Thought Concerning Women as Priests
If the priest is alter Christus, is he not also, just by the transitive property, alter novus Adam? The priest as alter Christus figures a universal priesthood and redemption; but maybe the priest additionally, as the other new Adam, is figuring a more specific redemption and purification of Adam, that is to say of the man (and not of the woman). After the transgression in Eden, God, our Divine Physician, prescribes to Adam and Eve, to men and women, two different purgations, two different purifications: Adam, and all men, are to find their way back to God, their purgation and purification, through the bitterness of their earthly toil; Eve and all women, are to find their way back to God, their purgation and purification, through the very painful birth of new peoples and the yoking of their desire to the man, and in that, the perpetual desire to bear and bear again, new children, no matter the pain or cost.
The priest as a day-to-day man, as a fallen heir of Adam, experiences the cost of original sin; he, too, toils bitterly on the earth, seeking to sow and reap God’s harvest in a field that often seems to yield very little; the culture is not changing; the parish is experiencing difficulties; there are a lack of vocations, etc. But as alter novus Adam, the priest figures the glory of Adam redeemed; here is now a laborer who toils, and whose toil yields abundunant and supernatural fruit; what he plants, grows; what he sows, he reaps; the harvest is plentiful; all that he touches flourishes. This is Christ the gardener. Christ the new Adam.
Women are not to disrupt this imaging by taking upon themselves the salvific history which applies specifically to men. It is for men to experience redemption through their relationship to earthly toil and work. In a day-to-day life, this has no purchase on what a woman is doing in her occupation, etc. Eve worked alongside Adam; Ruth worked in the fields. Just the same, it is not disruptive for a man to take care of a child. But whereas a woman can work and toil in earthly occupation, she will not find her purification and purgation through that work; and whereas a man can bitterly weep and yearn for childbirth, he will not find his purification and purgation in that yearning.
If a person is deficient in vitamin C, it may delight them and be to their general benefit to eat magnesium-rich food. But this will not fulfill the prescription that will heal their deficiency. Men and women have, as it were, different deficiencies, different things that have to be healed, and the Edenic prescriptions pertain to these.
Women then can look to Mother Mary, who has universal identification, but maybe also figures an additional and specific redemption for women alone. In her, the new Eve, the yoking of the desire is not to an earthly man, but is to God, is to the Father and the Son and the Spirit all at once. The desire is ordered to her good, and the children she bears, she bears in joyfulness. And yet, as the new Eve, Mother Mary is very different from the new Adam — she is not God. And so, until such time as all His plan is completed, Mother Mary still experiences a certain pain and sorrow in childbearing…she sorrows to see the delay and the abuses of her children…her tears water the earth, and make it fertile.
This specifically Marian role belongs to women: to yoke our desire to the truest Man, to Jesus Christ, and to water the earth with our tears, with our desire for His kingdom in all its fertility, that it might truly bear forth the fruit within it. This work of prayer and desire, this faithful endurance of prolonged gestation in hope of birth, is what has been prescribed to women. It is what women religious take up and pursue. And this call works in tandem with the male priests who toil upon the hard earth; who find that hard earth suddenly, yieldingly, softened by sweet and timely rains — rains produced by women who sorrowed and believed.