If a priest must be male in order to represent Christ who was and is male, must he then be Jewish in order to represent Christ who was and is Jewish? My first aim is to clarify what I call the various elements or levels that go into or have gone into an explanation of the Church’s practice of not ordaining women. I am concerned here only with the reservation to men of the priestly or sacerdotal grades of the sacrament of order, namely the episcopate and the presbyterate (bishops and priests). I say this before going any further, because at one time ‘ordination’ had a very wide application, including to deaconesses, abbesses, empresses and so on. My discussion, however, will not even comment on the question of ordaining women to the diaconate, but is restricted to the priestly grades of order. My second aim is to ask how the relationships of Christ’s maleness and his Jewishness to the economy of salvation differ in such a way that though his priestly representative must needs be male he need not be a Jew. Thus I shall include here discussion of arguments for the restriction of the priestly grades to men only, particularly insofar as they might seem to imply that a priest must needs be not only male but also Jewish. I shall pursue my second aim against the background of the first, thus placing the question of maleness, Jewishness, Christ and the priesthood, in its wider theological-explanatory context. I shall begin my clarification of the various levels of explanation

The most famous book that talks to us of precisely “human” happiness, the proper happiness of man in so far as he is man in this world, is, no doubt, Aristotle’s Ethics. Here he tells us, as if looking into our own souls in our own time, that everything we do, all the particular, singular things in which our actions exist and which constitute the outlines of our lives, we do because we seek to be happy by the doing of these actions. This seeking to be happy in each particular act is what unites all the things that do exist in so far as they are touched by human minds and hands. All human beings reveal the same curious variety of longings in their origins. The world, in other words, is full of things that came to be because someone sought to be happy and did something to attain this purpose, albeit not always the right thing or the best thing..

Aristotle next explains to us that we can have differing ideas of that in which this happiness consists, but even here, the general diversity is not so great when we come to examine it. The great variations that seem at first sight evident in human searchings can be subsumed under four general headings. Some think that happiness is money, some pleasure, some honour or power, and still others think it consists in human contemplation of truth, of knowing the things that are. Happiness, Aristotle tells us; is an activity, it is an activity of our highest faculties on the highest objects