Sir, - While it is a valuable and necessary endeavour to focus on the roles) of the lay person (Rosemary Swords, Opinion, July 2nd), discussion about women's ordination is also needed.
It is true, as Ms Swords indicates, that male and female are different and that each, as such, has different gifts to offer the life of the Church. The Roman Catholic ordained priesthood, in its exclusion of women, therefore, is sadly missing the unique and vital contribution of women. To say women cannot be ordained because they are women suggests that their unique gifts are unnecessary and not valuable.
It is truly without merit to argue for the continued exclusion of women from the ordained priesthood because, as Ms Swords claims, "it was Christ who decided to choose only men for the priesthood". In fact, a careful reading of the gospels shows that Jesus ordained no one. Moreover, he never counselled anyone not to be Jewish.
What Jesus did do was the prophetic work of the renewal of a society and a religious establishment that had become forgetful of the excluded ones through His call for the radically inclusive reign of God.
It is in the spirit of this prophetic work of Jesus that we must not only talk about women priests in the Roman Catholic Church, but welcome them! - Yours, etc.,
Meghan Sullivan, Philadelphia, USA.