common Priesthood in the Post-Vatican II Church: The

Need for a Theology of the Laity

80

14. Dialogue Between the Marian and Petrine Aspects of the Church:

Foundations for a Theology of Ministerial and Common Priesthood

84

Von Balthasar’s Discussion of the Marian and Petrine Aspects of the Church

84

166

The Masculinity of the Ministerial Priesthood and the Femininity of the Common Priesthood

88

15. Mary as Exemplar of the Common Priesthood and Mother of the

Ministerial Priesthood: an Interpenetratory Ecclesiology of Ministry

92

Mary in the Order of Creation and Redemption: Model for the Laity

92

The Mutual Ordering of the Common and Ministerial Priesthood: Further Considerations

93

EPILOGUE: UNANSWERED QUESTIONS AND FURTHER EXPLORATION 96

BIBLIOGRAPHY 100

TABLE OF CONTENTS 103

167