Question If I'm an atheist, does it make sense to criticize the Catholic church for practices such as the exclusion of female priests? Suppose that a Catholic authority replies to such criticism by saying that there is strong Biblical evidence to show that priests must be male. Since I am an atheist, I may be unpersuaded by this argument, and still insist that the church would be more just if it gave women equal status with men. But then, if I reject this Biblical argument it seems that I may as well reject Catholicism itself. In other words, I think there is something strange in the suggestion that Catholics should improve their religious practice by incorporating certain progressive reforms. The justification of these reforms often seems arise of a view that would invalidate, not just the allegedly objectionable practices at issue, but religion altogether. Practices such as the exclusion of female priests may strike me as irrational, but then why should I care if I think that Catholicism quite generally is irrational to begin with? Put differently, it seems that if we accept that it is reasonable for others to practice Catholicism, we then have no grounds to object to particular aspects of their practice. We can't simply pick and choose for them.

Accepted:
August 1, 2013

Comments

An interesting question. I think the answer is yes: there's a way to offer the sort of criticism you have in mind. It would be to argue that by Catholicism's own lights, the reasons for excluding women from the priesthood aren't satisfactory. Catholicism isn't just a closed system with no canons of evidence and argument. Indeed, Catholicism presents theological arguments for its view that only men can be priests, and those arguments are open to examination and scrutiny.

Another way to put it: not all Catholics agree that women should be excluded from the priesthood. They think that the internal arguments for a male-only priesthood are weak. Whether they're right or wrong about this, their view isn't incoherent.

Of course, this is just an example of a larger point. It's often possible to criticize a view whose larger presuppositions one rejects by pointing out that the view doesn't do well by its own standards.

In the example at hand, there are things one would want to take into account in making the case you want to make. It wouldn't be enough to argue that having female priests would be "progressive" or good for women or society. The Catholic view is that the priesthood is a sacrament, and that it was ordained by God that priests must be male. On the Catholic view, priesthood has an "ontological" component, and one can no more simply decide to make women priests than one can decide to make whales fish. However, that doesn't close the case. The considerations that Anglicans were moved by and deciding that women can be priests are relevant, for example. What many Anglicans decided is that the very sorts of arguments Catholicism relies on for excluding women from the priesthood are defective as theology and as Biblical interpretation. At least some Catholics would agree.

In any case, the point isn't who's right here; the point is that insofar as an institution or tradition offers reasons for what it believes, those reasons are subject to evaluation on grounds of coherence and consistency -- even by people from outside the tradition.

A final note: this doesn't preclude the possibility of a more radical critique. One could argue that even if Catholicism's position on the priesthood is internally consistent, it's flawed on more general grounds. However, I took your question to be more narrowly focused.

One needn't accept Catholicism in order to argue, legitimately, that the reasons given for a specific Catholic practice, such as the male-only priesthood, aren't persuasive even granting the rest of Catholic theology. For example, if Catholic theology gives a biblical justification for the male-only priesthood, it's open to Catholics and non-Catholics alike to examine the justification to see how cogent it really is: even granting the truth of the Bible passages being used to justify the exclusion of women priests, do those passages really justify the exclusion, or have they been interpreted in a tortured or tendentious way? Is there another interpretation of the passages, an interpretation just as good as the traditional one, that doesn't justify the exclusion? I think anyone, Catholic or not, can legitimately ask those questions.