Before becoming Pope Leo XIV, Cardinal Robert Prevost presided over one of the crucial revolutionary reforms of Pope Francis’ pontificate by having women serve on the Vatican board that vets nominations for bishops.
But he also has said decisively that ladies can’t be ordained as priests, and despite having worked for years in Peru where women often lead church communities, seems noncommittal on whether women could ever serve in any ministerial capability.
Nevertheless, the ladies who’ve worked closely with Prevost in recent times have praised his leadership style, ability to listen and respect for his or her opinions. In interviews with The Associated Press, they are saying they expect that as pope, Leo will proceed to advertise women in church governance positions, albeit with limits.
Maria Lia Zervino was among the many three women Francis appointe d to the Dicastery for Bishops in 2022 to review possible appointments. It was a job previously held by cardinals and bishops, an old boy’s club that has jealously guarded the key process behind the appointment of bishops.
Zervino rejoiced when Prevost was elected pope, saying the respect he showed for her and other women on the board and their opinions gave them faith in him as a pacesetter.
“I’m convinced that he doesn’t must learn how you can work (with women), how you can allow them to speak, to take heed to them, to have them take part in decisions, because that’s what he does anyway,” said Zervino, the Argentine former head of the World Union of Catholic Women’s Organizations.
Zervino said she expected Leo would proceed Francis’ reform processes, albeit in his own style.
“He’s an easy man, serene, at all times with that smile that we saw that seems to return from an interior peace,” she said in an interview. “So whenever you see someone who’s balanced, peaceful and respectful and who welcomes what you say and is at all times able to hear the opposite, you will have faith in him.”
A 2023 comment on women as priests
At a 2023 gathering of bishops on the longer term of the Catholic Church, Prevost was asked at a news conference about women in church leadership positions. He said it was “a piece in progress” and that there can be a “continuing recognition of the proven fact that women can add an ideal deal to the lifetime of the church on many various levels.”
But he drew some very clear lines.
“I believe we’re all acquainted with the very significant and long tradition of the church, and that the apostolic tradition is something that has been spelled out very clearly, especially if you wish to talk concerning the query of ladies’s ordination to the priesthood,” he said within the Oct. 25, 2023, briefing.
Catholic women do much of the church’s work in schools and hospitals and are often accountable for passing the religion to the following generation. But they’ve long complained of second-class status in an establishment that reserves the priesthood for men.
Prevost acknowledged Francis had created two commissions to check whether women might be made deacons, who perform most of the same functions as priests. While he said the difficulty was still open, he warned that turning women into clerics “doesn’t necessarily solve an issue, it’d make a recent problem.”
Just because a lady in society may be president does not imply there’s an “immediate parallel” within the church, he argued.
“It isn’t so simple as saying that at this stage we’re going to vary, if you happen to will, the tradition of the church after 2,000 years on any certainly one of those points,” he said.
Deacons are ordained ministers who preside at weddings, baptisms and funerals. They can preach but cannot have fun Mass. Married men may be ordained as deacons while women cannot, although historians say women served as deacons within the early Christian church.
A prudent and personal listener
Karlijn Demasure, emeritus professor of practical theology at St. Paul University in Ottawa, served on a Vatican commission with Prevost proposing reforms to the authority of bishops and the way they’re chosen. She said Prevost was absolutely convinced of the necessity to involve lay people and nuns within the choice of bishops, not less than at an initial level.
“He listens well,” Demasure said. “He hears what has been said, and if he doesn’t agree, he says it but in a pleasant way: ‘I wouldn’t say it like this, or I wouldn’t do it like that.’”
She said Prevost was quiet, “prudent and personal.” She wonders, though, what’s going to occur with the work of the commission, certainly one of 10 groups which can be studying particularly thorny questions, resembling the role of ladies, and were resulting from report back to the pope by July.
Sister Nathalie Becquart, certainly one of the highest-ranking women on the Vatican, worked with Prevost during Francis’ meeting, often called a synod, on the longer term of the church. She also happens to be his neighbor, living in the identical Palazzo Sant’Uffizio contained in the Vatican gates, and was among the many well-wishers who greeted Leo when he got here home the night of his May 8 election.
Becquart posted a joyous selfie with the pope within the courtyard in certainly one of the primary private moments after his election. “I had time to greet him, not only as a neighbor,” she said.
The women’s diaconate
Becquart recalled that she had been at a conference of the 900 nuns who run the world’s female religious orders when the white smoke got here out of the Sistine Chapel chimney. It didn’t trouble her that the nuns had no vote within the conclave, for the reason that cardinals “could see that the church is the people of God.”
“Synodality is about feeling we’re from the identical body, we’re interdependent, now we have a deep inner connection, and for me that was a deep spiritual experience I could never imagine before,” she said.
Also through the conclave, advocates for ladies’s ordination set off pink smoke flares over the Vatican to protest their exclusion from the priesthood and the election process.
“The discrimination and exclusion of ladies is a sin, and we’re here to say the following pope will inherit this query and wishes to work quickly to correct it,” said Kate McElwee, executive director of the Women’s Ordination Conference.
Hofstra University researcher Phyllis Zagano, who was on Francis’ first Vatican commission on women deacons, stays optimistic. She pointed to Prevost’s acknowledgement that the deacon issue was still open and that he ministered in Peru, a region that has pushed for years for the church to acknowledge women as ministerial deacons to assist offset the priest shortage.
In a column for Religion News Service, Zagano noted that a recent proposal for a recent Amazonian liturgical rite, published last month by the Amazonian bishops conference, contained explicit recommendations for ladies to be ordained as deacons. When Francis in 2020 considered official requests from Amazonian bishops for female deacons, he dodged the difficulty.
“Women deserve the ordained diaconal ministry of ladies,” she said in an interview.
___
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely accountable for this content.
