VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Asserting that the Catholic Church needed the gifts and experiences of women, Pope Francis appointed several women to top positions in the Roman Curia, including the first female prefect of a major dicastery, and worked to ensure their contributions were recognized in parishes and dioceses around the world.
While affirming that only men could be ordained to the priesthood, he expanded the number of other official ministries open to women and gave women a voice in important deliberations, including as members of the dicastery that recommends candidates to serve as bishops and, particularly, by allowing women to be full voting members of the Synod of Bishops on synodality.
He opened the formal ministries of acolyte and lector to women and established the formal lay ministry of catechist — moves that were part of his overall push to encourage all the baptized to be more active in evangelization as missionary disciples.
He formed special commissions in 2016 and 2020 to study the question of women deacons. And, in response to a request by participants in the synod on synodality, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, said in 2024 that the commission would be revived to continue its research.
The pope resisted efforts that seemed to pursue change or “reform” for merely pragmatic reasons, such as opening up the priesthood to women or married men as a remedy for a shortage of priests, or to “clericalize” the laity with fuller access to positions of power.
It is an error, he had said, to think laypeople, including women, can only truly contribute to the church or fulfill their call as Christians by being ordained or serving in top positions in the Catholic Church. He called it the risk of being “more concerned with dominating spaces than with generating initiatives.” Instead, all laypeople should be accompanied and supported in being active “agents of evangelization” in their public and daily lives, he insisted.
Pope Francis also was critical of any gender ideology that sought to erase differences between men and women, and he called radical feminism “machismo with a skirt.”
He championed women as possessing unique and vital gifts that must not be overlooked, diminished or demeaned, but insisted families, communities, the church and the world desperately need their contributions.
Women possess a “generative” power making the “nature of their vocation as ‘builders,’ cooperating with the Creator in the service of life, the common good and peace,” he told women taking part in an international conference on women in the church in early 2024.
He saw women as “the great gift of God” who is able to “bring harmony to creation.” Men and women are not the same, he said in 2017, but “one is not superior to the other” either. However, it is a woman, he said, who “teaches us to caress, to love tenderly and who makes something beautiful of the world.”
Especially in the early years of his pontificate, he would share stories and bits of wisdom he learned from his grandmother Rosa, with whom he had an especially strong, loving relationship. He often praised strong, confident and competent women in his life who had made a lasting impact on him, including his boss at the chemical factory where he worked as a young man and a nurse who, he said, helped save his life when he was hospitalized with a serious lung infection.
However, Pope Francis sometimes displayed outdated and even objectionable notions of women, such as his quips about problematic mothers-in-law or telling the International Theological Commission that the presence of women in its ranks was like having “strawberries on the cake.”
While that remark was “seriously offensive,” said Phyllis Zagano, an expert on women in the church and adjunct professor of religion at Hofstra University, “we must recognize his age, heritage and background.”
Born into an Italian family in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1936, he had spent his life as a priest, bishop and pope living, eating and working surrounded by men — mostly other priests — and had little contact with women, she told Catholic News Service in early 2024.
Perhaps aware of this echo chamber, he called on theologians to “de-masculinize” the church because, as he wrote in the introduction to a book, “the church is a communion of men and women who share the same faith and the same baptismal dignity.”
He had asked Salesian Sister Linda Pocher, a young Italian theologian, to organize a series of information sessions for him and his international Council of Cardinals to reflect on the role of women in the church, including in ministries.
When the pope first invited her to contribute in 2022, “I was explicitly told not to touch on the topic of ordination,” Sister Pocher said at a panel discussion in Rome in March 2024.
“However, later, in the meeting with the cardinals, it was the cardinals themselves who brought it up,” she said. “The issue of women’s ordination is a bit like the elephant in the room, that is, in certain contexts everyone sees it, but no one dares to mention it,” and it became clear that “it was impossible not to touch this theme.”
Zagano, who served on the pope’s first study commission on women deacons in 2016-2019, said that Pope Francis presented “a definite respect for women as intelligent beings” while he was also “immersed in a culture notable for its misogyny. That culture can be more accepting of women in management, while it continues to resist women in ministry.”
For example, the pope referred several times to a 20th-century Swiss theologian’s concept of Petrine and Marian principles to explain why only men are priests, but women, like Mary, have a “more important” role. The pope’s use of the terms “seem to restrict women from ministry while allowing them access to management positions as they might be broadly conceived, not as positions of jurisdiction or governance,” Zagano told CNS.
Some modern-day theologians have found the Petrine-Marian binary problematic, including Pope Francis’ characterization of the church being a woman, bride and mother.
The problem is not that there are differences between women and men, said Maeve Heaney, director of the Xavier Centre for Theological Formation at the Australian Catholic University and a consecrated member of the Verbum Dei community. What is wrong is “to radicalize or essentialize” differences, that is to carve out one monolith of qualities as belonging to women and another for men, she said at a Rome conference in March 2024.
“The identification of women with a certain kind of femininity which is, in turn, connected to a particular language and image of the church, has been off-putting on occasion to some women,” Anna Rowlands, a professor of Catholic social thought and practice at Durham University in England, told CNS in early 2024.
Pope Francis saw the need for more women theologians, reflecting his belief “that theology is radically incomplete if it is not written by women and does not reflect women’s physical, spiritual, ecclesial and political experiences, historical and contemporary,” she said.
“Essentializing women’s experience without more fully listening to women and enabling them to write and reflect out of their experience seems to some to illustrate the very problem,” Rowlands said.
With the 2021-2024 synod on synodality, the pope addressed the need to listen to women’s lived experience by completely reconfiguring the way a Synod of Bishops would be prepared and carried out. Women were invited to be full members of the 2023 and 2024 assemblies in Rome with unprecedented roles as facilitators and voting members, and countless more took part in the preparatory phases on the local, regional and continental stages.
Xavière Missionary Sister Nathalie Becquart, undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops, said at a conference in Rome in March 2024, that the synod process made it clear that just as all the male participants did not have the same position on key issues, neither did the women.
Rowlands, who participated in the 2023 and 2024 synod assemblies, told CNS in early 2024, “Women played a truly remarkable role” during the entire synod process.
“Women with voting status also brought powerful testimony into the Synod Hall, speaking from a genuine diversity of social and theological viewpoints in their own right — not reliant upon being represented by bishops,” she said. “Pope Francis seemed delighted by the vibrant mix of voices and viewpoints and the presence of so many women.”
He hired many women to fill top positions in the Roman Curia and his reform of the Curia included creating the possibility of naming laypersons, not just archbishops and cardinals, to head a Vatican dicastery. While the reform went into effect in 2022, he appointed the first woman to be prefect of a dicastery in early 2025 (Jan. 6).
Naming Consolata Missionary Sister Simona Bramilla to lead the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, the pope also named a Spanish cardinal to be the dicastery’s pro-prefect, not to diminish the role or authority of the prefect, according to one canon lawyer, but because of possible situations that call for the exercise of holy orders.
He made concrete “practical efforts, rather than theoretical ones, to promote the presence of women,” Sister Pocher told CNS in early 2024, and he moved to promote respectful, mutual “listening to women, not just giving them roles.”
Zagano said Pope Francis worked with what he had to “bring the Church into the 20th century — not a typo. By that I mean, the writings of the Second Vatican Council are striking even now.”
The pope understood “the tension between and even within the ‘pro-Vatican II’ and ‘anti-Vatican II’ camps,” and moved “carefully — more slowly than some would wish — to let the voices of women be more widely heard and, more importantly, listened to,” she said.
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