The May 2024 issue of Commonweal featured a symposium titled “Women and the Priesthood.” All four contributors to the symposium were Catholic women, and all four argued that the Catholic priesthood—historically and currently denied to women—was in fact where women belonged. Each of the four arguments was different, however, and they represented a fair survey of the most persuasive claims to be made by women’s-ordination advocates.

Jane Varner Malhotra, director of advancement communications at Georgetown University, is an activist in the Women’s Ordination Conference, now nearing its fiftieth year of existence. She is also the cofounder of the Washington Home Inclusive Monthly Mass (WHIMM), which organizes liturgies led by women Catholic priests ordained in sub-rosa ceremonies (there are said to be around two or three hundred of these underground clergywomen). Malhotra’s Commonweal argument rests on a notion of equity: that the Church can’t truly address the needs of all its members unless all its members—that is, both sexes—are able to preside at its altars. “As creators who have the potential to give birth, women are agents of the sacred, with unique experiences and perspectives that must be shared in order to know a fuller picture of the divine,” Malhotra writes.

Mary E. Hunt is a professional theologian with two master’s degrees and a doctorate in the field. She is cofounder and codirector of the forty-year-old Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual (WATER), which advocates “feminist theology,” although lately it has immersed itself in LGBTQ issues as well. Like Malhotra, Hunt expresses a belief that the Church’s current ban on women priests denies the faithful the unique contributions “of women and nonbinary people.” But Hunt also candidly admits that her own “preferred option” would be for the Church to jettison the ordained priesthood altogether and, presumably, let every baptized Catholic say Mass and administer the sacraments, “eliminating the clergy-lay split.” Women’s ordination would be a step in that direction, blurring the distinction between the two.

Like Hunt, Teresa Delgado possesses a doctorate in theology, and like Malhotra, she occupies a high administrative position at a Catholic university. She is dean of St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at St. John’s University in Queens. Her argument seems to be addressed mainly to her fellow academics, couched in language that few non-academics would understand. Its central concept is “colonization,” with a number of variants: “colonizing mindset,” “colonization of women’s bodies,” the Church as a “colonizing entity,” “our decolonizing challenge as Catholic women.” But Delgado never gets around to defining this term. It clearly has something to do with her identity as a Latina, but I’m half-Latina myself (Peruvian mother), and I fail to see its relation to the issue of women priests.

Alice McDermott is the only one of the four symposiasts who is neither in possession of an advanced theology degree nor on the payroll of a Catholic university. She has a completely lay career as a distinguished novelist and short-story writer. She draws on a host of personal recollections: the nuns at her parochial school who felt obliged to “bow and scrape” whenever the parish priests “deigned to visit our classroom”; the ho-ho-ho cardinal who told her with a wink, “It’s you women who really run the Church”; the female Catholic-school teachers who complained to her that the hierarchy had never informed them about priests in contact with their students who were already under suspicion of sexually abusing children. You don’t have to be a Catholic, just a woman with exposure to men at their irritating worst as well as their noble best, for those anecdotes of pompous mansplaining and “little lady” condescension to ring a bell. McDermott argues that such incidents of “ritual misogyny” on the part of male clerics would stop if “women were given full participation in the life of the Church.” She maintains that the all-male priesthood is an “outward sign” of “inner corruption” and “blindness.” In the Catholic Church under its current clerical regime, “to be female is to be the other, to be lesser,” McDermott writes.

How persuasive would these four arguments be to most Catholics in the pews? Delgado’s repeated references to “colonization” would no doubt resonate in graduate seminars, but that’s a very limited audience. Even her choice of the word “Latinx” indicates a certain tone-deafness when it comes to the world of town, not gown. A recent Gallup poll showed that only four percent of real-world Latinos and Latinas want to be called “Latinx,” and 40 percent of them dislike the word. Some Latinos contend that it’s an Anglo linguistic imposition—and thus a prime example of “colonization.”

Hunt’s vision—“eliminating the clergy-lay split”—has the virtue of getting rid of the sex-discrimination issue in a single stroke. But it would require such a radical reconfiguration of the Church’s ecclesial and liturgical structure as to make it unrecognizable. The Mass would presumably resemble a Sunday meeting of the Society of Friends, in which members, instead of feeling moved by the Spirit to speak, would feel moved by the Spirit to consecrate the Eucharist, hear confessions, lay on holy oils, and so forth. But in my experience, even the most progressive Catholics aren’t willing to sweepingly jettison their Church’s traditions. The desire for blessings of same-sex couples—by ordained Catholic priests, not random Catholic laypeople—evidenced in the Vatican’s controversial Fiducia supplicans document, is left-field support for the persistence of an atavistic Catholic longing, even among radical progressives, for a formally defined clergy.

By contrast, Malhotra’s and McDermott’s contributions to the symposium present attractive and plausible arguments centered around cores of truth. Women really are “agents of the sacred” by virtue of their birth-giving capacity, as Malhotra argues, with “unique experiences and perspectives” to bring to the life of the Church. And Catholic priests and prelates really can be obnoxious know-it-alls with unsightly male personality traits, as McDermott asserts. I admit to some sympathy for the winking cardinal she satirizes: women do “run the Church,” or at least run hefty segments of the liturgical and bureaucratic cultures of many parishes, where male lectors, cantors, altar servers, RCIA instructors, committee heads, parish-council heavies, and extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion are rare birds indeed. Still, anyone who romanticizes the pre–Vatican II parish needs to read J. F. Powers’s story “The Lord’s Day” for a surgical dissection of exactly what McDermott is talking about.

Furthermore, a solid majority of Catholics say they agree with Malhotra and McDermott. The most recent Pew Research Center survey on the issue, released in April 2024, reveals that a robust 64 percent—nearly two-thirds—of U.S. Catholics say they believe the Church should allow women to be priests. This percentage dips considerably among Catholics who attend Mass at least once a week. Among those, only 41 percent support admitting women to the priesthood, while 56 percent are opposed. Still, 41 percent is an impressive fraction.

Despite all this, the women’s-ordination movement has made only the most meager progress on the practical front: persuading very many Catholics, even progressive Catholics, to attend Masses and other liturgical rites celebrated by female Catholic priests. For example, Malhotra’s WHIMM (motto: “Be the change you want to see in the Catholic Church”) holds monthly “inclusive Masses” presided over by ordained women priests in private homes and public parks on Sunday mornings. The Masses draw “10 to 30 people,” according to the WHIMM website—in the Washington-Baltimore-Annapolis area that is home to 1.2 million Catholics.

The best-known of the female cleric–headed Catholic congregations is the Mary Magdalene Apostle Catholic Community in San Diego. Featured in the New Yorker and the New York Times, it was founded in 2005 by Elizabeth Jane Via, a since-retired deputy district attorney ordained on a boat floating in Lake Constance. Mary Magdalene Apostle boasts 150 members, and its Sunday Masses take place in a real church—a Lutheran church—but Via, now in her seventies and a bishop, has yet to find a successor-pastor who lasts long. In 2020 she ordained a young priest, Kori Pacyniak, who actually identifies not as a woman but as nonbinary. Pacyniak soon decamped to pursue a doctorate in religious studies at the University of California, Riverside, and Via is back as pastor. Judging from photos and videos on the Mary Magdalene Apostle website, the weekly congregation seems to be mostly about the same age as Via herself.

Now, you might say that it is unfair to expect a Catholic movement to thrive when it must operate illicitly and its leaders are automatically excommunicated, as has been the case with Catholic women priests and the male bishops who ordain them (whenever the identities of the latter come to light). As a journalist, I once looked into a group with nearly the same pariah status—including in some cases excommunication—as the women priests and their congregations, except that this group was at the opposite end of the Catholic ideological spectrum: Tridentine diehards meeting furtively on Sundays with their renegade priests in storefronts and abandoned Protestant churches back in the 1970s, when the old Latin Mass was entirely banned. Newspapers carried their tiny classified ads: “Real Latin Mass Here.” When Pope John Paul II issued his indult in 1984 permitting the old Mass to be said in limited venues, they started coming out of the woodwork. There were never very many of them in absolute terms, but there were a lot in relative terms. The nursing-home and Catholic-campus chapels where the old Mass was now permitted started to burst at the seams.

The issue of women priests among Catholics is something like the issue of same-sex marriage among the Japanese. There seems to be broad support in Japan, especially among young people, for allowing LGBTQ people to marry each other. Still, though a Japanese high court ruled in March that the country’s ban on such unions was unconstitutional, there seems to be little will in Japan to change the country’s socially conservative laws. A Western journalist reported that a Japanese friend had told him, “We care, but not that much.”

It’s safe to say that when it comes to women in the clergy, the vast majority of Catholics care, but not that much. And that is directly related to the fact that the vast majority of Catholics care about their faith, but not that much—or at least not enough to set foot inside a church very often. Only 28 percent of U.S. Catholics now attend Mass weekly, as the Church still requires them to do, according to Pew statistics. That’s down from 40 percent about a decade ago. Some Catholic progressives will quickly counter, “Well, if only women could preside at the altar...” They need look no further than the Episcopal Church, where 40 percent of priests are women, but both professed membership and average Sunday attendance have been in free-fall since the 1960s. I’m not saying that admitting women to the priesthood in 1977 caused the Episcopal Church to lose around 40 percent of its members (from 2.7 million to today’s 1.6 million), but the concession has done absolutely nothing to stanch the flow.

Just as the future belongs to those who show up, the future of Catholic culture belongs to those who show up at the parish churches where Catholic culture is made. To quote J. F. Powers (in Wheat That Springeth Green), the Church may now be “a mere remnant of herself”—what with parishes closing and consolidating right and left, and numbers of Catholic weddings and baptisms in decline—but “a priest had to get on with his job, such as it was.” And “such as it was” means recognizing that the majority of the shrinking numbers of Catholic faithful who regularly attend Mass and otherwise actively participate in Catholic life—the people who will actually produce the Catholic priests of the future—are, to put a fine point on it, trads. By “trads,” I don’t mean Latin-Mass fanatics. I mean Catholics who, whatever their liturgical preferences, view the Church as being in continuity with its own past, back to the time of Christ. They tend to view the practices and patterns that have developed in the Church over two millennia in a positive light as natural unfoldings, not as mistakes that demand radical correction in the twenty-first century. They’re the (predominantly younger) people who support such recently revived traditions as processions, Eucharistic adoration, and prayers to St. Michael, which many progressives find baffling, if not suspect.

But even the 41 percent of regular Mass-goers who think it’s only fair—why not?—to admit women to Holy Orders don’t seem too fazed by the Church’s refusal to do so. They like saying “Have a nice day, Father” to the pastor as they make their way out of the church, just as they like lighting candles and buying pretty First Communion dresses for their daughters. They care, but not that much. And the 56 percent adamantly opposed to women’s ordination care a lot.

This is the reality on the ground that advocates of women’s ordination face. Conservative Catholics tend to believe there are ontological differences between the sexes that progressive Catholics simply don’t recognize. When progressives pooh-pooh this conservative belief—“just because Jesus was a man, that doesn’t mean the priest has to be a man to act in persona Christi”—they face a wall of conservative incomprehension at a perceived failure to see the quintessentially masculine nature of Christ’s laying down his life for his bridal Church. When conservative Catholics read about women’s “unique experiences and perspectives” to bring to Catholic life, they might think not of the priesthood, but of Mother Cabrini or the recently beatified Wiktoria Ulma, a Polish farm wife martyred by the Nazis in 1944 for sheltering a Jewish family. They might also think that the most effective way to get rid of male clerical condescension isn’t to create female clerics but for male clerics to quit condescending. The situation is further complicated by the fact that some women’s-ordination advocates have aligned themselves with extraneous causes such as abortion access—which is red meat to Catholic conservatives.

There is plenty of passion on the women’s-ordination side, as evidenced by the Commonweal symposium. But it’s not in the grassroots. It’s among the lucky people who work at universities, diocesan offices, nonprofits. Those are major voices. But they don’t count where it counts. They are not such as it was. All this could change, of course. The Catholic Church is in a state of operational chaos right now, and there could be an about-face.

On May 20, 2024, not long after the Commonweal symposium went to press, Pope Francis gave an interview with CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell, who asked whether a Catholic girl would ever have the opportunity to be ordained as a deacon, a stepping stone to the priesthood that includes preaching and administering some sacraments. Francis answered with an emphatic “No.” This was consistent with earlier statements by Francis, who is otherwise a repository of progressive hopes for radical changes in Catholic theology and ecclesiology. In October 2023, a published interview had emerged quoting Francis as declaring, “Holy Orders is reserved for men.”

Still, Francis has repeatedly ordered studies of the possibility of female deacons, possibly in non-ordained ministerial positions that would keep ordination-advocates’ hopes up by creating a title—“deacon”—that could later be bolstered by liturgical duties. The latest reconsideration of this question seems to be a component of a post–Synod on Synodality “study group” on women’s roles in the Church that Francis has commissioned. In what was perhaps a slip of the tongue—but perhaps not—Cardinal Mario Grech, head of the Vatican’s secretariat for the Synod, told the media in July 2024 that Francis had asked the study group to look into the possibility that women could be ordained to the “priesthood” (this was the word he used, according to media accounts). So perhaps the question isn’t closed after all. What’s clear is that, for now at least, few women sitting in the pews seem to care that much.