Pope Francis announced last week that the prohibition of female priesthood in the Catholic Church is probably permanent.
The announcement came amid celebration of the anniversary Martin Luther’s Protestant schism. The pope attended a service in honor of the historical moment, where he met the female leader of the Lutheran Church, Archbishop Antje Jackelen.
Naturally, the focus on the female archbishop raised questions about the ostensibly absent female presence in Catholic leadership. In response, the pope cited writings by Pope John Paul II as reasoning for the Church’s current stance, which note Jesus’s selection of exclusively male apostles in the Bible.
The timing of this announcement near the anniversary of the Protestant split is particularly appropriate because the issue of female priesthood — and related Church stances — has the potential to provoke another divide.
This is not to say that women will suddenly start nailing grievances to cathedral doors in the Vatican, but comments published by the New York Times snapshot the social media equivalent of Luther’s theses.
Some women mentioned that the ban on female priesthood was a primary motivation for their personal decisions to leave the Catholic Church. They could not reconcile the contradiction of teaching their daughters they could be anything, while excluding them from leadership in their own religion.
Of course, there’s always the potential of joining a different church. New offshoots and denominations of Christianity are nothing new, but they generally do not retain traditional Catholic tenets — namely the belief in consecration.
One commentator notes that the problem of female priesthood is a theological issue, not a social or political debate. Unlike gender discrimination in the workplace, the exclusion of women is not rooted in bias and prejudice, but in Biblical tradition, as Pope John Paul II’s letter indicates.
Furthermore, women are not completely excluded from serving in the Church. Just as women have their own roles within the Bible, women have their own separate vocations in the Catholic Church as nuns and religious sisters.
The prospect of female deacons remains up for discussion within the Church, as Pope Francis established a commission to research the plausibility of female deaconhood in August.
Deaconhood would enable a more prominent official role for women in the Church but would not afford the same authority as the priesthood. Deacons can participate in celebrating Mass, but they lack the full spiritual endowment needed to perform consecration.
In an age where gender is increasingly understood as non-binary, the Catholic Church’s relentless hold on traditional constructions of gender presents a sort of cognitive dissonance for progressive Catholics.
Even if women’s role in the Church is not a political or social issue, religious institutions do not exist in a vacuum and inevitably engage with social and political concerns. They might approach issues from a theological standpoint, but their decisions have broader societal implications.
Ultimately, the Church needs to make room for female voices when making decisions about women’s religious role moving forward. Whether or not the Church’s future includes female priesthood is up for debate, but women should at least be part of that discussion.
After all, “catholic” means universal, and “universal” means all-inclusive — which includes women, too.
kmilvert@indiana.edu
