It is of this priestly life, it is of this ultimate reality that the Church is both gift and acceptance. And that she may be this, that she may always and everywhere be the gift of the Spirit without any measure or limitations, the Son of God offered Himself in a unique sacrifice, and made this unique sacrifice and this unique priesthood the very foundation, indeed the very “form” of the Church.
This priesthood is Christ’s, not ours. Not only have none of us, men or women, any “right” to it, but it is emphatically not one of the human vocations analogous, even if superior to all others. The priest in the Church is not “another” priest, and the sacrifice he offers is not “another” sacrifice. It is forever and only Christ’s priesthood and Christ’s sacrifice, for in the words of our Prayer of Offertory, “it is Thou who offerest and Thou who art offered, it is Thou who receivest and Thou who distributest…” And thus the “institutional” priesthood in the Church has no “ontology” of its own. It exists only to make Christ Himself present, to make His unique Priesthood and His unique Sacrifice the source of the Church’s life and the “acquisition” by men of the Holy Spirit. And if the bearer, the icon, and the fulfiller of that unique priesthood is man and not woman, it is because Christ is man and not woman…
Why? This of course is the only important, the only relevant question, the one that no “culture,” no “sociology,” no “history,” and even no “exegesis” can answer. For it can be answered only by theology in the primordial and essential meaning of that word in the Church, as the contemplation and vision of the Truth itself, as communion with the uncreated Divine Light.
It is only here, in this purified and restored vision, that we might begin to understand why the ineffable mystery of the relationship between God and His creation, between God and His chosen people, between God and His Church is “essentially” revealed to us as a nuptial mystery, as the fulfillment of a mystical marriage; why, in other terms, creation itself, the Church herself, man and the world themselves, when contemplated in their ultimate truth and destiny, are revealed to us as a Bride, as a Woman clothed in the sun; why in the very depth of her love and knowledge, of her joy and communion, the Church identifies herself with one Woman whom she exalts as “more honorable than the Cherubim, and beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim.”
