The Catholic Church cannot ordain women: the Church is divine – and divinity doesn’t ‘adapt’  

There are few things more unfashionable in the Year of our Secular Overlords 2025 than to suggest that the Catholic Church might be right. And no issue seems to incense the progressive class more than that of female ordination.

Yes, of all the civil liberties we have been denied throughout the centuries, it is the plight of women wanting to wear a cassock and collar that is our greatest injustice. The argument for women priests is advanced as though it were an inevitability: the obvious next step on the escalator of progress. It is the 21st century, after all. If women can be judges, generals and airline pilots, why not clergymen, too?

Anglicanism has managed it. Methodism too. Why not the Catholics?

The assumption behind the whole business, of course, is that “priest” is a job vacancy to be filled like any other. Imagine the Vatican operating like a ministerial department in Whitehall: with blind hiring practices, diversity quotas and fast-track schemes for society’s most marginalised (oh, and of course, the faint whiff of Parliament’s famous jerk chicken lunches wafting through halls of the Vatican).

But what the progressives fail to grasp is that holy life is not a career. The priesthood is not a job to which one applies, nor a rung on an ecclesiastical ladder, as one might view the civil service or a waitressing gig in central London.

It is a vocation, yes. But, more crucially, it is a sacrament. The priest does not stand at the altar as a functionary of the congregation, nor as a committee delegate. He is not a middle manager between the big boss (God) and his lowly paper-pushers.

Christ was male, and He chose men as His apostles. The Church has always understood that this choice was not accidental but deliberate, and that it established the form of the priesthood itself.

Priests stand in persona Christi – in the person of Christ Himself. That is not a metaphor. The priest does not merely recount Christ’s life, he represents Him, and the Church has no power to alter what Christ instituted.

That basic sex-based fact cannot be unmade by synod or popular demand.

The sacraments themselves are deliberate and precise. Just as the Church cannot suddenly decide that beer will do just as well as wine at the Eucharist, or that sand may substitute for water in baptism, so too is it forbidden from deciding that the priesthood may be altered to fit the spirit of the age.

The fact that women are not designed for the priestly sacrament does nothing to diminish our value. The modern demand for women priests often comes cloaked in the language of “equality”, yet it imports into the Church a secular vision of dignity.

It assumes that unless women can be ordained like men, we are relegated to second-class status.
By this logic, the Virgin Mary herself – the highest and holiest of creatures, the Mother of God, the Queen of Heaven – somehow lacks importance because she is not a priest.

The saints, mystics and doctors of the Church include some of the most formidable women in history. Teresa of Ávila, who reformed the Carmelites with iron will; Hildegard of Bingen, who advised emperors; Catherine of Siena, who told the Pope to leave Avignon and return to Rome.

Do these women mean less in the tapestry of Catholic history because they did not perform Mass? Is their contribution or value lesser because they were not frocked? The absurdity of this should be apparent.

Women like those I mentioned above had no chasubles, no mitres and yet their authority radiated across Christendom. They remind us that spiritual power in the Church has never been reducible to clerical office. To insist that priesthood is the only form of true influence in Catholicism is to mistake the nature of the Church itself.

The Church is not a bureaucracy where the real decisions are made in committee rooms. The greatest force in Catholic history has always been belief – and belief is not limited to the ordained. The Catholic Church is not a bureaucracy where decisions are confined to hazy Roman committee rooms. It is not an “old boys club” that belittles women or decrees them subservient to their male seminarians.

Progressives who scold the Catholic Church for its “patriarchy” do not, for some reason, march on mosques with placards demanding female imams. The Guardian editorial board does not publish scathing demands that Al-Azhar in Cairo open the Friday sermon to women, or that Shia seminaries in Qom change their ancient rules.

No, the social justice warriors know perfectly well which doors to graffiti and which to leave well alone. The Vatican, after all, is unlikely to respond with the same careless condemnation or righteous outrage as other religions might.

Instead, they confine themselves to lecturing Christians – and the Church of England, anxious to demonstrate its modernity, has dutifully complied. Women priests, women bishops, same-sex marriage, endless “inclusivity” measures: the whole catalogue has been enacted.

And what has been the result? Empty pews, collapsing vocations and dioceses selling off their vicarages to pay the bills. In fact, the same Islamic institutions that liberals wouldn’t dare accuse of sexism are buying up our Anglican churches and denying their women basic liberties within their once-hallowed walls.

The CofE has achieved ideological relevance at the price of theological rot. Having adjusted itself to mirror the surrounding culture, it has discovered that the surrounding culture no longer has any use for it.

This is the warning Rome cannot afford to ignore. A Church that redefines herself to keep up with societal whims will never survive. Why? Because society changes faster than any synod can keep up. What is progressive in 2025 will be reactionary in 2035, and any religious organisation that changes its basic identity to fit the trends will always be one step behind.

If the Catholic Church is nothing more than a human institution, she should indeed adapt, as trade unions and political parties have for aeons.

But if she is divine, she cannot.

Catholicism has always noted that its task is not to innovate but to preserve. It is bound by what Christ instituted, not free to rewrite his teachings at will. Were it to announce tomorrow that the priesthood had been misunderstood for two millennia, it would not be “bold reform” but ideological suicide. It would be confessing that Catholicism had misrepresented Christ Himself – and in that moment, it would cease to be His Church at all.

The argument for women priests is not, in the end, about women. It is about whether the Church will be allowed to remain itself. Progressive Christian denominations have already demonstrated what happens when they capitulate to social pressures. Congregations wither, doctrines dissolve and the faith becomes one more NGO with a hymn book.

Catholicism, for all her sins and scandals, has so far resisted that fate. She has done so not out of misogyny but out of fidelity – fidelity to something higher than any brick-and-mortar institution.

Better, then, to be called obstinate than to surrender the sacraments. Better to scandalise polite opinion than to mutilate what has been entrusted by God himself. Better to be decried as old-fashioned than to cease to be Catholic.

The world may jeer. But it will realise – as it has before – that there is something strangely bracing about an institution that refuses to bend. In a culture where everything is provisional, where every institution trims itself to the prevailing wind, there is a certain majesty in the immovable.

Rome does not exist to flatter the times, but to outlast them. And outlast them she will.‍

Photo: graphic by Arcadia

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