Many faithful Catholics, knowing the Church teaches that men and women have equal dignity, have rightly asked a proper and good question: Why can women not become priests?

The reason the Church consistently has taught that women cannot become priests, even though women and men have equal dignity, has to do with Jesus’ actions. Jesus chose twelve Apostles, and he chose them very deliberately. All twelve were men, and those men (the first Pope and Bishops of the Church) ordained more and more men. They seemed to understand that Jesus had set a rule to be followed: men were to become priests, and not women.

St. Paul will help us understand how women could be both highly regarded but not be priests. St. Paul went out of his way to point out that as members of the body of Christ each Christian has different gifts and serves in different capacities:

“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. . . . If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body. . . . If the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the organs in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single organ, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.” (1 Cor. 12).

A hand and an eye serve very, very different functions, and serve those functions so well that they are actually very poor at doing other things. An eye has no capacity to manipulate an object; a hand cannot smell if food is fresh or rotten; a nose cannot tell if it is light or dark. A body made up of only eyes, hands, or noses would be a very poor and very ineffective body. The question then becomes: is there some real, worthy distinction that says men and not women should be priests within the Church?

The answer to that question is yes. Priests only become priests by participating in the priesthood of Christ himself, who was incarnated as a man and who chose men to continue his priesthood in persona Christi, which is to say as if Christ himself were performing the sacraments. These men are indelibly marked, a mark which cannot be imparted on women precisely because they are women and Christ was a man. Acting in persona Christi requires maleness.

Just as men cannot give birth and should not be angry about this incapacity, women cannot be priests and should not be angry about this incapacity. There are many men who might be better mothers – perhaps more caring, more invested, less clumsy, more nurturing. So with women – there are many women who may be better preachers than the average priest. But those abilities do not change the fundamental fact of their identity as women and as men and so their capacities.

But perhaps the most important reason why women cannot be priests is that Christ himself established the priesthood in men. To override His decision would be to call into question His authority – and why stop there? We could, for example, say that Christ’s teachings regarding the Eucharist, or loving one’s enemies, or any other difficult teaching was really a mistake. But to do so is to deny His Godhead.