As we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus, a performance artist and theologian makes a very personal appeal to Pope Francis to recognise a new understanding of priesthood

Dear Holy Father,
My brother Francis.

I am taking the step of writing an open letter to you because I feel that I am in a position to speak on behalf of many Catholics who have left the Church, or who are hanging on by their fingertips. I also speak for many of my own post-Second Vatican Council generation who see the Church as benignly irrelevant, if not actively detrimental to human flourishing, and are looking everywhere else for God. I fear that my words would not reach you through more private channels, and I wish to open up a new conversation about the future of the Church.

I have spent many years in the Anglican Church, which has become my adopted house of worship, but I am called home by your encyclical Laudato Si’, with a desire to return not as a child or as a supplicant, but as an heir coming into my inheritance, and as an adult with much to offer. I am the daughter of Charles Davis, a priest who left the Church in 1967 because he could no longer find his path to God inside her walls, and Florence Henderson, a member of the Grail, and an expert in the liturgy, whose priestly calling was invisible to a Church struggling with God’s image in women.