Modest Support for CDF decree/Di Noia
AUGUSTINE DI NOIA is director of the U.S. bishops' Secretariat for Doctrine. His comments accompanied U.S. distribution of the CDF statement. We quote here from his explanatory piece in the National Catholic Reporter (12/15).
IF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH HAD not decided in 1976 to ordain women, there would almost certainly have been no Inter Insigniores in 1977, nor Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in 1994, nor a further clarification of the issue now, in 1995. Just because the decision was taken by a major ecclesial body, and even before a theological consensus had taken shape, the Holy See was forced to articulate the Catholic position on the matter in this series of official documents.
... Even though a fully elaborated theological argument for the traditional practice was not yet in place, the Catholic church felt obliged to affirm that the restriction of priestly ordination to men was not simply a matter of discipline and that she was not authorized to do in this area what Christ himself did not do.
Controversy has obscured the fact that the case advanced by Inter Insigniores and Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in support of the traditional practice is an extraordinarily modest one, from a theological perspective. Both documents avoid appeal to gender-specific traits, female/male role differentiation or to Christ's maleness. As the official commentaries have indicated, such considerations can at best have only illustrative force. The Holy See leaves to theologians the task of determining the role of such considerations in developing arguments for the traditional practice.
The documents themselves chart a more modest course. They appeal to the fact that Christ did not choose women to be among the Twelve Apostles and that the apostles adhered to the injunction implied in this nonselection by declining to accord women an official status in the ministry of the early Christian community.
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