“wouldn’t it be possible for a woman to also have Christ be the active source of the power to consecrate Communion?”
Well, the teaching authority of the Church is what safeguards the understanding of the Eucharist as really and substantially the Son of God, as well as other important truths: that the priest has the power to consecrate, because he is the successor of the Apostles, who received that power directly from Christ, and even that Jesus was fully God and fully man. All of these truths are needed to even make sense of the notion you just brought up. If you drop even one of those truths, you may be using the same words, but you are no longer proposing the same thing. And if one accepts the teaching of the Church on these other theological points, why not accept the teaching that women cannot be priests?
The Son of God, an excellent teacher, yes, all these things. And indeed, other faiths bring spiritual truths to us, even if only the simplest truth that humans are flawed and owe obedience or love to a greater being or law. But one of the things that Christ, and his Apostles who received their teaching directly from him, taught was that Christ’s Incarnation was a definitive moment in history, that of Truth Himself coming down to earth and taking an earthly form. As humans we have really only two possible responses to this: deny that he was Truth Himself, and perhaps learn from him or just ignore him; or, believe that he was Truth, and Lord, and that therefore every spiritual yearning of man (even the ones also partly fulfilled by pagan faiths) is fulfilled in him. We all have our own paths, and God meets us exactly where we are – but he loves us so much that he wants all of our paths to end with Him. And, _to exactly this end_, he makes his marks through human history, some lesser marks, and some greater marks, but none so great as the Life and Death of his Son, which was the perfect sacrifice for us. All of the lesser marks (some of them hidden within other faiths) were given to us to point us to the definitive mark of Christ. I hope this does not sound like a dry sermon – I’m writing from my heart.
Good day!