From the very beginning of his papacy, Pope Francis has sent the message that women matter as much as men in the life of the church. During a plane interview in November 2022—his favoured setting for breaking free from the scripted confines of the Vatican—he stated a “society that does not give women the same rights as men will become impoverished.”
But to better appreciate Francis’s understanding of women and their role in the church, we first need to step back and consider the role of the laity in the church. Women and men who are not clerics (deacons, priests, and bishops) constitute the laity and are a formidable majority of the global membership. The problem is that only half of the laity feel that they are valued for something beyond their baptism. For women, it is largely their motherhood and devotionalism that seem to earn the church’s respect, leading to the perception that, at least at ground level, they are second-class citizens in the church.
Francis knows that allowing females to serve on the altar, read at Mass, and serve in canonical tribunals is insufficient: more needs to be done, and therein lies the trap. From the outset of his papacy, Francis has been clear that the teaching of his predecessors—Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI—on the exclusion of women from the priesthood remains in force. He cannot do otherwise. In an airplane interview returning to Rome from a World Youth Day event in 2013, he was adamant about respecting the role of women, at the same time insisting that church teaching on women and priesthood is not negotiable: “On the ordination of women as priests, that door is closed.”
At the heart of the debate for the ordination of women are cultural and theological concerns that can’t be reduced to a simple formula of human rights and equity. These ordinations would constitute a dogmatic shift. Approving such ordinations would rupture the unity of the Catholic Church, and no pope is going there, Francis included.
Popes have been fretting about this question since the 1970s, when the push for greater involvement of women in ministry began to be heard in the Vatican. Biblical, historical, and theological scholars were raising issues around women in the early church that were previously unexplored. And other Christian denominations—the Anglican Church specifically—were wrestling with the challenge of female ordination, forcing Rome to react.
And react it did. Pope Paul VI instructed the Pontifical Biblical Commission to study the question. The commission concluded that there may be reasons for the continued inadmissibility of women to the presbyterate but such a justification cannot be grounded in scripture. Not the answer Paul was looking for. One of the members of that commission, the Canadian Jesuit biblical scholar David Stanley, told me that the unanimity of the commission shook the pope. When Pope Paul moved ahead with the publication of a formal document closing discussion on the matter, Stanley resigned from the commission.
That formal document, Inter Insigniores, issued on January 27, 1977, left little uncertainty about the church’s definitive thinking: NO. This Declaration on the Question of Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood affirmed that the “Catholic Church has never felt that priestly or episcopal ordination can be validly conferred on women” and proceeded to make the case on the basis of several considerations: the priest acts in persona Christi, and Jesus was male; Jesus did not call women to be apostles; the church’s practice has been secured by a constant tradition in both the East and the West. The document includes, not without sympathy for those who will be disappointed by its judgment, that women who express a desire for the ministerial priesthood are doubtless motivated by the desire to serve Christ and the church.
It is not surprising that, at a time when women are becoming more aware of the discrimination to which they have been subjected, they should desire the ministerial priesthood itself. But, for the Church, the priesthood does not form part of the rights of the individual. It is of a higher order.
If the pope and his doctrinal officials thought this would resolve the matter, they were quickly enlightened otherwise. John Paul II, especially in his 1994 Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, sought again to close down all debate on the matter as it was futile, contra-ecclesial, and divisive: “I declare that Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”
For John Paul II, because the matter “pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself” and is not a disciplinary or legal issue, the church’s inability to ordain women to the priesthood is indisputable. Except, for many in the church, it was not, and whatever flames the pope intended to douse were persistent and are still fiercely aglow. Hence, Francis’s dilemma. Church authorities have great difficulty advancing an argument that simply stands the test of enduring credibility. The Vatican, prior to issuing Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, tried to enlist prominent prelates to take a stand that would support the church’s unalterable position and, in doing so, advance some new and convincing argumentation.
One of the prelates approached was Gerald Emmett Cardinal Carter of Toronto, a powerful churchman, much respected in the corridors of corporate and political power, feared if not loathed by Catholic dissidents, influential in the Vatican especially in matters of finance, capable of dominating the Canadian national hierarchy by sheer dint of his outsized personality. Rome saw him as the right man for the job of selling the church’s increasingly unpopular position.
And so, in 1983, Do This in Memory of Me: A Pastoral Letter upon the Sacrament of Priestly Orders was issued by the cardinal’s office, and controversy erupted. This pastoral letter repeats the position of every pope who has spoken on the subject. Theologians disparaged its arguments, feminist activists lamented its tired repetition of old nostrums, and other Canadian bishops looked for cover.
Carter strenuously defended his work through interviews, sermons, and public addresses. Still, the issue did not go away. Instead, it intensified. Roman Catholic women were ordained, and Rome declared their ordinations illicit and invalid and excommunicated both the women priests and those who took part in the ceremonies. Debates in the academy and in learned publications refused to be silenced. Women organized to champion causes that caused Rome more than a little discomfiture. Religious orders of women balked at Roman efforts to suppress free discussion. Sympathetic bishops and priests who defied the Vatican were censored and disciplined.
This is the state of the art that Francis inherited. Although many Catholic women reconfigured their organizations and goals to shift away from ordination as their sine qua non to broader issues of women’s equality in the Catholic Church as a consequence of Rome’s intractability, the issue of ordination centred on the potentially achievable goal of women as deacons rather than the priests. In addition, global awareness of other pressing issues for Catholic women was in the ascendant—human trafficking, domestic violence, migrant women and children—and, as a consequence, strictly ad intra ecclesial issues waned.
But did not disappear.
While the scholars are studying women as deacons, and commissions are formed seemingly ad infinitum, Francis has moved decisively on the empowering of women in the highest echelons, with his Predicate Evangelium (Preach the Gospel), an apostolic letter promulgated in 2022. This document radically reconceives, renames, and restructures the Vatican Curia, allowing laywomen and laymen to exercise leadership positions in the various departments where they would have served at only a secretarial or consultancy level, if at all. With this structural innovation, Francis has moved the laity to the very centre of power.
This may not be the solution people want. Francis is convinced that women can bring to the church gifts that do not require clerical status, that the struggle to access holy orders is misconceived as the varied ministries exercised by women are unique to them and do not require ordination oils. In an interview with America in 2022, Francis insisted that the fact that women cannot “enter into the ministerial life is not a deprivation.”
International reaction was swift and merciless. Former president of Ireland Mary McAleese, a distinguished civil jurist and canon lawyer, dismissed Francis’s comments as “misogynistic drivel,” and Tina Beattie of England, one of the leading feminist Catholic theologians in the world, lambasted the pontiff for getting it persistently wrong: “If half the human race made in the image and likeness of God is waiting for the other half to develop a theology to explain its existence, then all we have is chaff.”
Francis seems deadlocked in his efforts to build bridges of understanding, stymied by his predecessors, derided by his conservative adversaries for selling out Catholic priestly identity, and reprimanded by his legions of supporters who see his position on women as irredeemably traditionalist. But Francis also believes he understands what is at stake. Change, but not now.
First of all, the soil must be skillfully tilled. Although Francis shares with many prelates the realization that simply repeating the prohibition against the ordination of women to the priesthood is ultimately ineffective, he cannot change the church’s teaching by papal fiat. So he does what he can: appoint women to positions of senior responsibility in Vatican governance, augment the pool of first-order specialists with an enhanced female presence—including economists of high calibre, like Mariana Mazzucato of University College, London, and Kate Raworth of Oxford—and position women in key decision-making operations that are personally close to his heart. The appointment of French religious sister Nathalie Becquart as a co-undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops’ office was a major breakthrough.
Francis supports these moves with the understanding that it will be one further nail into the coffin of clericalism:
. . . because of clericalism, which is a corruption of the priesthood, many people wrongly believe that church leadership is exclusively male. But if you go to any diocese in the world you’ll see women running departments, schools, hospitals, and many other organizations and programmes; in some areas, you’ll find many more women than men as leaders . . . To say that they aren’t true leaders because they aren’t ordained is clericalist and disrespectful.
Francis would probably agree with actor Emma Thompson, who, when speaking of female heroism to theatre critic John Lahr, commented that “women will look around and often be aware of what others need. They have to be like that because no one else will fucking do it. Women look after everyone endlessly—and without them there would be nothing.”
Francis would concur—sans the expletive—and although debates continue to rage fiercely around gender gifts, nature-versus-nurture roles in the socialization of females, etc., the Argentine pope does his bit to move beyond stereotypes when enabling women to rise above the glass duomo, as it were, but clerical casteism remains a near insuperable obstacle.
Priesthood shorn of clericalism is a high priority for Francis, and it is connected to his thinking around the inclusion of women in the sacrament of orders. What for many may appear as a cynically calculated delay reveals, upon close inspection, the pope’s thinking around the creative contraries that define the human project: listening, genuine dialogue, patience, earnest respect for the position of competing views.
Francis, it’s true, has repeated the position of previous popes on the issue, but by leaving open the role of free and transparent speech in Church governance and decision making, he creates an environment wherein the collision of intellects can move truth forward. Not all is foreclosed. A strategy of incrementalism ensures that new ideas are not expunged but given airtime, even if that means their potential for polarizing moves them to peripheral rather than central status.
The words of war correspondent Martha Gellhorn can serve as a cautionary warning for Francis and his church: “a wonderful New Year’s resolution for the men who run the world: get to know the people who live in it.” The women who live in the Catholic Church are by every measure the largest and most productive component of its life and outreach; the men who run the church must get to know them in ways that don’t reduce them to a holy mystery in need of their own justificatory theology, to an abstraction rather than an encounter, to a principle rather than a reality.
Francis’s strategy is to purge the abstraction and embrace the reality. He is halfway there.
Excerpted from The Jesuit Disruptor: A Personal Portrait of Pope Francis by Michael W. Higgins, 2024, published by House of Anansi. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.
