By Sharanya Dutta
Journalist: “Really, never?”
Pope: “If we read carefully the declaration by St. John Paul II, it is going in that direction.”
Pope Francis — on his way back to Rome from Sweden after celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation — said on 1st November that the ban on women priests was likely to be a ‘forever’ decision. In 2013 and in 2015, he has said respectively on the issue of women being ordained as priests: “That door is closed” and “Women priests — that cannot be done.”
In Sweden, ironically enough, he’d attended a service where the Primate of the Church of Sweden, Archbishop Antje Jackelén (a woman) was present. The ceremony marked 499 years since Martin Luther nailing his ninety five theses to the door of a church to protest the dated and corrupt practices of Catholicism. Hear hear.
After the Pope’s statement, the Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC) — an organisation that has championed the cause of women’s ordination as priests and bishops into the Roman Catholic Church since 1975 — released a statement called “Patriarchy Will Not Have The Last Word” in which they said: “The Church cannot be afraid to examine customs when they no longer communicate or resonate with the Gospel.”
Without actually allowing women to be part of the hierarchy in an organisational or an administrative capacity, the Pope has spoken of women in Catholicism in platitudes and pedestalising terms. “The Church is the bride of Jesus Christ,” he had said, “And the Madonna is more important than popes and bishops and priests.” But these nomenclatures are pacifist at best and patronizing at worst. His thrust to evolve, instead, a “theology of women” was rejected by the editors of Catholic Women Speak: Bringing Our Gifts to the Table, who said that it reduced women to “objects of study, a separate category of reflection”. And that it should certainly not be written by men.
In August, the Pope announced the creation of a commission to study the historical importance of female deacons. But at the mention of any real change, he responded by saying “They said: “The Church opens the door to deaconesses.” Really? I am a bit angry because this is not telling the truth of things.” All he wanted was a “list.”
John L. Allen Jr.’s book talks about the Pope’s formative years as a chemical assistant, supervised by Esther Ballestrino de Careaga, a Paraguayan communist on the run with her daughters. An early New Yorker profile claims that the murder of Careaga by the junta (she was kidnapped and dropped from a helicopter into the sea) changed his life. But these biographical details seem to fade in the face of call for concrete changes in the hierarchy of the church. The Pope’s personal gospel is the letter from 1994 by Pope John Paul II that he keeps referencing which says “In calling only men as his Apostles, Christ acted in a completely free and sovereign manner.” What about the freedom of women? They can be “the holy martyrs, virgins and mothers of families”.
A 2015 Pew Research Center Poll conducted in the US shows that 59 percent of Catholics, 77 percent of cultural Catholics and 66 percent of ex-Catholics think the Church should allow women to be priests. A 2014 Univision survey looked at Catholics from twelve countries and found that in France (83 percent), in Spain (78 percent), in Brazil (54 percent), in Argentina (60 percent) wanted women to be priests. In countries like Uganda, Congo, Mexico and Philliphines however, Catholics were more orthodox. It would be intriguing to see what a similar survey does in India which has nearly 20 million Roman Catholics.
The internet exploded with comments after the Pope’s latest statement. As one commenter Courtney Shannon says, “Even as a 7-year-old, I knew something was off when we had to call the priests ‘father’ yet the nuns ‘sister.’”