Pope Benedict recommends radical obedience for his priests. That would be obedience to Benedict, naturally. From his recent homily:
In his homily, Benedict made clear that reforms cannot go against Church doctrine. He singled out “a group of priests from a European country” who had recently “issued a summons to disobedience.”Such fun and games, and so many ways of playing those. For example, how do we know that there were no women among the apostles? Much information was lost during the power struggles of the early Christian church, and much also depends on how one defines "an apostle."
They had done this to the point of disregarding church teaching and encouraging “women’s ordination, for which Blessed Pope John Paul II stated irrevocably that the Church has received no authority from the Lord,” Benedict said.
In 1994, John Paul issued an apostolic letter saying that that the Church “has no authority whatsoever” to ordain women, citing among its reasons that the apostles of Jesus Christ were all men.
But in any case, the basis for ordaining priests appears to be a metaphor, having to do with the apostles of Jesus Christ. Why can this metaphor be stretched in some directions and not in others? Now men of all ethnic groups and races can become priests and their numbers vastly exceed the presumed number of the original apostles. Yet women's priesthood is "irrevocably" out.