This month the Southern Baptist Convention voted to advance a constitutional amendment tightening its ban on women — now reaching beyond the office of pastor to bar women from preaching to the congregation. Rather than meet that narrow reading of a few Pauline verses head-on, this piece makes the affirmative case: that the first witnesses of the Resurrection were women, and that even Hans Urs von Balthasar — a staunch defender of reserving the Roman Catholic priesthood to men — conceded that Mary is “Queen of the Apostles,” possessing “other and greater powers” than the ordained offices themselves.¹ Balthasar took that as proof women had no need of ordination. I take it as proof of the opposite: if Mary already stands above those offices, there is no coherent reason she — or any woman — cannot hold them.
¹: Hans Urs von Balthasar, New Elucidations (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986); the phrase is quoted approvingly by John Paul II in his Address to the College of Cardinals and the Roman Curia, December 22, 1987. [Verify the exact page in New Elucidations before publishing — quotation and work confirmed, pagination not.]
