Women who want to be priests (2023)

Soline Humbert was a seventeen-year-old studying history and politics at Trinity College Dublin when she first felt a call to the priesthood. She did not welcome him from her. Humbert, a Catholic born and raised in France, knew that in theroman catholic churchonly men could be priests: it was an indisputable rule enshrined in official teachings and traditions. This was in the early 1970s, and in other religions and in society in general, women's roles were being redefined under the influence of second-wave feminism. Most of the mainline Protestant denominations had already recognized or were moving towards the ordination of women. Reform Judaism had just ordained its first rabbi. But the Catholic Church, so entrenched in symbols, clung to the notion that a priest must bear a physical resemblance to Christ in order to exist.in the person of Christ. Vatican authorities often noted that Jesus chose only men to be his twelve apostles, the model for the priesthood and for his church organization. Furthermore, his omission of the Virgin Mary from these ranks meant that women could be worshiped without being ordained. Other Christian traditions found a balancing inspiration in the knowledge that Christ choseMaria Magdalenato witness and proclaim the Resurrection, and in Catholic theology she is sometimes referred to as the Apostle of Apostles. But the Vatican did not see this story or stories about Christ's openness to women as justification for admitting them to the priesthood.

Humbert told me that the sudden conviction that came over her was deeply disconcerting. She felt like "an illusion rooted in pride or rejection of my feminine nature and of God." She was hard-working and down-to-earth: she had survived the death of her beloved mother from cancer at the age of twelve and had moved from France to Ireland on her own. She now wondered if she was going crazy. She saw a psychiatrist and later confided in a minister that she laughed off the idea. Finally, she began to pray, "Don't call me, your church doesn't want me."

Humbert tried to put his call behind him. He graduated from college, got an M.B.A. and a master's degree in theology, he married and had two children. She has worked as a business counselor and volunteered in her local diocese as a marriage counselor. Then one day in 1990, the longing returned, like a dormant volcano beginning to roar again. She was happy with her husband, Colm Holmes, a businessman with warm, friendly manners and calm, egalitarian beliefs: she had grown up hearing stories about her great-aunt, who was a suffragette. Her children, eight and six years old, are doing well. There was nothing wrong in her life, outwardly or inwardly, except her tremendous desire to serve God by preaching the gospel, hearing confessions, and blessing the bread and wine of the Eucharist. She went to tell the Archbishop of Dublin, thinking that with the dwindling supply of priests he would be glad to know that God calls women. Humbert recalls: "He said to me, 'Why do you want to be a priest? You could be a saint." And I said, "Well, I could be a priest."ya saint. Men can be both.

For months, Humbert wept at the thought that her deepest sense of self would never be realized. "If you are an acorn, you must be an oak tree, not a pine tree or a cactus," she told me. She was moved when a friendly nun unexpectedly handed her a communion chalice and plate and told her: "The Catholic Church is not ready yet, butUdsis it so."

Years passed, but his desire did not diminish. One summer, Humbert and her husband decided to take their children from Dublin to France to visit her family. As they were about to leave the house, a religious bulletin fell through the mail slot. Humbert grabbed it to read on the long ferry ride across the Bay of Biscay. That night she opened it with an article about the 19th century Saint Therese of Lisieux, a Carmelite nun sometimes called the Little Flower of Jesus. Humbert knew a lot about her, but he didn't know that Therese also felt a strong call to the priesthood. Thérèse's sisters testified at her beatification process that she had asked them to shave her head in order to have a tonsure, a sign of priestly devotion. Thérèse had written in her diary: “I feel a call to aPRIEST' and she had declared that she would die at the age of twenty-four, because at that age she would have been ordained, and surely God would spare her the pain of not being able to exercise her calling. Therese died of tuberculosis at the age of 24.

Humbert read late into the night. He realized that he had not learned this exciting information about Therese because the church was embarrassed: he had learned about Therese's sweet simplicity, but not about her wild calling from her. When the ferry docked in France, the family made a pilgrimage to the Norman city of Lisieux, where a basilica commemorates Theresa. In the years that followed, Humbert returned nearly a dozen times.

In 1994, Pope John Paul II granteda strict official letterthat seemed to prevent even talking about the ordination of women. He lamented that despite the "enduring and universal tradition of the Church" the possibility of women priests "is still considered worthy of discussion" in some parts of the world. John Paul continued: "I declare that the Church has no authority to ordain women to the priesthood, and that this trial is the final decision of all believers in the Church." Humbert told me the pope's words were devastating: "It's hard to describe how violent, spiritually violent, I felt because it's a document, after all. But I felt like it was meant to put an end to people like me, any woman who had that sense of purpose. It felt like he was trying to kill what was most alive in us, what was connected to the divine." Humbert believed that a true vocation, whether religious, artistic or scientific, would always flow through you. If you were born to do something, he said, "resist at your peril."

Unlike Humbert, Myra Brown was not born into a Catholic family. His parents were Southern Baptists who left that church after moving from Arkansas to Albion, New York, as farmhands in the early 1960s. A few years later, his father got a job at a steel mill and the family moved. to Rochester. When Brown, the youngest of eight children, was a teenager, her father died of hypothermia after being mugged. The family was poor, but her mother supported them all with government support, a lush garden, and a job cleaning other people's houses. Brown and her siblings could go to church with anyone who took them on a particular Sunday. They attended a Baptist church with her grandmother, a Pentecostal church with friends, and a Catholic church, St. Bridget's, with neighbors and Brown's older sister, who had converted to Catholicism.

Brown fell in love with the rituals, the music, and the fervent way the priest talked about Jesus. As an African American, she appreciated that St. Bridget's had a significant black congregation and included gospel singing in her services. Brown was a fine speaker and a fine singer. But in 1992, when she was twenty-four, she was surprised by an invitation from the priest, Father Bob Werth, that she one day preach a sermon. Official Catholic teaching maintained both altar and priesthood women. The Vatican only allowed altar servers in 1994, and there are still priests who resist. One of the leaders of the burgeoning conservative Catholic movement in the United States, Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, former Archbishop of St. Louis, has partly attributed the waning interest of young men in the priesthood to the presence of altar servers. "Young men don't want to mess with girls, it's natural," he said.said a site2015 jokingly titled New Ehungerization Project. “The girls were also very good at the altar service. Many boys have drifted away over time." The youth altar service is a testing ground for the priesthood, Burke said, and requires "a certain male discipline."

Last January, Pope Francis amended canon law to officially recognize women as acolytes and lectors, roles in which lay people read the Bible and help with tasks like lighting candles and setting up the altar. At the discretion of local bishops, women have been performing these duties for years, particularly in parts of Latin America where there was a shortage of priests and lay preachers. Traditionalist Catholics also found these reforms reprehensible.

First, Brown told Father Bob that he simply couldn't preach a sermon. He then went to his house and as he vacuumed the living room, he felt a tug on his shirt. He went up to his bedroom, knelt down and prayed. He heard a voice saying: "Yes, I am calling you to preach and teach my word." Brown told me: “I thought you were joking. And I started arguing with God. I said, 'I'm black, I'm Catholic, and I'm a woman. They don't do that in my church!'” She agreed with Father Bob.

Will the Roman Catholic Church ever ordain non-male priests? Many Women Feel Called to Be Priests, and Many Catholics Support Them: Out Louda surveyfrom the Pew Research Center, about six in ten Catholics in the United States say the church should allow women to become (and marry) priests. The number is fifty-five percent for Hispanic Catholics, the church's fastest-growing demographic. In Brazil, the Latin American country with the largest Catholic population, nearly eight in 10 Catholics surveyed by Pew support the idea of ​​women priests.

The Pew survey also showed that American Catholicism is suffering "a greater net loss" than any other religious tradition. If you google the word "apostasy", the word "catholic" immediately pops up. According to some reports, women, long the backbone of the church, have withdrawn from active engagement in greater numbers than men. Many people withdraw because they can no longer stand doctrines that refuse to recognize same-sex marriages, advocate contraception, allow divorced and remarried people to take communion without receiving an annulment, or allow women are priests. “My adult children don't go to church,” Soline Humbert told me. "It doesn't surprise me. When they were little children, we would sit in church during these sermons on the great and terrible sin of sex and illegitimate birth and how it particularly affected women and girls: sermons, all of which were preached by people that your life would never get pregnant I thought thatesperanzaMy boys don't listen. As soon as they were old enough, they relieved me of that worry by never coming back."

But even if many Catholics welcomed the ordination of women, the prospect seems as far off as ever. The Roman Catholic Church is not a democracy, as its traditionalists keep reminding its would-be reformers. Its government is sophisticated and strictly hierarchical. And successive popes have proposed issuing new statements on the incompatibility of women with the priesthood. They have also punished priests who have publicly expressed their support for the ordination of women, sometimes going so far as to accuse or excommunicate them. The Vatican in early Juneposted a reviewof its canon laws codifying automatic excommunication for "both a person who attempts to confer holy ordination on a woman and a woman who attempts to receive holy ordination."

Some progressive Catholics have suggested that revelations of clerical sexual abuse in recent decades, and the unflattering light the scandal has cast on the all-male leadership that has long covered up misdeeds, strengthen the case for allowing women priestesses have But at the highest levels of the Vatican, the scandals do not appear to have affected views on gender roles in the Church. In 2010, the Vatican underPope Benedict XVI, promulgated new rules that facilitate the discipline of pedophile priests, butthe same documentclassifies the "attempted saintly ordination of a woman" asmore serious crimes—a category of crimes that includes pedophilia.

It wasn't until 2007, when Anne Tropeano was in her thirties, that she found a church to revive the pale Catholicism of her childhood. With a background in marketing and communications, she was the manager of a rock band called TapWater who lived with the musicians on a lavender farm outside of Portland, Oregon. She was slim, with long hair parted in the middle and a retro-cool '70s vibe. The people she dated, including her boyfriend, were secular guys who loved her fun-girl energy; Her increasingly serious spiritual yearnings were wobbling her a bit. One Sunday she went to mass alone at St. Ignatius, a Jesuit congregation in southeast Portland. As the opening rites began, she noticed priest Tom Royce at the end of the procession. He was in his early eighties, white-haired, and stooped. Tropeano said to himself: "This guy is like a million years old, what is he going to do?" She was shocked and deeply moved when she walked down the aisle and delivered "the most joyous and authentic sermon on childish fear and the proper way to worship the 'fear' of God - not to fear God as a punisher, but to have respect - full in awe of this majestic Creator who brought us into being."

Tropeano kept coming back to St. Ignatius, a plain white building on a busy street near a bus stop. Homeless people unfurled sleeping bags at the door. Inside, ceiling tiles sometimes fell off, and puddles of water seeping through the floor were regularly cleaned up by parishioners. But the pews were full, and Tropeano found the congregation unusually diverse. There was a significant Vietnamese and Filipino membership, along with families whose Croatian and Italian ancestry had filled the community in its first decades; There were a number of parishioners with disabilities. Tropeano, whose years of spiritual quest included New Age and Buddhist interludes, found that the "Jesuit taste for spirituality" - "seeing God in all things, commitment to social justice and service to the marginalized, and insight intellectual" was exactly what she was looking for. She immersed herself in the life of the congregation and helped attract hundreds of new believers to the Novena of Grace, an annual nine-day prayer. Katie Hennessy, a hospice social worker at St. Ignatius Parish, noted unusual qualities of charisma and compassion in Tropeano, but also signs of a solemn, solitary intensity. Hennessy sometimes walked past the church in broad daylight and saw Tropeano praying alone, kneeling in a pew as watery light streamed through the stained-glass windows of the darkened church.

In 2014, when Tropeano was forty, he enrolled in a Jesuit divinity school in Berkeley, California, where most of the other students were men preparing for the priesthood. A friend thought that Tropeano himself looked a lot like a priest in the making. Tropeano "worked very hard to wrestle with everything from the liturgy to the Scriptures to Vatican II," he recalls. And she seemed so well prepared for itLeada congregation.” (The friend asked not to be named because she teaches in a Catholic school and thinks speaking out about Tropeano's calling could get her in trouble.)

Hennessy thought that in the past, when even the idea of ​​becoming a priestess was beyond her imagination, Tropeano might have joined an order of nuns. But many of these orders died out. When Tropeano confided to me that she felt called to the priesthood, it made sense to Hennessy, who told me, "With her passion and zeal, Anne had to play a priestly role within the faith community and perform all parts of the Mass." she reminded Hennessy of the Biblical parable of the talents, in which a man entrusts some money to his servants on a long journey. Two make investments and make a profit, but a third buries his share for fear of losing it. The story is often interpreted as a warning to her not to let her shyness stop her from using her God-given gifts. Hennessy told me that the church "buries talent in fear."

Pope FranciscoFor all her populism, conviviality, and commitment to social justice, she has expressed no more interest in women's ordination than her predecessors. in aPress Conference 2015, referred to John Paul II's 1994 Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, the proclamation that had so shaken Soline Humbert, and said: “Women priests, you cannot do that. Pope Saint John Paul II said it clearly after long, long, intense discussions, long deliberations." When a Swedish journalist asked Francis about this again in 2016, he reaffirmed his loyalty to John Paul's line on the matter.

That year, Pope Francis appointed a commission to study the issue of women deaconesses. In the Roman Catholic Church, deacons are ordained ministers who can perform baptisms, weddings, and funerals, among other things, but cannot celebrate mass, hear confessions, or consecrate the bread and wine of the Eucharist. People who wanted to see women enter the diaconate, and perhaps eventually the priesthood, were hopeful. Among those appointed to the commission was Phyllis Zagano, an outspoken scholar at Hofstra University who has devoted years of research to arguing that womentatserve as deacons in the early centuries of the Church. (The apostle Paul refers to the first-century Christian Phoebe as a deaconess.) But Francis would do nothing. He said the commission's findings were too mixed, "toads from different wells" as he put it, and appointed a second one in 2020, with all new members. He hasn't given any advice yet. When he officially allowed women to serve as acolytes and lectors, he saidcautionto emphasize that these are lay ministries "fundamentally different from the ordained ministry received through the Sacrament of Holy Orders."