Kate McElwee- Excellent Analysis of Pope Francis, Synodality, and Women’s Ordination

Kudos to Kate McElwee for an insightful analysis of Pope Francis’s evolution!

My Response:Pope Francis could evolve a more Synodal church by removing the canonical penalty of excommunication against Roman Catholic Women Priests. He could engage in a courageous dialogue with us   to promote the full equality of women in all ministries in the Church.  This practical step would  do wonders to promote justice and human rights in the Church and world. It would help heal a centuries -old toxic misogyny that has excluded women from Holy Orders. Bridget Mary Meehan ARCWP

https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/guest-voices/evolution-pope-francis-women-some-movement-more-needed

….”However, a devastating departure from Francis' pastoral and "listening" nature is his treatment of the question of women's ordination to the priesthood. While there may be some progress to be tracked parsing slight shifts in language from year to year, he has remarkably stayed the course set by John Paul II. The inadequacy of his responses have prompted journalists to ask nearly the same question in papal press conferences or interviews in 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2020and 2022. When speaking briefly, Francis simply says, "The church has spoken and said, 'No.' " When given more time, such as in a recent interview in 2022, he reveals a worrying confidence in the Marian and Petrine principles to explain the complexity of our relationship to God. 

How can such a pastoral man not hear the cries of women in his own church? What encounter informed him to characterize women's ordination advocates as operating from a "spirit of the isolated conscience," as he wrote in Let Us Dream? How can he call for women's rights in society and not scrutinize his own role as the supreme leader of the largest patriarchy in the world?  

These questions haunt me, but the most generous explanation I can think of is that Francis does not believe the church is ready to answer this question. Admittedly, that is hard to reconcile with what we know of the global calls for women's ordination in the synodal process, the consistency, visibility, and "noisiness" of the women's ordination movement, and decades of theological thought challenging church teaching, but the less generous interpretation is far worse. I will let you fill in the blank.  

Lastly, one cannot consider Pope Francis without examining his understanding of Marian theology, and by extension the metaphors he uses to elevate women right out of structures of power. Often repeating himself word for word, Francis reminds us: "Our Lady is more important than the Apostles!" This "more important" and vague references by Francis to an underdeveloped "theology of women," is an attempt to add mystery to the metaphor that reduces women to not just mother and spouse, but church and "something more!" Mysterious indeed.”  

Pope Francis listens during an audience with participants in the plenary assembly of the women's International Union of Superiors General May 5, 2022, at the Vatican. (CNS/Vatican Media)