Too much focus on who can and cannot be ordained as a priest risks distracting from Vatican II’s call to holiness and mission for all the baptised, the Bishop of Down and Connor, Dr Alan McGuckian has warned.
He made the comment during a video conversation with theologian Dr Abigail Favale, after the question of women’s ordination had been raised.
Bishop McGuckian said he is convinced that the Church “cannot change” its teaching on priestly ordination, but warned that the debate can blunt the wider call to lay mission.
“I have always felt that the big revolution of Vatican II was going to be about the vocation and the mission of the laity,” Bishop McGuckian said. “Yet we have argued almost ever since about who can and can’t be priests, which I think takes away from and blunts the effectiveness of that great call to holiness for everyone and to mission for everyone.”
Bishop McGuckian said “something new is happening” in the role of the laity, adding that women “already do, and will, play a leading role”.
He pointed to the historic leadership of women religious in Ireland, particularly in healthcare and education, saying this “was a given” in his youth.
Dr Favale, a professor at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, said she had once strongly supported women’s ordination, describing it as “a litmus test” for whether she could belong to a church, before her view changed through the Church’s sacramental argument.
She said it is “clericalist” to suggest that women can only have influence in the Church if they are priests. “There is so much women can do in the Church even now,” she said.
Dr Favale, author of Into the Deep and The Genesis of Gender, said women saints such as St Catherine of Siena and St Hildegard of Bingen showed a “profound prophetic power” in the Church.
“They were not clamouring to be priests,” she said. “They were clamouring for priests to be holy.”