From a Facebook Debate

John Wijngaards is indeed significant enough to have a Wikipedia article; so are Calvin, Arius, Mani, Simon Magus, Abelard, and Judas Iscariot. All that is achieved by quoting anybody is to demonstrate to what degree one agrees or disagrees with that position. It is ironic you should quote Wijngaards, of whom I confess that I had never heard, when the entire point of my original essay was to point out the ubiquity of heretical theologians who have the amazing gall to call themselves Catholics. Wijngaards' words to the effect that God does call women to the presbyterate contain an implicit blasphemy, since it is an irreformable teaching of the Catholic Church that men only may receive the Sacrament of Order, just as it is an irreformable teaching of the Catholic Church that the Sacrament of Reconciliation may be administered to those only who have committed at least one actual sin after baptism.
Is your father an Anglican or a Catholic priest?

There is that notoriously irritating thing, a Conflict Of Worldviews, in this argument.
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Everytime you have mentioned priesthood, vocation, etc., you have always talked about it in terms of "preaching," "teaching," "spreading the word of God." Certainly these things appertain to the priestly ministry. But they are not of its essence.

The essence of the Catholic priesthood consists in the ability to offer up the Sacrifice of the Mass.

The Sacrifice of the Mass is one and the same sacrifice with that of Calvary, only it is offered in an unbloody manner. It is the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ to His Father. Jesus Christ is offered to His Father under the sacramental species of bread and wine. The bread and wine become, through the same omnipotent creative power that brought heaven and earth into existence out of nothing, that is to say, through the omnipotence of God, the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ. Therefore, the Eucharist is God (De Fide). To effect this transformation, as I have said, requires the omnipotence of God. No one who is not possessed of the omnipotence of God can do this; and the Sacrament of Orders gives its recipient a share in the omnipotence of God. Obviously for an omnipotent God, transsubstantiation does not seem any harder, in fact it seems a great deal easier to my imagination, than the creation of heaven and earth. Now surely it is patently obvious that not anyone who feels called to it has a right to the power of God. God will bestow His own power on those only whom He Himself chooses. The same omnipotence is required to sanctify a sinner in the Sacrament of Penance. A priestly vocation requires not only an internal sense, but also the external call of one's bishop.

A priest exists to administer the sacraments of Communion, Confession, and Extreme Unction. Only Jesus Christ and His priests have the power to confect the Eucharist; only Jesus Christ and His priests have the power to absolve sinners: "I absolve you from your sins in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" would be blasphemy in the mouths of anybody else.

There is certainly no inherent reason why a woman cannot preach or teach religion or spread the word of God. But a woman simply cannot be a Catholic priest, just as a woman under the Old Dispensation could not be a Jewish priest, neither could any man who was not of the tribe of Levi. Was this discrimination against the other eleven tribes?

A woman cannot be a Catholic priest because she cannot validly receive the Sacrament of Orders. This is a matter of fact, of reality, of objective truth, of the cosmic order of the universe, of the Divinely established settlement of the Church. It cannot be altered by the will of anyone except Almighty God; but God has given us, once for all, the Catholic Religion, which is necessarily Catholic in time as well as in space, for there is a necessary continuity in the true religion. The truth of God does not change from one century to another, or from one millennium to another, for Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and for ever; and to Him a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years are as a day. The order in which God has established things has nothing to do with anyone's opinion, but with the truth.

The article by Zmirak demonstrated that all the other religions besides Judaism and Christianity, or to be more accurate and more correct, the Catholic Church, had female priests. Therefore there must be a reason inherent in Judaism and Catholicity for the absence of priestesses in these religions.

The truth is an objective thing, and does not admit of the possibility of its own opposite. The truth is not dependent upon the human mind. The human mind must conform itself to the truth, and not the truth to the human mind, still less to the human will. I believe the truth because it is there, and not because it is my own opinion. Reality is not an opinion.

Since the proclamation of Pope John Paul's Apostolic Letter "Ordinatio Sacerdotalis," of 1994, it is beyond contestation, though nothing is beyond the contestation of rebels, that the Catholic Church does not, never has had, and never will have, the authority to ordain women. I would advise a reading of that Apostolic Letter; it is not very long, and that it expresses an irreformable teaching is quite obvious from the words towards its end:

"Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of Our ministry of confirming the brethren: We declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be held definitively by all the Church's faithful."

"Ut igitur omne dubium auferatur circa rem magni momenti, quae ad ipsam Ecclesiae divinam constitutionem pertinet, virtute ministerii Nostri confirmandi fratres (Luc. 22, 32), Declaramus Ecclesiam facultatem nullatenus habere ordinationem sacerdotalem mulieribus conferendi, hancque sententiam ab omnibus Ecclesiae fidelibus esse definitive tenendam."

That this paragraph invokes papal infallibility is unquestionable: though there will doubtless be those who will question the unquestionable. The author of the article at http://www.ewtn.com/library/ISSUES/ORDIN.TXT points this out very clearly, calling it "a textbook case of infallibility in action."

"There are, clearly, four tests of infallibility: the Pope must be
(1) intending to teach
(2) by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority
(3) a matter of Faith or morals
(4) to be held by the Universal Church.
Ordinatio sacerdotalis not only passes all four tests, but it is manifest that the Pope delibrately phrased the teaching to ensure this would be obvious.
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First, it is not strictly correct to refer to a Church document as infallible. The Pope, under certain conditions, is infallible; what he teaches under those conditions us "irreformable" - that is, unchangeable because certainly true.
...Fourth and finally, the definition of infallibility at Vatican I does not limit infallibility to those extraordinary cases in which the Holy Father states he is formally defining a new dogma. Whether or not he would call Ordinatio Sacerdotalis a dogmatic definition, the Pope has stated infallibly a doctrine that has always been known, taught, and believed by the great body of Catholic faithful - namely that the Church has no authority to ordain women. He has, in other words, irreformably formulated a proper understanding of a limitation on the authority of the Church.

""I think that what we are witnessing in the denial of 'infallibility' to 'Ordinatio Sacerdotalis' results from the long struggle of orthodoxy with modernism over the last generation. Faithful Catholics are enormously frustrated and what they want is a document that will, frankly, shut the dissidents up and make them go away. When the dissidents respond to a document by pointing out a number of reasons why it really isn't the last word, faithful Catholics tend to think that they must be right; otherwise the question would really be settled.
"But this credits the dissidents with far too much intellectual honesty. The fact is that no document can close a question for someone who is in rebellion against legitimate authority. ...
What is needed to make the dissidents go away, of course, is discipline. But you don't get discipline from a document (though it can be a good starting point).
...Without discipline, the best we can do is understand infallibility properly and live by it ourselves. Papal infallibility rests on three basic arguments: from Tradition (or history); from Scripture; and from ecclesiology (the logic of the Church's situation).
The argument from Tradition or history is simply that, from the earliest times, Catholics have credited the successors of Peter with the authority to settle disputes and teach the Faith without error. This is manifest in the works of the Fathers, for example.... See more
The argument from Scripture is based in those passages which bear upon the authority of Peter: his name as Rock; the conferral of the keys to the Kingdom; the power of binding and loosing; and, as the Pope pointed out, the guarantee of Christ that Peter would not fail in Faith and must confirm his brethren. To take into account the Petrine succession, we add the logical argument that these powers were essential to the Church, that Christ knew He would not come again before Peter died, and that it would be tantamount to a new dispensation if Christ had not intended (as Tradition makes clear) that these powers would also be exercised by Peter's successors - all vicars of Christ - until He comes.
The argument from ecclesiology is based upon the logical necessity of having a supreme power of this type at work in the Church if Christ's promise to be with the Church forever is to have any real meaning. By Scripture and Tradition we know that the popes can bind the faithful to believe something as Divinely revealed. Clearly Christ's promise would be violated if a Pope ever bound the faithful to believe something false in a matter relating to their salvation. Hence, it must be impossible for a Pope to do this. He simply MUST be protected by the Holy Spirit when teaching about a matter of faith and morals, by virtue of his supreme authority, with the intention of compelling the assent of the entire Church."

Before I finish, I wish to reiterate the point is that it is not essential to, though it is the duty of, a priest to preach: rather, a priest shares in the omnipotence of God by being able to consecrate the Eucharist for the nourishment of our souls, and in the Sacrament of Confession to unlock the gates of hell for sinners who are imprisoned there. No one has a right to the awful and terrible power of the Catholic priest, but those whom God has called to that dignity; and it is the infallible teaching of the Catholic Church that no woman is called to that appalling dignity.

In promulgating "Ordinatio Sacerdotalis," therefore, Pope John Paul II was merely repeating un unchangeable teaching of the Catholic Church; unchangeable, that is, because certainly true.

It is my opinion that this lamentable state of affairs derives not simply from the conflict of orthodoxy with modernism, but also and moreover with the paganistic egocentrism that has infected our culture since the eighteenth century and its so-called Enlightenment (which "Enlightenment" led, of course, to the horrors of the French Revolution, among other things). There are residues of a once-Christian culture in Western society, "a smouldering," as Hilaire Belloc wrote at the end of "The Servile State," "of the old fires:" and since the fire is not quite burnt out we may hope to rekindle it yet. Only God knows what the future of this apparently moribund society shall be: but one thing is certain, and that is that unless it returns to the Catholic Church, which nourished it and brought it to its zenith, it will crumble and wither away.
I conclude with the words that end "The Servile State:"

"And as I am upon the whole hopeful that the Faith will recover its intimate and guiding place in the heart of Europe, so I believe that this sinking back into our original Paganism...will in due time be halted and reversed.
"Videat Deus."