Women priests

This shortage is not a new development. Indeed, it has been a problem since the time of the late Archbishop Anthony Pantin and long before his time. There are several factors underlying this trend. The first is that being a Roman Catholic priest no longer carries the status it once did. The congregations of various churches tend to have distinct socio-economic profiles and, in Trinidad and Tobago, the RC Church’s membership has the highest proportion of uppermiddle and upper class persons. As such, and in an increasingly materialistic world, the younger generation would be less likely to find the priesthood an attractive career choice.

In other denominations, however, the role of religious leader carries with it more status, power, and even income. These are certainly factors which help explain why, even as the RC Church struggles to find new priests, the evangelical churches are getting new pastors and new members at a steady rate. Of course, this is also because the intellectual requirements and the acrifices required to become a priest are of a significantly higher order.

An RC priest is always an educated man, whereas any layperson can proclaim themselves a pastor and, if their finances allow, even a PhD (albeit not one from an accredited university).

So the challenge facing Roman Catholics is how to attract new priests without compromising the Church’s moral and professional standards. The solution, we would argue, is obvious. Ordain women as priests.

There is no theological reason why the Vatican cannot alter its stance on this issue. The standard position of the Church is that Jesus did not choose any women amongst his disciples and therefore women cannot be priests. But this argument is obviously weak. Pushed to its logical conclusion, the Church should therefore not have any priests who aren’t Jews, since every disciple was Jewish. Besides, if Jesus really didn’t want women in positions of authority, then the Church should neither have nuns nor put them in charge of convents or schools. In any case, the important roles of Mary and Mary Magdalene in Jesus’s life clearly outweigh the social norms of that time and culture which would have caused him to choose only males to be his disciples.

Moreover, it is women who now, as they did in Jesus’s time, form the backbone of the Church. The merest glance at any congregation in any part of the country would reveal the truth of this. And surely the Vatican would not argue that women lack the moral, intellectual, and personal traits required to be religious leaders?
We are not saying that such a drastic change in Church policy would be easy, or even desired by most of the laity (including women themselves). But, over its 2000-year history, the Church, while retaining its core beliefs and values, has always adapted itself to changing social and political conditions — indeed, had it not done so, it is unlikely to have lasted this long. The ordination of women into the priesthood is an obvious step, and one which in the long run would, in our view, immeasurably strengthen the Church.