St. Therese, St. Terese Benedicta, and Women Priests

Last updated on: August 8, 2014 at 3:55 pm by David Mills

St. Therese, St. Terese Benedicta, and Women Priests 2014-08-08T15:50:29-04:00 David Mills

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In his celebration of the ordination forty years ago of the first Episcopal women ministers, the Episopalian bishop of Europe claims that “Some past women saints reported feeling called to be priests,” a claim made with that drive-by vagueness I well remember from liberal writings I read when I was an Episcopalian.

If anyone said this, whatever they said about wanting to be priests wasn’t what the bishop was suggesting they said, which is that they wanted something they thought they should, and that they had a right to, have. Friends I asked thought he was referring to St. Therese of Lisieux and possibly St. Terese Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), as those, especially the first, are the two saints invoked in this cause. So I did a little web searching. Not an exhaustive search by any means, but this is what I found.

It doesn’t seem to have true of St. Therese. She said, as quoted in this article from the Homiletic and Pastoral Review dealing with the question:

I feel as if I were called to be a fighter, a priest, an apostle, a doctor, a martyr; as if I could never satisfy the needs of my nature without performing, for Your sake, every kind of heroic action at once. I feel as if I’d got the courage to be a Crusader, a Pontifical Zouave, dying on the battlefield in defence of the Church. And at the same time I want to be a priest; how lovingly I’d carry You in my hands when you came down from heaven at my call; how lovingly I’d bestow You on men’s souls! And yet, with all this desire to be a priest, I’ve nothing but admiration and envy for the humility of St. Francis; I’d willingly imitate him in refusing the honour of the priesthood.

It isn’t surprising that someone with a love of the Mass and of the priesthood might want to be a priest even if she (or he) knew she couldn’t be one. In fact it would be surprising if the thought didn’t cross devout minds. If the bishop was referring to St. Therese, as I suspect he was, it’s hardly honest to say that she felt called to the priesthood.

The claim doesn’t seem to be true of St. Terese Benedicta either. As she wrote in The Separate Vocations of Man and Woman According to Nature and Grace (1932):

If we consider the attitude of the Lord Himself, we understand that He accepted the free loving services of women for Himself and His Apostles and that women were among His disciples and most intimate confidants. Yet He did not grant them the priesthood, not even to His mother, Queen of Apostles, who was exalted above all humanity in human perfection and fullness of grace.

She goes on to say that she thinks making women priests “cannot be forbidden by dogma,” and seems to think that maybe someday it will be considered, but then says that “The whole tradition speaks against it from the beginning” (emphasis hers) and that “in my opinion, even more significant is the mysterious fact emphasized earlier — that Christ came to earth as the Son of Man” (emphasis again hers). Here is the longer passage from which that quote was taken.

I would be grateful to hear from readers had more information about this.

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