Ordinatio Sacerdotalis

Background and Occasion

From the 1970s, some Protestant and Anglican communities began to ordain women, and the question was raised within the Catholic Church as well. In 1975, in correspondence with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan, Paul VI set out the Catholic position: the Church holds that it is not admissible to ordain women to the priesthood, for very fundamental reasons. In 1976 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published the declaration Inter Insigniores, which explained these reasons at length.

The question did not go away. In many places it continued to be treated as open, or as a matter of discipline that the Church might change. John Paul II wrote Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, a short apostolic letter of four sections, on Pentecost Sunday 1994, in order to remove all doubt.

Central Teaching

The reasons given

The letter summarises the reasons Paul VI had given:

• The example of Christ. Christ chose only men as his apostles. He did so freely and in a sovereign manner, after prayer (Luke 6:12–13), and not because he was conforming to the customs of his time; the Gospels show that he did not hesitate to depart from those customs in his treatment of women.
• The practice of the Church. The apostles did the same when they chose their collaborators and successors, and the Church has constantly imitated Christ in choosing only men.
• The living teaching authority of the Church, which has consistently held that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is in accordance with God’s plan for his Church.

The letter adds a point from Redemptoris Mater and the apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem (1988). The Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God and Mother of the Church, did not receive the mission proper to the apostles or the ministerial priesthood. This shows that the non-admission of women to priestly ordination cannot mean that women are of lesser dignity or that they are discriminated against. It reflects the plan of God, in which men and women have different and complementary roles, and in which the greatest in the Kingdom are not the ministers but the saints.

The declaration

The heart of the letter is its fourth section. Noting that in some places the question is still considered open to debate, or that the Church’s judgement is thought to have merely disciplinary force, the Pope declares, in virtue of his ministry of confirming the brethren (Luke 22:32), that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women, and that this judgement is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.

The letter does not argue that the Church has chosen not to ordain women. Its claim is that the Church lacks the power to do so, because the sacrament is not hers to redesign: it was received from Christ.

Later Clarification

In October 1995 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, with the Pope’s approval, published a Responsum ad dubium answering whether this teaching belongs to the deposit of faith. It replied that it does, and that it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium (Lumen Gentium 25). The Pope, in other words, did not issue a new definition but formally confirmed a teaching already held definitively. The Congregation’s Doctrinal Commentary on Ad Tuendam Fidem (1998) lists it among the truths to be held definitively. In 2018 the Prefect of the Congregation, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, reaffirmed that the teaching is definitive and not open to revision.

The letter concerns priestly ordination, and so the episcopate and presbyterate. The distinct historical and theological question of women deacons has been studied separately by commissions appointed by Pope Francis.

Theological Significance

Ordinatio Sacerdotalis is an important example of how the Magisterium teaches definitively without a solemn definition. It shows the Pope confirming a doctrine of the ordinary and universal Magisterium, a mode of teaching described in Lumen Gentium 25 and in the Code of Canon Law (canon 750 §2).

Theologically, the letter rests on the principle that the Church has no authority over the substance of the sacraments, which were instituted by Christ. The manuals apply the same principle to the matter and form of each sacrament: the Church can determine many things about how sacraments are celebrated, but not what Christ himself determined. In the case of Holy Orders, the tradition has held that the recipient of the sacrament is one of the elements fixed by Christ.

For readers of this site, the letter belongs with the treatment of Holy Orders in Pohle’s The Sacraments and in the course’s lesson on the sacraments of service, and with Redemptoris Mater and Mulieris Dignitatem on the dignity and vocation of women.