In the Sunday New York Times Magazine (6/21), Randy Cohen, author of the column “The Ethicist,” fielded a question from a man studying to be a Roman Catholic priest. The seminarian asked if it was ethical for the school he attended to only give scholarships to students studying to join the religious order. Cohen’s answer seemed reasonable: “There’s nothing wrong with a religious order establishing a school for its members, subsidizing their education, and then later broadening the student body to include tuition-paying nonmembers.”
Then Cohen’s answer took a bizarre turn that will get him in hot water with Catholic readers.
What is at issue…is sex discrimination: your order’s refusal to admit women and, more significant, your aspiring to the priesthood, a leadership position in your church, one closed to women. Calling a practice ‘religious’ does not exempt it from ethical scrutiny.
First of all, I’ll nitpick. The writer didn’t say his order is closed to women. Many religious orders are open to women as nuns (the Dominican order is an example). Admittedly, becoming a nun is not the same as being a priest, but on the other hand, it means Cohen’s implication that women at the college are being denied scholarships could be false, depending on which religious order the seminarian was joining.
Now, about this priesthood thing. In bringing this up Cohen violates an ethic himself — the one about not giving unsolicited advice. This seminarian asked about scholarships at a college, not about the nature of the priesthood. Presumably a man already studying to become a priest knows the priesthood is all male and has come to terms with the fact. For Cohen to bring this issue up is a little like telling an engaged man, “And you know marriage means you can only have sex with your wife.” It is vaguely insulting. If Cohen wants to engage in anti-Catholic polemics, he should do that on his own time, and not as part of an advice column.
No, the priesthood is not open to women. The Boy Scouts aren’t either. That shouldn’t trouble anyone who doesn’t want to be a Boy Scout. I don’t know what Cohen’s religious persuasion is, or if he has one, but certainly he is not so naive that he does not realize that religions often hold positions that make no sense to nonmembers. It makes no sense to me that Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse blood transfusions, even at the cost of their lives, but as long as they are willing to live with the consequences of this rule I am not disturbed by it.
For what it is worth, I am not entirely comfortable with the Church’s position on the ordination of women either. The reason given, however, is fairly straightforward. The priest leads the congregation at the Mass, and the Mass is a recreation of the Last Supper. Jesus presided at the Last Supper, and Jesus was a man. Thus, a priest, as the stand-in for Christ, should also be a man. One way to think of it (though very imprecisely) is that the priest is an actor in a play. We wouldn’t expect a female actor to play a character that is clearly and traditionally played by males — for example, Abraham Lincoln in a movie about the Civil War.
As a matter of personal opinion, I’m not sure that Catholics would be confused about the identity of Christ if the celebrant at a Mass were a female. But this is the position the Church has taken for centuries, and there is a logic to it. Though, in a certain light, this thinking could be taken as sexist, it doesn’t necessarily have to be. Women can’t father children and men can’t have babies. The Church holds that this difference between the sexes is not incidental, it is intended by God. As a result, it should be expected that women and men would have different roles in religious life. I have been told in no uncertain terms by some feminists that, since I am a male, abortion is none of my business. So the Catholic Church is hardly alone in asserting that gender identification is relevant in moral matters.
However you approach this issue, Cohen’s answer has a burr-up-the-butt feel to it. He should have stuck to the issue at hand, rather broadening to attack the Catholic Church. It was, in a word, unethical.