The constant belief of the Church has been that God in His sovereign will has plans for women that do not include the priesthood. From the beginning of the Church, women have played significant roles in its life: Mary, the Mother of the Lord, Mary Magdalene, the first proclaimer of His resurrection, the women martyrs like Cecilia, Agnes and Edith Stein who witnessed to their faith with their blood, the women like Monica who witnessed to their pagan husbands of their faith in Christ, the innumerable women who raised their children in the faith, the women like Scholastica and Clare who entered or founded monastic communities of women, the wise women like Catherine, Teresa of Avila and Therese of Lisieux who taught the Church about following Jesus. Without women the Church would be immeasurably poorer. Yet none of the above women or any other has ever been ordained a priest in the history of the Church.

The reason why neither Jesus, his Apostles nor any Catholic bishops in succession to the Apostles have ordained women as priests is because of the nature of the priesthood. Priests represent the person of Jesus in his headship of the Church. Because through their priestly ordination they become personally identified with Jesus, whose body was essential to the true humanity he assumed in the Incarnation, priests can do for the good of His people what only Jesus could do: change bread and wine into His Body and Blood and absolve people from their sins. Essential to this representational character of the priesthood is the gender of the priest. Unlike racial and ethnic factors, culture and social background – all of which have a fluidity, all of which could be radically different with enough time – gender is an unalterable biological feature of the human landscape. “He made them male and female” (Genesis 1:27). Gender is the clearest distinction among human beings at the level of their human nature and the only one that is absolutely necessary to their existence through multiple generations. It is for good reason that the first question the parents of a newborn child often hear is, “Is it a boy or a girl?” Gender, then, is not peripheral but central to each person’s identity.

More than that, a sound human instinct recognizes that when one person is representing another person, not representing a group (as in the U.S. Congress) or acting only in an ambassadorial capacity, that representational role is strengthened by having the gender of the representative be the same as the one represented. That is why, in an advance over ancient times and even those of Shakespeare, women today play the roles of women in plays, movies and on TV while men play the roles of men. We sense that it is more fitting for a man to represent a male character and a woman to represent a female character, even though men could say the female characters’ lines and vice versa. A Catholic priest, it should be noted, does more than simply represent Jesus in a play or movie: he actually does what Jesus did when celebrating the sacraments of the Eucharist and Penance. It is all the more fitting, then, that in his body with its visible, audible and tangible gender characteristics, the priest bear resemblance in this fundamental way to the Jesus he represents to the Church. As we say about other things, “it helps to look the part.” All the more so when a man must actually be the part.

The Church’s understanding about the priesthood is not easy for some people to accept. Sometimes the Church begins with an instinctual grasp of a truth that only later it can more fully explain. We have all had the experience of recognizing someone whose name we cannot remember but whom we are sure we have met. Later we remember the person’s name and details about his or her life. Our initial recognition was right but it needed to be fleshed out more. Perhaps the Church’s teaching on whom may be ordained is like that. But the key lies in the priest’s personal representation of Christ, not simply in the functions he performs.

It is unfortunate that so often, in the heat of debate, the special roles that God gives women in his Church are lost sight of. Women are still being called along with men to marry and raise children for eternal life. Women are still being called to embrace vowed religious life in religious communities. Other women are being called to the consecrated life in the world and not as part of religious communities. Women in great numbers work professionally for the Church and in even greater numbers, give freely of their time and energies to myriad of Church activities. The Church could not do without them. Today’s women are challenged to respond wholeheartedly to the Gospel of Jesus and bring Him to the world, just as women have done in the past. That is most certainly still in God’s plan for them and that will never change.