As a convert to Catholicism from atheism, I often get buttonholed with people’s hard questions for the Church. A cradle Catholic, my interlocutors figure, may never have been able to truly take an outside view, but I was once an atheist blogger, critiquing the Church and trying to argue others out of faith. I couldn’t have changed my mind without wrestling with these hard, foreign teachings. For the most part, I welcome the questions, but my answers take a form my questioner doesn’t expect. I try to get under the surface of the question to point to the way that my friend’s disagreement with the Church is both much larger and much stranger than they expect.
Most recently, I was at a conference, hearing stories from a kind Protestant man about his attempts to persuade members of his congregation to allow women to serve as elders. He had piled up biblical evidence of the Old Testament women of valor, the women of the Gospels who were faithful to the end, and the deaconesses and other women who helped sustain the early Church. Given the biblical evidence, as well as the lived experience of seeing women lead outside the Church, why should Church leadership be barred to them? What could it communicate except sexism?
As a Catholic, I told him I was more sympathetic than he might expect. If my own Church saw priesthood primarily as a matter of evocative preaching or adroit leadership, I would be hard-pressed to explain why women with these talents should be excluded. I’d faced questions along these lines when converting; how could I as a feminist concede that women would not be priests? I told my atheist friends the same thing I told my Protestant friend: We didn’t really disagree primarily about whether women could be priests, we disagreed about whether priests existed.
The Catholic Church makes a much richer and stranger claim about her priests than simply that they are leaders.
The Catholic Church makes a much richer and stranger claim about her priests than simply that they are leaders. A priest is a man who may confect the Eucharist and forgive sins. If you do not, as my atheist friends and Protestant interlocutor did not, believe that the Eucharist is Christ’s Body and Blood, then you do not believe there are any priests as I understand them.
It would be very strange, if you found your friend had a delusional belief about meeting a male unicorn, to commit to convincing them that they ought, for equity’s sake, try to believe in female unicorns as well. Similarly, if you believe there are not priests in the manner the Church claims, it would be very odd to commit to asking the Church to invite women to pretend to be priests in the same way you believe the men are presently pretending. Before you can answer the question of whether there can be women priests, you have to settle whether there are any priests and any sacraments at all. Only if that proves to be true can you move on to the question of whom Christ has chosen to be a channel of these graces.
On another night, I was pulled aside by a new acquaintance who told me she saw a lot that she admired in the Church. “So why not become Catholic?” I asked. Treating the question lightly, she said, “I like sin too much!” “Well, which sins?” I asked. “Premarital sex,” she replied. I paused. Did she actually think it was sin, or did she think the Church made a mistake characterizing it that way? She admitted it was the latter.
“So,” I asked her, “If you think the Church is wrong about premarital sex, what do you think marriage is?” She thought for a moment and said it was mostly a change of tax status. “Fair enough,” I told her. If that’s what I thought marriage was, I wouldn’t have a problem with premarital sex either! Nothing could be more reasonable than saying that an adjustment to federal filing status shouldn’t change the moral valence of sex.
The fact that we were both using the words “marriage” and “premarital” made it harder to spot we were talking about two very different things. The word “priest” could obscure the heart of our disagreement just as easily. In both cases, the Church uses these words to mean something much richer and stranger than the secular world anticipates. Before we can fully adjudicate what began as a question of values, we need to settle a truth claim. Do priests exist as the Church claims they do? Does marriage?
My own conversion was the fruit of many such conversations with a relay race of interlocutors.
In neither of these conversations did my interlocutor decide to become Catholic on the spot. But I hope, in both cases, that a door to wonder cracked open. If the Church were as thin a thing as they imagined, they’d be right to spurn her. I hadn’t, as they might fear, settled for less than they felt human beings merited. The Church, in offering the sacraments, is offering something stranger than many people dare to hope for.
My own conversion was the fruit of many such conversations with a relay race of interlocutors. (I doubt everyone who took a chance on conversation with me knows that I finally came home.) Picking a fight with the Church as I understood it gave me the chance to understand the Church as she actually is.