Memo To All You Who Think Otherwise:

The Catholic Church will never ordain women

By Damian Thompson

Thanks to technical problems, I wasn’t able to comment on Rowan Williams (”Archbishop of Canterbury” in the Henrician usurpation tradition, as Gerald Warner calls him) lecturing the Vatican on the virtues of women priests. I’m glad he did, because it is high time that the Church of England stopped apologising for this innovation. Anglicans have women priests; Catholics and Orthodox don’t. End of story, so far as corporate reunion is concerned.
“Oh, but the Roman Catholic Church will certainly ordain women one day,” Dr George Carey once told me. No it won’t. Why do Anglicans find this so hard to grasp? When Pope John Paul II decreed that the Church does not have the authority to ordain women, he was reiterating a teaching that has never changed. It was, nonetheless, a historic declaration, for it meant that henceforth the Church could ordain women only by denying that the Pope has the divine authority to define an unalterable doctrine. (NB: doctrine, not discipline.)
Interestingly, many liberal Catholics reluctantly obeyed the Pope. What JPII was doing was closing down a debate that, from the point of view of orthodox Catholicism, was always illegitimate. And, by and large, it has indeed closed: these days, the tiny “Catholic” women’s ordination movement is drifting towards either Anglicanism or the world of episcopi vagantes.
As they don modern chasubles that, fortunately, already look as if they were designed for the larger lady, these excommunicated womenpriests declare that they have been led out of the offical structures of the Church by the Holy Spirit. And I’m far too much of a gentleman to contradict them.