Tea at Trianon: A Reflection on the Male-only Priesthood

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, February 17, 2024

A Reflection on the Male-only Priesthood

From Controversiam:

The primary role of a priest is to administer sacraments and to teach. And to do those things he must serve as a conduit between heaven and earth; he must represent the people to God, and God to the people; he must be a symbol, an icon or prototype, of God's relation to the world and to us—masculine to feminine, begetting (i.e., giving from self without receiving) to receiving, transcendent to immanent, father to child, Christ to the Church. Men by nature are suited to represent and symbolize in these ways; women by nature are not.1

The priest, therefore, does not simply carry out managerial tasks; in a special sense he gives himself up to become another Christ so that Christ might act through him. There is, then, an ontological principle or truth which must be maintained by way of the sign. Whenever he celebrates the mass or gives absolution in the confessional, he is acting in the place of Christ: in persona Christi. A priest truly represents—is deputized to act in the power and place of—our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Thus, the Church has authoritatively spoken on this theological question, including the definitive affirmation by Pope John Paul II that “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women.”2 (Read more.)