Post-Dispatch religion reporter Tim Townsend mentioned
Catholic teaching on ordination i.e., the male-only priesthood, in his Saturday, May 31 column.

The Vatican has stated, not for the first time, that the topic is closed.

But there are still folks out there — you perhaps — who don’t understand the reasoning behind the church’s teaching or who think they understand and don’t approve of the reasoning.

The women’s ordination issue doesn’t have the same cachet it once did, and for good reason:

Back in the ’60’s it was a hot, new topic and it grew in intensity during the seventies and eighties when radical secular feminists — who had no use for Christ or the Catholic Church or for the sanctity of unborn human life, for that matter — took up the cry. Some men and women inside the church were swayed as well. For a highly detailed look at this recent history of the R.C. church and women, including ordination, see The Bishops & Women: Women for Faith & Family Archive

For a shorter history, see Helen Hull Hitchcock’s Marking a Milestone.

And if you just have time for one example of a turnaround in thinking, take a look at Sr. Sara Butler. In 1985 Sr. Butler was on the U.S. bishops’ committee that was planning on writing a pastoral on women.

At the time, Sr. Butler was in favor of women’s ordination.

As she tells the story, she was later invited by a non-Catholic group to join in a roundtable discussion of the topic. Her job was to articulate her church’s best arguments on the male-only priesthood. So she did, and she did a good job, and in so doing she began to more deeply understand her church’s thinking. The rest is history.

Sr. Sara Butler changed her mind. And in 2007 she published a book explaining all.

For those still stymied by the Roman Catholic teaching on the priesthood, we highly recommend Sr. Sara Butler’s “The Catholic Priesthood and Women: A Guide to the Teaching of the Church.”