07 November 2023, The Tablet

Pope Francis needs ‘most help’ on the issue of women, says top theologian

by Sarah Mac Donald

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The Synod on Synodality offered “not a single idea of how to meaningfully include women” except to “tentatively suggest” that the two unpublished papal commissioned reports on women and the diaconate be made available for the 2024 Synod, Professor Mary McAleese has said. 

Responding to the conclusion of the first part of the Synod on Synodality and the publication of the synthesis report, the former president of Ireland said that the balance of power within the Synod “always lay with the bishops” and she blamed the African bishops for the “total disappearance” of the issue of LGBTIQ inclusion, while she blamed Pope Francis for the “reduction to bare minimalism of the ‘urgent’ need for greater inclusion of women in decision-making”.

Professor McAleese said Pope Francis had “conveniently” taken the issue of female ordination off the agenda in advance of the Synod along with blessings for same-sex marriages.

Though everything was supposed to be on the agenda, “obviously” it wasn’t, she said.

The academic, who is a canon lawyer, said the best contribution throughout the month of the Synod came from Cardinal Christoph Schönborn who had pointed that “the Pope alone has complete freedom to make the changes to the canon law, language, and teaching” which the “People of God painstakingly expressed their views on during the two-year Synodal ‘listening’ journey.”

However, another academic, Massimo Faggioli, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University was not so downbeat.

In a lecture, “The Synod: An Early Assessment of the 2023 Assembly in Rome” hosted by the Loyola Institute in Trinity College Dublin, Professor Faggioli said that when Pope Francis enlarged the membership and voting rights of the Synod he had brought about something “new” and “a different kind of Synod”.

At this Synod, the presence of women was not a token. “It was more than that. Their voices were really present and heard and visible,” he said.

Arguing that “we are at a very important juncture for the Catholic Church”, Professor Faggioli said he was “very hopeful” and what he had seen was “very encouraging”.

“A few years ago I would never have imagined this happening,” he admitted.

However, he added, “women is the issue on which Pope Francis needs most help”.

“As much as he is very open minded on LGBT,” his language on women “is from another century”.

The Italian academic suggested that Pope Francis needed to be “surrounded by women theologians”.

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