Why should women become priests?

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Why should women become priests? Catholic Churches today and in the past 40 years or so have been starting to ordain women as priests. Most people think this is completely sacrilegious and revolting against the church. But, women do not want to become priests because they are angry, or because they want to win, or because they want to trample men’s feelings, but because they are searching for the truth about themselves as women, and so they can relate more to God. Let me explain. First, let me begin with feminism. Feminism is the belief that women and men are equal in dignity as human beings. Most people would agree that equal dignity, at times, has been denied for women. This changes attitudes, concepts, and structures to reveal this equality. Also, feminism is not just a call for women to have an equal place in the current system of the Church, but rather it challenges people to rethink the system itself in the light of women’s experience. Women do not want merely equal access to priesthood in the Church, they want to remake it (Bielgrien 13). Women continue to strive for equal status in the church. They are beginning to oppose more and more of the Church’s teaching. Feminists are now opposing the idea that humans have a “dual anthropology.” The Church supports this philosophy and explains that “women’s human nature is naturally different from men’s human nature” (Bielgrien 13). Arguments against the ordination of women imply this nature, in which sexual differentiation is seen as an essential element and therefore part of the divine plan that God wants. The dual nature of men and women is the ordaining principle for complementary roles, functions, and activities of women and men” (Bielgrien 13-15). However, women who are in favor of ordaining women priests say there is a “one-nature anthropology.” This philosophy claims that “there is no preordained role or function, beyond the biological, for either men or women since the appropriate activities of the individual are extrapolated from spiritual and personal characteristics” (Bielgrien 16).

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