Male and female were created in God’s image and likeness, equal yet different. It is the “equal yet different” which necessitates the female embodiment in ecclesial leadership and theology. Jesus was quite aware of this, and so was the early church. Jesus, in his bodily maleness, radically assumed the feminine bodily gifts of giving birt

This is part of a longer discourse from the Prairie Messenger , an article to make us think by Marie-Louise Ternier Gommes

Male and female were created in God’s image and likeness, equal yet different. It is the “equal yet different” which necessitates the female embodiment in ecclesial leadership and theology. Jesus was quite aware of this, and so was the early church. Jesus, in his bodily maleness, radically assumed the feminine bodily gifts of giving birth, both in the way he lived and in the way he died. Jesus revealed in his total personhood that the capacity of women’s bodies to bear, deliver and nourish new life belong to God’s very nature. If this were not so, why else would the Son of God choose to take human form in a woman’s womb? Why else would Jesus break social and religious barriers by carrying on a profoundly theological discussion with a Samaritan woman and reveal his true identity to her, something that greatly unsettled his male disciples? Why else would the risen Jesus commission a woman, Mary Magdalene, as the first apostle to spread the Good News of his resurrection? Why else does the apostle Paul praise women disciples as leaders in their house churches? Why else does St. Paul stress so frequently in his letters that we are “a new creation in Christ” and that “everything old has passed away”? If this means nothing, then why baptize women “in Christ” at all?
Something tragic has happened in our 2,000-year history. Female leadership in the early church lost its prominence once worship moved from the private to the public sphere, now suffering from historical amnesia. The current ecclesial gender imbalance, in which women’s ways of knowing, understanding and witnessing have been relegated to the margins of ecclesial vision or are primarily perceived through male eyes, seals off a rich and much-needed resource for theology, spirituality and liturgy. Women’s fundamental human experience and her ways of knowing and living are seldom consulted in the church, let alone reflected in official church statements. Even in today’s time of ecclesial crisis and decline, women’s ways of mediating, perceiving and resolving remain largely untapped at higher levels of church governance. And so, church leaders stumble through mea culpas and feeble attempts to fix and to re-energize the spirit of the Gospel, wondering why it is not working. In the meantime the spiritual health of both men and women continues to suffer from breathing with only one gender-lung.
The Lineamenta (preparatory document) for the 2012 Synod on New Evangelization urges the church to take a hard look at its own means of proclaiming the Gospel, asking how to tap into the religious experiences of especially those Catholics who no longer feel at home in our faith family. This invitation to ecclesial self-examination could offer a prime opportunity to re-evaluate the church’s relationship to its own women and to listen deeply to their ecclesial pain.
The bIood and water flowing from every woman commingles with the blood and water flowing from Jesus on the cross in one great act of birthing a new world, recalled vividly in every eucharist when water is mixed with the wine/blood of our Lord. Jesus was flesh of Mary’s flesh and blood of her blood, having grown in her womb for nine months; as his Blessed Mother, at the Lord’s crucifixion it was equally Mary’s flesh that was tortured and her blood that was spilt for our salvation.
St. Thomas Aquinas said, “What has not been assumed, has not been redeemed.” Every woman knows intimately, even if she is not a biological mother, her God-given vocation to transform ordinary food and drink into the body and blood of a new human being. In every conception and birth God’s great incarnational and eucharistic work is revealed in and through a woman.
Why then is it considered heretical to claim that God could well call a woman to stand at the altar and act in persona Christi — my Body, my Blood? And if God indeed calls her, how is she to respond? If, and only if, it is not God’s will (all other criteria and claims are subject to this one) that women serve as priests, then how can the church’s bishops open wide the tap of wisdom and gifts in half of God’s image and likeness? For the sake of the Gospel, the need for the new evangelization, the spiritual wholeness of all God’s people and the overall future of the church, we have little choice but to engage such questions.