Milwaukee priest says women’s ordination would make ‘better sense’

December 13, 2010

Sixteen years after Venerable John Paul II declared that “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful,” a priest of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee has written a newspaper column stating that the ordination of women would make “better sense” because women are more fitting images of the Church as the Bride of Christ.

After inaccurately stating that “celibacy for clergy began in monasticism” and was instituted for diocesan clergy only in the Middle Ages, Father Victor Capriolo added:

To study the Church is to realize that the one constant in her history has been change — from a married clergy to a celibate clergy, from Inquisition to ecumenism, from the way confession (Reconciliation) has been administered and the Mass celebrated, to the way the Church’s disciplines on fasting and abstinence and its moral stance on things such as usury and slavery have changed through time. Will there ever be women priests in the Catholic Church? I wonder.

In 1992, Archbishop Rembert Weakland named Father Capriolo the spiritual director of the archdiocese’s college seminarians; he is now a pastor in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.

 

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Further information:

• Father Victor Capriolo: Will the Roman Catholic Church one day ordain female priests? (Fond du Lac Reporter)
• Ven. John Paul II: Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (Apostolic Letter on Reserving Priestly Ordination to Men Alone, 1994)
• Father Christian Cochini, The Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy (Amazon.com)