On 20 January 1977 the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued the “Declaration on the Question of the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood,” reaffirming the Catholic position barring women from priestly ordination. The issue is complex and thorny. The major argument of the Declaration was that the restriction is founded on an “unbroken tradition” possessing a “normative character”. Later in the Declaration other arguments from fittingness, described as being in themselves non-demonstrative are brought forth.

One set of these arguments developed the sacramental idea of natural resemblance, listing in support various theologians, among whom was Thomas Aquinas. Because this latter part of the Declaration, with its attendant idea of maleness as a prerequisite for priestly ordination, attracted so much interchange in newspapers and periodicals, it behooves us to take a more careful look at the position of Aquinas referred to by the Declaration. While it is our opinion that the real strength of the Declaration hinges on the idea of “unbroken tradition”, and on which we are not commenting in this essay, it remains instructive to understand the context within which Aquinas’ views on ordination are elaborated. For this reason the essay is termed a Note and simply wishes to make a small contribution to a much wider discussion engaging theology today.

I do not think that ‘arraignment’, the term used by Fr Fergus Ken, quite hits off my comments on Rahner’s Foundations of Christian Faith. I said as clearly as I knew how that I thought the book was in most respects of very high quality indeed. It is true that I devoted most of my comments, partly for reasons of space, partly because panegyric is uninstructive and tiresome, to what I felt were its limitations.

I agree that it is often necessary to qualify the meaning of one’s statements carefully, if misunderstanding is to be avoided. But there is a difference between the kind of qualification which makes one’s meaning more precise than it would otherwise be, and the kind which seems rather to destroy it. Thus I can say, I love that lady, but I don’t intend to marry her’, and my qualification serves to clarify my feelings and motives. But if I say, I love that lady, but I don’t mind in the least if I never see her again, or if she falls under a bus tomorrow’, then I may cause a certain amount of confusion, and may reasonably be asked what I do imply in saying that I love her. A propos of Christian expectations of a future life, Rahner says that we must resist the temptation to think of them as ‘anticipatory, eyewitness accounts of a future which is still outstanding’ (p 431). Perhaps it is stupid of me not to be able to see what is being denied here, unless it is that Christians have some kind of expectation for the future, after the end of the present life. If Rahner’s point had been merely that the expectation was not arbitrary, or that the afterlife to be expected was not unconnected with the moral dispositions and the relation to God which a person was building up in the present life, it would surely have been expressed in some other way.

Certainly I have a use for qualifications, believing as I do that to contrast Christian faith with myth in the way that Rahner does (p 291) is an important strategic error in apologetics, unless one mitigates the contrast with a great many qualifications.