On Easter morning, the Risen Christ chose to appear first to Mary of Magdala. He commissioned her as his representative and spokesperson to “Go and tell” the Good News to the others.
Mary of Magdala is the first apostle, the “Apostle to the apostles”. So how is it women are still excluded from all ordained ministries in the Catholic Church?
Fifty years ago I was a student in Trinity College, agonising over a calling to the priesthood (presbyteral ministry). At the same time in Rome, Pope Paul VI was shutting down debate on the opening of the ordained ministries to women. He asked the Pontifical Biblical Commission (of 20, including two male clerics) to study what was deemed a new question: Can women be priests?
In April 1976 the commission’s unanimous conclusion was that the New Testament by itself didn’t settle the possible accession of women to the presbyterate.
The commission’s report was never published. We know of its deliberations only because its findings were leaked. A few months later, Paul VI declared, in his Inter Insigniores document, “The church does not consider herself authorised to admit women to priestly ordination.”
Lacking convincing theological arguments, it devolved to his successor Pope John Paul II to quash the issue, with Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in 1994.
Pope Francis called a Global Synod in 2021 for Catholics to listen to the Spirit in each other and to speak boldly. For many, this process of discernment of what the Spirit was saying to the Church included asking again about women’s ordination.
The issue of women deacons and priests surfaced in all dioceses in Ireland and in many other countries despite some attempts to filter it out as a settled immutable doctrine.
Last month, on March 10th, the Vatican released the Report of the Study Group on The Participation of Women in the Life and Leadership of the Church. As I read it, one word jarred. Repeated over and over, it caused me to stare in disbelief. “Discomfort”, as in: “some women experience discomfort in the church”.
Discomfort! Such a mild, safe word. No mention of pain, of suffering, of wounding. Discomfort is a word I have never used to describe the reality of my situation in the church, nor have I ever heard it from other women.
I remember a newspaper article headline to an interview I gave: “The agony of a vocation denied to women,” it read. This reflected much more accurately my reality.
Did any of the writers of this report read Out of the Depths about Ludmila Javorova? In 1970 she was ordained a priest by a Catholic bishop as part of the underground church in the then Czechoslovakia when that country was under Soviet rule and it seemed all but certain that Catholicism would be erased.
The denial of a vocation is not to experience “discomfort”. It is a severe wounding. I have described it as a crucifixion in a painting and a poem.
When Saint Thérèse of Lisieux spoke of her death at 24 as God sparing her the pain of not being able to be ordained, she was not talking of “discomfort”.
When the clerical child sexual abuse and cover up scandal first surfaced, we heard again and again from church leaders that they “didn’t realise how harmful it was to the children”.
To use the word “discomfort” is to do something similar: it denies and minimises the profound harm done to women by what is a form of spiritual abuse.
To speak of women’s “discomfort” serves only to preserve the comfort of those responsible for a disgraceful situation which cries to Heaven for justice and remediation. There is little incentive and no great urgency when all that is at stake is a “discomfort” for women.
A Monsignor once asked me: “Surely the pain isn’t that bad?” All he wanted was to be reassured he didn’t really have to take responsibility. He is not the only one.
In a recent interview, Bishop of Down and Connor Alan McGuckian was asked about women who felt they are treated as second-class citizens in the church. He denied they were and added, as proof: “I didn’t consider my mother a second-class citizen, nor did she consider herself one.”
Obviously the feedback from so many women in the synodal process counts for nothing. He was adamant women would never be ordained. And then there is the bishop who said, “It’s above my pay grade.”
To all the churchmen who exhort us to be endlessly patient, I say: Where is your courage, when what is at stake is a matter of justice, of credibility of the church and faithfulness to the Gospel?
The Irish Synodal Pathway will hold its National Assembly on October 17th next, the feast day of St Soline, whose name I bear: a reminder that God calls us by name, not by gender. Now is the time, the kairos. What comes from the Holy Spirit cannot be stopped. Christ is risen and women are rising.
Soline Humbert is a spiritual director and the author of A Divine Calling: One Woman’s Life-Long Battle for Equality in the Catholic Church, (2025, The Liffey Press)