The ministry of women and the unity of the Church

Do not publish! (he wants this to go in print if possible RG)

Imagine this moment:

White smoke had risen over the Sistine Chapel an hour ago. Now the Cardinal Deacon steps out on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica. In the traditional (but now altered) formula, he declares, “Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum! Habemus Papam: Eminentissimam ac Reverendissimam Dominam Teresa Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem Delgado, qui sibi nomen imposuit Maria Magdalena!”

That is, “I have great, joyful news for you! We have a Pope: the very Eminent and Reverend Lady and Cardinal of the holy Roman Church, Teresa Delgado, who has taken the name Maria Magdalena.” Then the first woman to be elected Bishop of Rome emerges to pray with and bless the cheering people.

Is such a dramatic, unprecedented event possible? History is far from over and, as Brendan McGrath, OSB, the pioneer Catholic biblical scholar, used to say, “What if we are the early Christians?” We may still have much to learn, as Vatican II’s Constitution on Divine Revelation, 8, affirms: “ . . there is a growth in understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down.”

Will that growth in understanding open the way for a woman to become Pope? Until and unless it does, the Roman Catholic Church will stand in the way of Christian unity.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus prays “that they may all be one, as You, Father, in me and I in you, may they be one in us, that the world may know that you have sent me.” (John 17. 21-22) At Vatican II, the Church embraced the cause of Christian unity that had flourished among Protestants for decades. The Constitution on the Church makes it clear that a Christianity divided into separate churches cannot fully be the Church that is the “sign and instrument” of union with God and of the unity of all humanity. Outsiders may even think that Jesus alienates people from one another when they see the divisions among Christians, as Pope St. John Paul II said.

Vatican II also recognised that its new ecumenical commitment was costly. The Church had to undertake the internal reforms necessary for unity, according to the Decree on Ecumenism, 4: Catholics’ “primary duty is to make an honest and careful appraisal of whatever needs to be renewed and achieved in the Catholic household itself.”

One of the most difficult but necessary reforms is the admission of women to all the ordained ministries of the Church. As long as women cannot serve as deacons, priests, and bishops, the Church undercuts its own ecumenical efforts. Women serve as ordained ministers in other churches because those churches have determined that fidelity to the Gospel demands it. These Christians cannot be required to abandon their time-tested and faith-based convictions as the price of unity. Nor can the Catholic Church demand that they do so, because its own teaching about the impossibility of ordaining women is fallible and theologically problematic. The teaching could be revoked, although certainly with great difficulty,

In November 2016, as he was flying back from Sweden to Rome, a reporter asked Pope Francis, “Is it realistic to think that there might be women priests also in the Catholic church in the next few decades?”

Francis had just embraced and prayed with Archbishop Antje Jackelen, the woman who was the Lutheran Primate of the Church of Sweden. Pictures of their historic encounter were beamed all over the world. Francis surely knew that this question was coming. Reporters had asked him about women priests before.

“On the ordination of women in the Catholic Church, the last word is clear,” Francis replied. “It was given by St. John Paul II [in his apostolic letter of 1994, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis] and this remains.”

The reporter pressed Francis. “But really forever? Never?” 

“If we read carefully the declaration made by St. John Paul II, it goes in that direction.”

So it appeared that Francis had ruled out the ordination of women for once and for all. “Pope Francis has said he thinks the Roman Catholic church’s ban on priestly ordination for women will continue forever . . . ,” said the National Catholic Reporter. “The Roman Catholic Church’s teaching that women cannot be ordained as priests is likely to last forever, Pope Francis said . . . ,” according to the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and PBS all understood him the same way.

Yet Francis would have known that he had to tread carefully. If he contradicted his predecessor by saying that the issue of women priests is still open, he would ignite a firestorm of opposition, but saying that the issue is closed forever would be simply untrue. Debate over the ordination of women has simmered within the Church for nearly fifty years, even though Popes Paul VI, John Paul II, and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger clearly wanted to squelch it.

In the mid-1970s, more and more Christian communities and churches were welcoming women into their official ministries. This development created a massive problem for the Catholic Church. One of the main goals of Vatican II was to promote the full visible unity of the Church of Christ. Since then, this effort had been a high priority. Yet, if the Church held that it could never ordain women, what realistic hope for Christian unity could there be? The divisions within Christianity could never be fully healed as long as churches did not recognise the legitimacy of each other’s pastors. So the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) decided to explain the reasons for the Church’s position in its 1977 declaration, Inter Insigniore (II).

II was not convincing and discussion of the question continued. In 1994, then, St. John Paul II noted that  “ . . .at the present time in some places [the Church’s teaching] is nonetheless considered still open to debate . . .” and tried to close down the debate in his apostolic letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (OS): “I declare that the 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.” Since OS relied substantially on the arguments as II had used earlier, it did not change the state of the question.

The following year, however, the CDF got theologians’ attention with a Responsum ad dubium (Answer to a question) about the authoritative status of the pope’s declaration. According to the CDF, OS’s teaching was infallible. This claim stunned and alarmed theologians. According to the Code of Canon Law, approved by St. John Paul II himself, “No doctrine is understood to be infallibly defined unless it is clearly established as such”. But years of discussion and debate had shown that the teaching of OS clearly was not “established as such.”

Like II, the Responsum also undermined the Church’s ecumenical efforts. Vatican II had stressed the importance of bringing all Christians together into a full and visible unity. St. John Paul II had insisted on this, too. Just months before the 1995 Responsum appeared, he issued his own encyclical on ecumenism, Ut unum sint [That They May Be One]. Unity among Christians was imperative, he said, because divisions among Christians seriously harmed the credibility of the Gospel. But how could those divisions be fully overcome if “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women”? He did not address this question.

The leadership of the Catholic Theological Society of America then decided that it was the Society’s responsibility to examine the CDF’s claim that “This teaching requires definitive assent, since, founded on the written Word of God, and from the beginning constantly preserved and applied in the Tradition of the Church, it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium [i.e., the authoritative teaching office].”

A specially appointed task force presented its findings to the CTSA in June 1996. A year of reflection ensued, after which the Society overwhelmingly endorsed the task force’s conclusion: among theologians and in the Church as a whole, there was serious and widespread disagreement over women’s ordination. Therefore, further study, discussion, and prayer were necessary.

So we must read Francis’s words as carefully as he chose them. While OS is “the last word” and it “remains” as the Church’s teaching, “last” does not always mean “final.” It can also mean “most recent.” St, John Paul II’s teaching surely “remains” – at least for the time being. While it may go in the direction of “forever” (clearly his intention), Francis simply described OS and the resulting status quo.

Because the unity of all Christians makes Jesus Christ and his gospel more credible, attractive, and effective; because ecumenical efforts require Catholics to remove any obstacle that unnecessarily creates divisions between their Church and other churches; and because the Church’s current teaching on ordaining women is one such obstacle, the 2023-2024 Synod on Synodality is a crisis moment for the cause of Christian unity.

The Instrumentum Laboris (IL) or “working paper” for the October 2023 session of the Synod built upon reports drawn from thousands of grassroots discussions throughout the worldwide Church. Echoing these texts and Pope Francis himself, the IL properly links ecumenism and synodality. A more participatory Church will appeal to our fellow Christians, while their experience of synodality can teach us how to “do synod” more effectively. This is one of the gifts of the ecumenical gift exchange, an instance of “receptive ecumenism.” We might also learn how women can be welcomed into ordained ministry with less of the turmoil that engulfed other churches when they did so.

Yet the IL does not consider this possibility. It does not connect ecumenism to the issue of women’s ordination. It says nothing about ordaining women as priests and bishops. IL frames future ministries of women in terms of reforming Church structures and procedures but offers no proposals for reconsidering the current problematic teaching itself.

The Synthesis Report on the Synod of Bishops’ first session (October 4-29, 2023) is similarly disappointing. It never engages the question of ordaining women to the priesthood or episcopate. It notes that “Different positions have been expressed regarding women’s access to diaconal ministry”, but it also suggests that conflicts would increase if women’s access to priesthood and episcopacy were on the table.

Yet the Synthesis added some important words to that “last word . . .  given by St. John Paul II.” It affirms that Baptism makes “all Christians participate in the sensus fidei and for this reason they should be listened to carefully, regardless of their tradition . . . “ (7, b) Such listening can lead to that “exchange of gifts” by which Christians of different traditions learn from each other about living their mission more faithfully. The Catholic Church in particular might learn of graces of women in all ordained ministries. This seems to be the will and wish of the Synod delegates: “Churches all over the world have expressed a clear request that the active contribution of women would be recognized and valued, and that their pastoral leadership increase in all areas of the Church’s life and mission.” (9, I; emphasis added).

Now those two sentences are too few and fragile to underwrite a major reform like the ordination of women. Yet, as Vatican II demonstrated, the Holy Spirit can work with meager resources. When the Council convened in October 1962, who would have predicted that the Church’s “growth in understanding” would produce such sweeping and dramatic changes by December 1965?

The ordination of women must become possible if the Church is to be visibly one, as the Lord desires, and the Synod could manifest that possibility in October 2024. Then we, who are perhaps the early Christians, will find it easier to picture that moment when the first woman Bishop of Rome emerges to bless and pray with us.