Synod on Syndality: Short history of women's struggle for increased roles in the Catholic Church

I knew it would be impossible to be able to say everything that could be said about this Synod on Synodality in Rome in just a few stories in the Free Press. So I created this blog for overflow material. Like this one, a short history of the struggle of Catholic women for a greater role in that Church.

Women have been knocking on the door of the Roman Catholic Church, asking for a greater role in ministry, for a very long time.

The most recent round of door knocking began in the 1960s, with Vatican II—the groundbreaking synod that sought to modernize the Church.

Signs of change were apparent when the new pope, Paul VI, appointed 23 women auditors: 10 religious and 13 lay women. They participated in preparatory sessions, especially those concerning the laity, where they were, in Paul’s words, “experts in life.”

No woman ever addressed the council, made up only of men, and the final documents say little about women.

One thing women at that council resisted was being considered a topic or an issue for men to decide about. “Women are not ‘a category’ in the church,” Sister Mary Luke Tobin, an American, said. “Men and women are the church.”

Thanks to those 23 women, Vatican II’s teachings on women are, for the most part, incorporated into its larger treatment of human dignity and not segregated into separate chapters on women.

In 1971, a Canadian played a leading role in raising the topic of women’s larger involvement in the Church. Cardinal George Flahiff, who was Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Winnipeg from 1961-82, promoted the full inclusion of women by declaring that “no argument should be made to exclude women from any service to the Church.” 

Rules prohibiting women from full service were the results of “male prejudice, blind adherence to merely human traditions or questionable interpretations of scripture,” he added.

Flahiff’s words echoed a meeting of the Canadian Catholic Conference that same year. That’s when 65 of Canada’s bishops met with 60 women to talk about the status of women in the Catholic Church in Canada at that time.

That meeting resulted in a set of recommendations that included declaring “clearly and unequivocally that women are full and equal members of the church, with the same rights, privileges and responsibilities as men,” that “all discriminatory barriers against women in canon law and tradition be removed,” and that qualified women should be ordained for ministry.

Despite that, nothing changed. Then, in 1973, Pope Paul VI commissioned a study on the ordination of women that found there was nothing in the Bible that barred women from being ordained and becoming priests.

When nothing changed again, women continued to press for a decision. In response, The Vatican set up more studies on the topic in the 1990s. The findings were never published.

All talk about an increased role for women seemed closed when, in 1994, Pope John Paul II stated that the Church “has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women.”

Fast forward to today, when Pope Francis has shown more support for changes to how women can serve in the Church. At the same time, he kept up the same pattern of commissioning studies on the topic—there was one in 2016 and another in 2020. Their findings were also not revealed.

In 2019, there was a synod in the Amazon. It was convened in part because of a lack of priests in the region. Bishops in attendance voted by 137-30 in favor of female deacons, a step below ordained priests but able to preach and serve during the Eucharist, along with performing baptisms, marriages and preside a funerals. But that finding was also shelved for further study.

When, in 2021, the pope declared his intention to hold a Synod on Synodality. In preparation, he asked Catholics around the world to share their hopes and concerns for the future of the church. The faithful identified a number of topics, including the role of women.

That result brought new energy to the quest to for women’s ordination, as did the announcement that 54 women were selected to be part of the synod gatherings in Rome. (Two of the women are from Canada: Catherine Clifford, formerly a professor of theology at St. Paul’s University in Ottawa, and Sister Elizabeth Davis from St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador.)

But those hopes were dashed when the pope pushed the topic off the main assembly’s agenda into another study group that will report to him in 2025.

Early on during this gathering in Rome, women from around the world gathered to voice their support for increased roles in the Church and to demonstrate their frustration with how long it was taking.

This included an event called the “Vati-can,” where women kicked a can down a Rome street—because the Church was always kicking the issue down the road.

Credit for information in this post goes to The Conversation.