That choking sound you heard today was Catholic progressives and secular liberals hearing that Pope Francis said no to women priests. Again. “The final word is clear,” he said on the flight back from a meeting in Sweden. “It was said by St. John Paul II and this remains.”

That final word, by the way, was: No, never, absolutely not, never, please don’t ask again.

Francis had said this before, in 2013 in another plane flight interview. “The Church has spoken and says, ‘No.’ John Paul II said it, but with a definitive formulation. That is closed, that door.”

C’mon Church!

That 2013 statement seems definite, but the progressives keep hoping that the Church will come around to see what every good person sees. The sexes are interchangeable and women can have every job men have. Of course. How could the Church not see this? C’mon, Church, open that door!

They were really hoping to hear this from Francis. It’s been an article of progressive Catholicism that the next pope would modernize the Church the way they wanted. After Paul VI, they thought Now! But nope. After John Paul I, nope. After John Paul II, even more nope. After Benedict, Yesssss! But as it turns out, nope.

Why they want to hear the Church change her mind on this is a good question. One reason is just that they think like everyone else. We’ve seen the world provide women with more and more chances and we all approve. If scientist, then priest. The progressives forget that the Church has her own life with its own rules. To be fair, they’ve also seen what jerks the men in power can be. “Why not women?” is an understandable reaction.

A second reason is darker: at least some realize that changing this teaching, held so strongly for so long, would throw every other teaching into doubt. The teachings on same-sex marriage, for example. You can hear the argument: “For 2,000 years the Church said only men could be priests and now we have women priests. Everyone loves them. Obviously, if the Church was wrong about that it can wrong about this.” By which the speaker would mean: It most definitely is wrong about this.

What John Paul II Said

That’s not a bad argument. Remember what St. John Paul II said. He’d written on the subject before, but it kept coming up, so in 1994 he wrote a special letter called Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. He doesn’t argue for the practice. He mostly says that this is what Jesus did and the Church has to follow him. He also points out that the high place of the Virgin Mary shows the rule “cannot mean that women are of lesser dignity.”

The whole arrangement — Virgin Mary, male priests, male and female laity — “is to be seen as the faithful observance of a plan to be ascribed to the wisdom of the Lord of the universe.” It was directed to making us holier. In short, the pope argued that God gave us this structure to help us grow closer to him and we can’t change it. To explain this would take books, but that’s the idea.

He concludes the letter forcefully: “I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.” That, to borrow the sportscaster’s joke, is the fat lady singing.

And just to make sure people heard, the next year she sang again. Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) hammered home with the point with a short note declaring, “This teaching requires definitive assent, since, founded on the written Word of God, and from the beginning constantly preserved and applied in the Tradition of the Church, it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.” (The Magisterium is the Church’s teaching authority.) That door, as Francis said, is closed.

This Funny Teaching

Today’s question came from a Swedish journalist, who began by noting that the Swedish Lutheran church has a women minister in charge and asked if the Catholic Church would be doing that. Then she added: “And if not, why are Catholic priests afraid of competition?”

It’s a silly question. But it’s the kind of silly question secular people ask because they don’t know any better. The reporter was almost certainly a secularist. (Very, very few people go to church in Sweden, and much fewer hold to any form of orthodox Christianity.) It’s all about equality and rights for them. Male and female, just different plumbing, but the difference doesn’t mean anything.

For the Christian, that difference means a lot. God created male and female for a reason. The union of the two creates a new living soul and that’s the biggest thing we can ever do. Start with this fact and you realize the difference between men and women could play itself out in all sorts of ways.

It might mean that men and women have different things to do in the Christian Church, for example. To explain how it works itself out would take books, as I say.

Back to the poor journalist’s question. It’s not about competition, good grief no. I suppose some priests might want to keep the supply low, but not many. The poor men work too hard as it is. It’s about following God’s instructions, in the trust that he will lead us all to happiness and holiness. If he tells us only men — and only a few men at that — can be priests, okay. He has his reasons.