On Friday NCR published a news piece about the hopes of “Father Anne” (Anne Tropeano) — whom the newpaper describes without qualification (or even scare quotes) as a “priest” — that the Catholic Church will allow the ordination of women to the priesthood.
“Three years ago, inspired by her deep prayer and spiritual formation in the Ignatian tradition, she answered the call she’d been hearing for years to be ordained as a Roman Catholic priest — even though that meant breaking the church’s ban on ordination of women and facing excommunication,” NCR reported.
Tropeano believes part of her calling is to help usher in a new era of female “priests” in the Catholic Church, something she sees as required for women’s “full participation” in the Church. She is leading a movement, dubbed God Says Now, to campaign for the consideration of female priesthood in the Synod on Synodality’s study on “the role of women in the Church.”
“Calls for women to be ordained came from around the world in the early stages of the ongoing synod on synodality,” Tropeano claimed. “The call was for ordination of women at every level: deacons, priests, and bishops. People are not free to speak openly about this, but the call is real.”
NCR’s first piece on Tropeano, published in 2021, describes her as “willing to pay the price” of excommunication “to follow her call.”
“But they can’t remove me from the church; I will not be moved,” she recently told NCR.
While Tropeano is hopeful that the Catholic Church could eventually allow women’s ordination to the priesthood, the Church herself has definitively excluded this possibility. For example, Pope John Paul II declared in his 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis that it is ontologically impossible for women to be ordained.
In no uncertain terms, the Polish pontiff declared:
Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.
In 1995, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, responded to a dubium by affirming that John Paul II’s teaching in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis is to be held definitively and to be understood as belonging to the deposit of faith as it “has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.”
While Pope Francis has publicly affirmed that women cannot be priests, Cardinal Mario Grech revealed in July that Francis has appointed a study group examining the issue of the “female diaconate.”
In 2019, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, a former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), confirmed to LifeSiteNews that not only female priests, but female deacons are impossible, explaining, “The impossibility that a woman validly receives the Sacrament of Holy Orders in each of the three degrees is a truth contained in Revelation, and it is thus infallibly confirmed by the Church’s Magisterium and presented as to be believed.”
NCR’s apparent support of Tropeano’s heterodox aspirations, despite their accompanying excommunication, stands in stark contrast to its severe treatment of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, whom it described as “disgraced” and promoting “radicalized” views in its news piece about his charges of “schism” and “excommunication” by the Vatican.
Unlike Tropeano, Viganò does not promote heterodox beliefs. Matthew McCusker has argued that Viganò’s refusal to submit to Francis is “an act of prudence, not of schism,” because Francis has “clearly demonstrated” himself to be a “public heretic,” and therefore a “doubtful pontiff.” He cited as evidence of his public heresy the 2017 filial correction, which “identified numerous distinct heresies which Francis has publicly professed and never retracted, despite being publicly corrected.”
“Therefore, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò must be regarded as “not guilty” of the grave crime of schism,” wrote McCusker.