“If [Henrik] Ibsen was a feminist, then I am a bishop,” James Joyce quipped in regard to what some contended were the social messages of Henrik Ibsen plays like A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler. I wonder what Joyce might say today about the Catholics (bishops and the pope among them) attempting to strike feminist positions on the role of women in the Church as the second assembly of the Synod gets underway.
The Church’s official teaching on women is something that keeps Catholicism stuck in what John O’Malley, SJ, called “the long nineteenth century.” The specific matter of women in the diaconate has been removed from the agenda of the Synod in Rome this month and is being handled by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. But it’s hard to imagine the issue of the role of women and ministry won’t be at the center of synodal discernment the next few weeks, judging at least from articles appearing in the October 2024 issue of Donne Chiesa Mondo, the supplement to the official newspaper of the Vatican, L’Osservatore Romano.
The Church arrives at the Synod seemingly ready to temper the expectations of many Catholic women by maintaining a “secretarial reshuffle” rather than offering an actual synodal reform—in other words, recommitting to appointing women to high-profile positions in Vatican offices. Given Pope Francis’s criticism of the administrative technocracy, this would be paradoxical, even if it could be justified as a necessary step. But it’s not a solution, and it could even become a dangerous and illusory substitute. As Phyllis Zagano said in her recent Jones Lecture at Fordham University: “‘Management’ is open to women. ‘Ministry’ is not.” Commenting on the interview Francis gave to America in November 2022, Zagano continued:
So there are three principles, two theological and one administrative. To sum up [Francis’s] belief, the "Petrine principle" covers ministry and the "Marian principle" presents the church as "spouse," and these two so-called "theological principles" are complemented by the "administrative principle" to which women are suited.
Yet Francis’s Synod is also an opportunity to turn the page on the “administrative-managerial” feminism that has brought a number of women to Vatican, diocesan, curia, and bishops’ conferences offices. For almost a century (and especially at Vatican II), the Church has focused on ecclesiology about what the Church is, but Catholicism still hasn’t found itself in regard to women. Consequently, too many women in the Western world have found that Catholicism is not for them. The evidence is there in the loss of entire generations of Catholic women in many countries. It’s hard to imagine the future of the Church in Europe and the West if this continues. Talk to women in parish settings and female students in the classroom; talk even to religious sisters from Asia and Africa. Many women of faith, even those who do not want to make a social-justice or human-rights argument, speak of being part of the Catholic Church with the quiet resignation of nineteenth century–novel heroines who know they have to marry for the sake of the family’s social and economic status. As long as the house stands…
When it comes to the role of women in leadership, the gap isn’t just between the Church and modern society. There’s an enormous gap within the Church itself—between official teaching and theology, and between the legal and institutional structure on one side and lived Catholicism on the other (especially in those churches that are growing). This is not one of those cases in which academic theology takes it upon itself to teach the magisterium. It’s the experience of the people of God that Francis so often talks about. In many places around the world, women keep the Church going in ways that the institutional Church knows de facto, because it needs their ministry, but that Rome does not want to know officially. The widespread practice of bringing priests from the global South and elsewhere to Western European and U.S. churches not only acknowledges denial of the possibility of women in ministry, but also entails an “extractive,” consumerist approach that damages local churches in other parts of the world. It’s one of the dark sides of the globalization of Catholicism.
The institutional Church finds itself at the Synod in a situation of uncertainty, but also of inevitability—there’s a feeling that something will have to be done about the role of women. The temptation is to say, once again, “not yet.” But unless you’re under the illusion that the “masculine religious revival” in America will finally replenish the seminaries and then the priesthood, it’s not something that can be postponed to the next pope, the next Vatican council, or the next century.
Major decisions, such as those on women and ministry, cannot be taken by a Synod, which in its current form is an advisory body to the pope. But the theological preparation for the second assembly of the Synod suggests some possible directions for the Church. As Italian theologian Serena Noceti recently pointed out in Donne Chiesa Mondo:
The vision outlined in the second Instrumentum Laboris [2024] represents a significant stage of maturation, precisely because of the anthropological and ecclesiological model it assumes on this theme ("Brothers and sisters in Christ: a renewed reciprocity"). It does not insist so much on the Genesis narratives, but on the contribution of women in the Church, starting from their condition as disciples of Jesus and announcers of the resurrection.”
The IL seems to move from complementarity to reciprocity between men and women, away from a binary framework that has contributed to polarization and conflict. As San Diego Cardinal Robert McElroy said courageously, almost two years ago:
There are calls for eliminating rules and arbitrary actions that preclude women from many roles of ministry, administration and pastoral leadership, as well as for admitting women to the permanent diaconate and ordaining women to the priesthood. One productive pathway for the church’s response to these fruits of the synodal dialogues would be to adopt the stance that we should admit, invite and actively engage women in every element of the life of the church that is not doctrinally precluded.
It is well known that the diaconate for women is not and has never been doctrinally precluded. And there’s a certain “doctrinally” Catholic vision of women that is often rooted in bourgeois prejudices and overlain with the thinnest patina of Gospel. Additionally, a discussion on the female diaconate that is based exclusively on the existence or not of historical precedents betrays the risk of instrumentalization and misunderstanding of the past as tradition. We must ask ourselves what the Church expects from the study of history. If it wants to find in the past a model to imitate or replicate, we are dangerously off-track—and not just for the diaconate, but also for the priesthood and the episcopate.
In his September 28 speech at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Koekelberg in Brussels, Pope Francis said:
The synodal process must be a return to the Gospel; it must not have among its priorities some ‘fashionable’ reform, but ask: how can we bring the Gospel to a society that no longer listens to it or has distanced itself from the faith? Let us all ask ourselves this question.
The crisis of our lives in the West, Francis continued, requires “an ecclesial conversion” so that “the habits, the models, the languages of our life are truly at the service of evangelization.” The problem for the Church today is less with tradition; that may be a problem for theology. The problem for the Church is evangelization. The Synod can bring about a more evangelizing Church if it foments an inclusive Catholicism of women in ministry.
To many Catholics today—not just women—it is obvious that evangelization and a return to the Gospel of Jesus Christ also means recognizing that the role of women in the Church today is not faithful to the Gospel. This moment of discernment is hugely important for women—which means it’s also vital for the whole Church.
