Work not in progress
The Synod on Synodality
Tina Beattie
Over the three years of the synodal process, women’s ministry has emerged across the global Church as an issue of almost universal concern. Yet the question of women’s ordination to the diaconate will not even be discussed in the climactic session of the Synod in October. Meanwhile, argues a leading theologian, more and more women are walking away from the Church and taking their families with them.
When the Vatican announced a synodal process starting in 2021 involving the worldwide Church, many Catholic women were sceptical. The high hopes many of us had when Francis became Pope had faded as year after year he repeated the same patronising platitudes about the wonderful gifts women have to offer and the need for a more feminine Church, but nothing substantial had changed.
Nevertheless, in the build-up to the 2023 Synod there was a sense that, this time, it might be different. Women’s groups around the world set up processes of consultation and feedback, and a sense of cautious optimism emerged. The Catholic Women Speak network, which I facilitate, commissioned a survey that was translated into eight languages and attracted 17,000 responses from Catholic women in 104 countries. Demographic differences were reflected in some of the responses, but the vast majority of respondents saw a need for reform. There was clear evidence of frustration and anger about clericalism and the lack of transparency and accountability in parishes and church institutions, though most also agreed on the importance of their Catholic identity to their lives.
In the end, a small minority of women were given votes at the Synod in 2023, but the bishops had vastly more voting power. The post-synodal Synthesis Report offered few details of the nature of the discussions around potentially controversial issues, but it did identify areas for ongoing reflection. One of these was the question of women’s ordination to the diaconate. It implied that there would be more discussion of this at the 2024 gathering, allowing time for further research in the interim, including “consideration of the results of the commissions specially established by the Holy Father, and from the theological, historical and exegetical research already undertaken”.
Now, we learn from the 2024 Instrumentum Laboris that this issue “will not be the subject of the work of the Second Session”, though “theological reflection should continue, on an appropriate timescale and in the appropriate ways”. In the meantime, neither of the reports by the two commissions has been published. Of the 10 groups appointed by Pope Francis to explore themes raised by the Synod, the only one whose members have not been named is the group entrusted with this discussion, which has been assigned to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
If one sees this only in terms of a single issue, it might be difficult to understand the intense frustration and disillusionment some are expressing. Writing in The Tablet (20 July), Austen Ivereigh suggests that it’s wrong to feel “angry disappointment”, arguing that the 2024 Synod is not about focusing on “a range of divisive, complex issues” but on the question, “How to be a missionary, synodal Church”. I fail to understand how the Church can be a missionary, synodal Church when more and more women are walking away and taking their families with them, tired of being treated as second-class Catholics or as irrelevant to the main business of mission and evangelisation. It is all part of a pattern of delays, deferrals, further reflections, unpublished reports, while the platitudinous waffle about women’s charisms and gifts drones on.
To say that the issue of women deacons is divisive is no reason to silence discussion. The Orthodox Church in Zimbabwe has just ordained the first woman to the diaconate in modern times. Her name is Angelic Molen, and the ordination had the approval and support of the Alexandrian Synod and other Orthodox patriarchs. If there is no open and honest discussion of such issues, there is no knowing how much support there might be among those whose voices are excluded from the privileged few invited into the conversation.
My own concern is not about campaigns for equality and rights, but about the Church’s sacramental theology and the doctrine of the Incarnation. In trying to placate women while justifying why the female body lacks the essential characteristic of the sacramental priesthood, church teaching has gone down the path of confusion and obfuscation. Consider, for example, the repeated insistence by Pope Francis that “the Church is a woman”. This renders Pope John Paul II’s essentialist theology of sexual difference incoherent, and it deprives the female body of any meaningful significance. Every attempt to trace a meaningful ecclesiological or sacramental vision only exposes more contradiction and mystification about the place of the female body in the Church’s sacramental life, if indeed it has such a place. The insistence that, on account of anatomical difference, only men are ontologically able to represent Christ cannot but foster attitudes of masculine superiority and abusive authoritarianism, which ripple down through the entire ecclesial structure and play out among us when we attend Mass.
I was received into the Catholic Church nearly 40 years ago, and I refuse to let the politics and institutions of the hierarchy drive me away from all that most gives meaning to my life: the goodness of the Catholic doctrine of Creation and sacramental grace; the story of the human quest for justice and peace that shines through the Scriptures and illuminates the lives of the saints; the quiet dedication of those who through the ages have served the poorest and most marginalised of God’s people, inspired and sustained by their Catholic faith; the inspiration that this tradition continues to offer to some of humankind’s greatest expressions of art, music, literature and architecture. My theological studies have led me to love the Catholic intellectual tradition for its marrying together of revelation and reason, grace and nature, mystical contemplation and practical action. The anachronistic workings of the modern institutional Church pale into insignificance before the magnificent hymn of the cosmos that the Catholic faith funnels into the human story.
So I cannot walk away, but I have lost interest in the chunterings of a celibate male hierarchy when it comes to women. The Vatican can carry on with its commissions and reports, but there are more fruitful ways for women to live our faith than to beg for the scraps that fall from the masters’ tables.
Tina Beattie is professor emerita of Catholic studies, University of Roehampton.
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