Cardinal Sarah: There is no room whatsoever for ordaining women.

The Catholic Church only ordains men as priests - there has been criticism of this for decades. And despite Pope John Paul II putting his foot down, the discussion continues. For Cardinal Sarah, there is no room whatsoever for ordaining women.

Cardinal Emeritus of the Curia Robert Sarah reiterates the impossibility of women being ordained to the priesthood. In a lecture entitled "Joyful Servants of the Gospel", the cardinal said in Mexico City on Monday that no council, no synod, no ecclesiastical authority has the power to invent a priesthood for women without seriously damaging the eternal figure of the priest and his sacramental identity. There is also no regional leeway. Part of the Catholic faith is that the sacrament of ordination was instituted by Christ identically for the whole Church: "For Jesus there is no African, Germanic, Amazonian or European priesthood.

The sacrament of ordination, he said, is a divine gift to be received, understood and lived. "The Church has always sought to understand and deepen the proper and real nature of the priest, who as a baptised person is called to be an alter Christus, another Christus, indeed an ipse Christus, Christ himself, to represent him, to be conformed to him, to be shaped and anchored in Christ through priestly ordination," Sarah continued. For the cardinal, the priest is a man of God "who is in the presence of God day and night to glorify him, to adore him." The priest, he said, is a man who is sacrificed to prolong Christ's sacrifice for the redemption of the world.

Pope John Paul II stressed in his 1994 Apostolic Exhortation "Ordinatio sacerdotalis" that priestly ordination has been reserved exclusively for men from the beginning of the Church. In order to stop the debate about ordaining women priests, the Pope stated that the Church "has no authority whatsoever to ordain women priests, and that all the faithful of the Church must definitively abide by this decision". The letter only comments on ordination to the priesthood. The question of ordaining women deacons thus remained open. In 2020, Pope Francis appointed a commission to clarify the issue. Last year, the Synodal Assembly of the Synodal Way called on the German bishops to advocate in Rome for the admission of women to the diaconate; furthermore, more far-reaching considerations from Germany on opening up all ordained offices in the universal Church are to be put forward. 

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