"Lifting Up Women’s Voices in Proclaiming the Gospel " December 15, 2016/, Voices for Justice /by Jocelyn Collen/ Ignatian Solidarity Network

https://ignatiansolidarity.net/blog/2016/12/15/lifting-up-womens-voices/

..."We asked our attendees to share their hopes are for women in the Catholic Church, to describe their vision for Catholic women in the future, leading to more than twenty minutes of inspired sharing. The overwhelming message was that women have gifts for our Church, and ought to be empowered, supported, and welcomed. Our attendees were high school and college students, men and women, campus ministers, university administrators, pastoral associates, teachers, volunteers, alumni, and others. All of the hopes that were offered brought me great joy.

Some noteworthy statements included dreaming about reimagining Church governance to include more women in important decision making roles in the Vatican, using gender inclusive language when describing God, empowering women to take on leadership roles in the Church, and providing more opportunity for leadership roles for women. Attendees spoke of hopes that women will be able to preach in the context of a Mass because young people are finding it hard to feel at home in the Church...

One attendee believes that “one day women will be priests, and that should be really soon…people complain about the shortage of priests, but 50% of the population” is women. Another woman, inspired by the Teach-In for Justice said: “I feel like this whole weekend is about fighting unjust social structures and, this might be a radical thing to say, but this is an unjust social structure. This is our Church. It is counterintuitive because our Church is telling us to fight unjust social structures, but the Church is a flawed institution that needs to be fought and fixed…”