ABSTRACT
In advanced Western societies, the Catholic tradition of excluding women from the priesthood has come to seem prima facie unjust. This is doubtless because of the intellectual shift in our thinking from "natural law" to "natural rights". The maleness of the priesthood is consistent with the metaphors of gender through which, predominantly, God has chosen to reveal himself both in the scriptures and in the long tradition of theological reflection. The priest is male because gender differentiation is significant to the self-revelation of God in history. God had sexual differentiation in his mind at the very foundation of the history of salvation. The Christian ideal of equality before God not only did not erase sexual differentiation, but, on the contrary, rested upon that reality as its foundation. The beautifully wrought sexual differentiation of the narrative of Christian faith will have buckled. And its collapse will have cracked every arch in its theological architecture.
