Pope Francis steers delicate course on women, the Church, and the Synod on Synodality 2024

Delegates vote to approve a synthesis report at the conclusion of the Synod on Synodality on Oct. 28, 2023. / Credit: Vatican Media

Vatican City, Oct 1, 2024 / 10:00 am (CNA).

Debate on women’s participation in the Catholic Church — including the idea of whether women could one day be deacons — is not on the agenda for this month’s assembly of the Synod on Synodality, but synodal conversations on the topic continue, some at the explicit invitation of Pope Francis.

On Oct. 2, Pope Francis will open the second session of the Synod on Synodality, the last part of the “discernment” phase of the synodal process begun in 2021.

Though women’s admission to ministries such as the diaconate was one of the big topics at the monthlong synod assembly last year, organizers have said the issue is now in the hands of experts after Pope Francis created a commission in the Vatican’s doctrine office to study the question at the request of 2023 synod delegates.

The commission at the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) will provide an update on its work during this month’s meeting with the plan to release a document in mid-2025.

While delegates and other participants to the synodal gathering will focus on how to be a Church in mission, the discussion on women is happening in other venues: in the study commission, at local synodal gatherings, in online events, and with the pope and his cardinal advisers.

Pope Francis’ position

The possibility of allowing Catholic women to become permanent deacons has been a persistent issue in Francis’ pontificate.

And while the pope has on multiple occasions indicated his willingness to study the issue, especially the historic figure of the deaconess in the early Church, he has also given a firm response, that “deacons with holy orders” is not a possibility for women.

“Women are of great service as women, not as ministers, as ministers in this regard, within the holy orders,” he told CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell during an appearance on the program “60 Minutes” in May.

More recently, Pope Francis spoke about the different roles of men and women in the Church in a speech to students at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) in Belgium on Sept. 28 during an apostolic trip that included one day in Luxembourg.

“What characterizes women, that which is truly feminine, is not stipulated by consensus or ideologies, just as dignity itself is ensured not by laws written on paper but by an original law written on our hearts,” he said, later adding that “it is terrible when a woman wants to be a man.”

In a press release issued quickly after the meeting, the university community criticized his remarks on women as “deterministic and reductive.”

Defending himself in a press conference aboard the papal plane back to Rome the next day, Francis reiterated the theological underpinnings to his current and many past statements on the dignity of women and their different role from men in the Church — the so-called “Marian-Petrine principle” first developed by the eminent Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthazar and invoked in the teaching of Church’s last four pontificates.

The principle draws on dimensions of Mary and St. Peter as symbols illustrating the different but complementary roles of women and men in the Church.

“A Church with only the Petrine principle would be a Church that one would think is reduced to its ministerial dimension, nothing else. But the Church is more than a ministry. It is the whole people of God. The Church is woman. The Church is a spouse. Therefore, the dignity of women is mirrored in this way,” Pope Francis said in an interview with America Magazine in 2022.

The dignity of women, he continued in that interview, reflected the spousal nature of the Church, which he called the “Marian principle.”

“The way is not only [ordained] ministry. The Church is woman. The Church is a spouse. We have not developed a theology of women that reflects this,” the pope said.

An open dialogue

In December 2023, Pope Francis invited theology professors to speak to him and his council of cardinal advisers on women’s participation in the Church. Earlier this year, these speeches were published in a series of books, one of which is called “Women and Ministries in the Synodal Church: An Open Dialogue.”

In his preface to the Italian-language book, Pope Francis wrote that an important aspect of synodality is having open conversations.

“The synodal process, as a process of discernment, starts from reality and experience, in open dialogue and creative fidelity to the great tradition which has preceded us and accompanies us,” he said in the preface dated March 25.

The speeches from the theologians’ meetings with Francis and the group of cardinals in December 2023 and February 2024 are largely critical of the current treatment of women in the Church and of the theological arguments of the last several pontificates for a male-only priesthood and a male-only diaconate.

In her contribution, Italian theologian and professor Sister Linda Pocher, a member of the Salesian Sisters of Don Bosco, contends that several of the usual arguments for a male-only priesthood are not as strong as usually held.

“I do not mean to say that we should absolutely remove the male reservation to ordained ministry. I mean to say that the rationale behind that reservation is weak, and it’s important to recognize that and be aware of it,” she wrote in “Women and Ministries in the Synodal Church: An Open Dialogue.”

In her testimony, the Italian theologian and consecrated woman of the Ordo Virginum (“Order of Virgins”), Giuliva Di Berardino, argued that the Catholic Church is missing a “public and official” female ministry.

“The point, we have to recognize, is that the Catholic world lacks the specificity of a women’s ministry that can enlarge the spiritual motherhood of the individual woman, her specific gift, to the universal dimension of the Church,” she said.

In another Italian-language book to come out of the encounters with cardinals, three theologians — two women and one priest — look critically at the “Marian-Petrine principle” of Hans Urs von Balthazar and ask if other interpretations of Scripture, and of the Virgin Mary, could not give support to a ministry open to women. 

In the preface to this book, called “De-Masculinize the Church?”, Pope Francis writes that “we have realized, especially during the preparation and celebration of the synod, that we have not listened enough to the voice of women in the Church and that the Church still has much to learn from them.”

He says the starting point is Hans Urs von Balthasar’s reflection on the Marian and Petrine principles in the Church, “a reflection that has inspired the magisterium of recent pontificates in the effort to understand and value the different ecclesial presence of men and women.”

“The end point, though, is in God’s hands,” the pontiff adds.

“Here is what I desire at this point in the synod process: that we do not tire of walking together, for only when we walk are we what we must be, the living body of the Risen One on the move, going out, meeting our brothers and sisters, fearlessly, on the streets of the world,” he says.

For Pope Francis, the journey of the Synod on Synodality is the destination, and the journey is listening to the lived realities of our brothers and sisters in Christ and walking with them.

As the philosopher and theologian Lucia Vantini put it in her presentation to the Council of Cardinals last year: “The issue of ministries is not now on the agenda, but it is now in the air and its pressure is felt: Like a ghost it roams our rooms, disrupts thinking, and inhibits frankness among us.”