This week’s blog is a draft version of my column in the Globe and Mail that appears today. It is published with the permission of the Editor.
What is it with the Roman Catholic Church and women? It is not as if they have just arrived on the scene and need to be integrated into the life of the Church. In fact, they are the life of the church.
It is the women who do the heavy lifting of Catholic life: they educate, research, facilitate, spiritually nourish, and sustain the regular rhythms of Catholic religious practice.
An, yet, the hierarchy of the Church needs to justify and validate their presence and gifts by writing documents about their irreplaceable charisms or feminine genius, their mystery and mystique, their call to complementarity.
The church leadership does this because it sees the clamouring for the inclusion of women in its sacramental ministry as both a rupture with theological tradition and as a threat to its universal unity.
So when the issue of women in the diaconate surfaced at last year’s first session of the Synod on Synodality it was not a surprise nor particularly welcomed. But it wasn’t banned either. There was a genuine expectation among many that it would return with the second session—currently unfolding in Rome—but Pope Francis, fearing its contentiousness would detract from the larger agenda of the synod and having already set up a Study Group to look at the issue (and having decided to place oversight in the hands of his fellow Argentine and trusted theologian, “Tucho” Fernandez), sought to defang the matter.
Understandably, many concluded that the pope was shelving an issue that remains for many Catholics a subject of urgency. But that interpretation, in my view, misreads Francis’s intention. This unique synod constitutes the highpoint of his papacy; it is establishing a new way of functioning as a church built on the pillars of deep listening, respectful dialogue, and openness to others, a model of social behaviour and governance that could be the church’s gift to a fractious world. Allowing debates around women and holy orders would compromise what Francis wants the synod to accomplish.
Still, the issue isn’t going away because it can’t or shouldn’t go away. It needs to be addressed fully, transparently, and with integrity. Francis’s narrative about women and their place in the church is a potent blend of the platitudinous and the pious. And it is unpersuasive.
So where do we go?
In the nineteenth century when the doctrine of papal infallibility was in the process of being formally declared as dogma at the First Vatican Council there were bishops and thinkers who, though not technically dissenting from the teaching, felt for various reasons that the time wasn’t ripe, that the Council wasn’t the right place to handle the matter. They were called the Inopportunists.
Well, I am an Inopportunist in that I think the role of women in ordained ministries—deacon and priest—is not best served or aired in the current synod. We need to do some serious institutional scouring beforehand. The primary concern must remain the scourge of clericalism and how we practically and methodically establish structures that confirm its erasure.
The curse of clerical sexual abuse is a daily reminder, irrespective the jurisdiction. France is still reeling from the revelations around its national icon Abbé Pierre, a Resistance hero, champion of the poor and homeless, a figure venerated in uber secular France, whose record of abuse is devastatingly long. Closer to home, the public legal battle between two priests in Ontario where one has accused the other of emotional manipulation and sexual assault is a stark reminder that clerical abuse can involve clerics abusing clerics.
The rot begins in the diocesan seminary; clericalism is incubated in a culture of exceptionalism. The training of religious order priests, as in the case of Jesuits, Franciscans, Redemptorists, etc. is different from that of those training to be parochial clergy, the parish priests regularly encountered by most Catholics, although these bodies are not entirely exempt from the institutional pathologies that nurture clericalism.
Francis himself has regularly denounced the failures of seminary instruction and even excoriated those in charge of them for their failure to address seminary dysfunction.
Francis could go further. Among the new cardinals he created on October 6—which included Archbishop Francis Leo of Toronto—is the Dominican friar, Father Timothy Radcliffe. Along with the Benedictine Abbess, Mother Maria Ignazia Angelini, Radcliffe serves as a spiritual director or spiritual eminence at the Synod. It would have been a bold move—and he is capable of bold moves—to include Angelini among the new members of the College of Cardinals. The cardinalate is not an ordained ministry after all, although it is historically an all-male church enclave.
Such a gesture would have been more than a holy disruption; it would have been a portal of hope.
Michael’s new book The Jesuit Disruptor: A Personal Portrait of Pope Francis (House of Anansi, Sept. 2024) can be purchased through Amazon Australia.
Dr. Michael W. Higgins has been involved with investigating and expanding the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, particularly in Canada, for over forty years. Dr. Higgins is the Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of St. Michael’s College in Toronto.
With thanks to Pontifex Minimus.
Pontifex Minimus is written on the ancestral territories of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabewaki, Attiwonderonk and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation peoples, who have stewarded these lands since time immemorial.
