THE CATHOLIC PRIEST today, in violation of many centuries of tradition, often finds himself surrounded on the altar by women and girls. This relatively recent innovation has changed the entire tone and symbolism of the liturgy. Women naturally, through their faces, their voices, their gestures and clothes, draw attention to themselves. Many women who serve as lectors, cantors or Eucharistic ministers are highly respectful in their demeanour and attire, but even so their presence is distracting. And some are not highly respectful. Female cantors are prone to project themselves excessively, making performance out of their role, their audience (and that is what a congregation is reduced to – an audience) captive to amateurish theatricals.

As I explain in the previous entry, there were many reasons why women were excluded altogether from the altar in the past. Only a philistine would view these traditions as scorn for women.

Some people say that declining vocations justify the presence of women on the altar. In fact, it is much more likely, if not certain, that the predominance of women leads to declining vocations. Men will never be drawn to the priesthood in large numbers if they must be adjuncts to women in their most visible role. To the modern man, holiness and manliness seem at odds – he may be hellishly torn between these contradictory drives – because of the loss of male authority and hierarchy. The effusive, emotion-drenched atmosphere of contemporary Christianity is like a gauntlet thrown down before him, a challenge to his elemental, irrefutable identity as a man.

The masculinity of the priesthood has been severely undermined, so much so that the issue of whether women should be priests seems all but settled, and this represents a crisis of monumental proportions.

                                             — Comments —

Amy writes:

I loved your post! And what an apt picture to have chosen! Bless you for speaking the truth in and out of season.

Laura writes:

Thank you.

But I can’t take credit for the photo, which accompanied this article, “The Golden Calf Dancers, II,” by Kathleen Willet Redle. She makes many excellent points on this subject.

Kristor writes:

The problem with women serving in the liturgy is not so much due, I think, to the fact that women by their deportment call attention to themselves (although, to be sure, sometimes they may), as that, however demure and modest women might be, men cannot help but notice and attend to them as women. This notice need not find expression in a feeling of sexual attraction to the woman in question, although obviously it might. Indeed, it might rise only to the level of “note to self; this is a woman.” But nevertheless this notice is an inherent distraction for men from whatever else they are doing. The distraction may be minor, but it is inescapable. And I think this is true even for homosexual men. Men cannot deal with women as mere persons. And this is only natural. We are built that way, after all. It would be odd, weird, indeed even a bit sick if it could be otherwise; for women are not in fact mere persons; their persons, their very beings, are unavoidably female, all the way down (as men, likewise, are men all the way down). As such, they are to men inherently interesting creatures, far more interesting than men as men. Men become interested in men as such only when the objects of their interest are particularly notable in some respect. But all men are more interested in women as such than in men as such, if only because women are so different and so mysterious to us. We want to get them, in all the senses of that word. And we never quite get them enough to feel wholly satisfied that we have, in fact, truly got them. So, a woman is always a bit of a challenge to a man, a puzzle he cannot help but try to solve, and cannot ever quite solve. 

I have a great deal of experience at liturgical service. Most of it has been given to choirs of men and boys, but for the last 13 years I have sung in a mixed choir. In the male choirs, sex – not sexuality, but sex, the question of the maleness or femaleness of the members of the group – simply was not a factor. Sex dropped out of our set of concerns. This was so, even when some members of the choir were homosexual. We therefore concentrated more effectively on the music, the performance, and – as musicians in any tight ensemble must – on each other, and so achieved a far greater degree of emotional intimacy (and excellence, both musical and spiritual) than has ever been possible for me in a mixed chorus. We male choristers revealed things to each other in our singing that we could not have revealed to a woman without some interruption of sexual feeling; the very deepest things, like our love of God, our ecstasy of delectation at the beauty of the music we sang, our joy at participating in what felt like a divine flux (and which is indeed, so far as the liturgical theology of the church is concerned, precisely, heaven), our happiness at the sanctification of the world that we felt pouring out of us, and finally of the fluid personal harmony engendered between us by the profundity of our mutual coordination, and so of the great love we bore for each other in our singing, that gave fruit in generosity and humility – and, thus, immaculate performance, ravishingly gorgeous to us all. 

Mixed choirs cannot scale those heights, even when the average caliber of the singers is far higher. They cannot transcend sex. 

A priest celebrating Mass with a female lay assistant on one side and a male lay assistant on the other will pay more attention to the woman, even if only by saying to himself unconsciously, “woman on the left.” And this sort of distraction from the all-important business at hand – the business, that is, of effecting the rite that salves and saves the world – cannot but reduce the efficacy thereof, first for the priest, and then by consequence inevitably for the congregation. I’m not talking here about the metaphysical efficacy of the rite, for that does not depend upon any human agency. Rather, I’m talking about its psychological efficacy, about the simple and complete openness of the priest, and through him the congregation, to the influx of divine grace. That grace being ever ubiquitous, greater openness thereto is after all the point of the rite. 

Thus the prohibition of women from the inner courts of the Temple, a tradition that goes back 5,000 years, at least. 

There are two other aspects of that prohibition that bear mention. The first is that if I had been asked, as a boy of seven, whether I would like to join a church choir that had girls in it, my reaction would have been, “Ewww! Girls? No way.” Boys don’t want to work or play with girls. They want to get them. For pre-pubescent boys, “getting” a girl means teasing her, dipping her pigtails in ink, surprising her with a frog or a worm or a wound. But the choir of boys, who sang with men, why that seemed to my seven year old self like a high and noble enterprise. Boys want to play with boys, and work with men. 

Then there is the sacrificial aspect of the central Christian rite, the Eucharist. The priest is male because his role is to be the sacrifice – potentially, at least. He celebrates in persona Christi; like the High Priest in the Temple at Jerusalem, he takes on the person of the Logos, to effect the sacrifice. As Christ is both victim and priest, so are Christian priests victims. In the very beginning of the religion that later became the Temple cult, and then Christianity, this meant the High Priest’s own death. When he entered the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement each year, utterly alone, the High Priest did not expect to survive the journey. He expected to be blasted by the Presence that awaited him behind the veil. 

Men are preferred for sacrifice for the same reason they are preferred for soldiery and hunting; they are more expendable. For obvious reasons, the death of a few men damages a people’s demographic prospects far less than the loss of a single woman. Men are preferred for sacrifice. A culture that sacrifices its females is tending toward death. So, putting women in sacrificial, potentially all-consuming roles like soldier, cop, firefighter – or priest – is a formal demographic suicide. We should be horrified at the idea. That we are not just shows how far gone we are already.

John E. writes:

As usual, I enjoyed reading Kristor’s thoughts here. There is something, however, about the idea that men are more expendable than women that I find unacceptable. I understand it in theory, of course, from a biological perspective. But how can a Christian argue for the idea without appealing to the need for polygamy, an unacceptable Christian practice? Even if one concedes that polygamy might be acceptable under certain circumstances, such as a crisis which reduces the population of men to such an extent that the human race couldn’t continue to propagate through monogamy, we are certainly not under those circumstances presently. Whether men were ever more expendable than women biologically speaking, they are not at the present.

Aside from this, I think that the idea grates against me because it tends to void the merit of the will involved in the individual man’s decision to sacrifice his life for another person. A man laid down his life for a woman? As well he ought to have, nothing significant done, his life was worth less anyways. Better to argue, I think, that men have a particular duty to sacrifice themselves in this way, and a particular nature that lends itself to the act (an argument that Kristor expounds upon very well, I might add).

Laura writes:

Polygamy, at some point in the distant past, may have arisen because of a shortage of men, but it has more often occurred when there was no shortage of men and has been the result of male competition unrestrained by any prohibitions against polygamy. I’m not sure why recognizing a biological aspect of this greater expendability of men requires approval of polygamy or limits the issue of male sacrifice to biological self-interest. Reducing male sacrifice in war, firefighting or the priesthood to biological survival would be like reducing marriage to mating. Yes, any Darwinian argument is grating when considered a complete explanation of human motivations.

John E. writes:

For what it’s worth, I should also have considered the unique role of a mother in the raising of children. This is another biological reality that speaks to the greater expendability of men than women, and it is always present in every society. A newborn baby has a much better chance at raw survival with only a mother than only a father. The fact that very few men are needed relative to the number of women in order to propagate is not the only biological argument for the expendability of men.

Laura writes:

As an argument focused on survival, the baby is just as dependent on male protection.  The newborn baby in primitive conditions does not necessarily have a better chance of survival with just a mother. She can’t fend for herself or protect offspring from serious danger. However, one man could conceivably provide protection to more than one mother.

When we talk of expendability, we’re assuming conditions of dire survival. In normal conditions, any given individual is expendable in the sense we mean. Both men and women are expendable.

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