(LifeSiteNews) — Pope Francis has failed to affirm the Church’s doctrine on the impossibility of ordaining women to the sacred priesthood, writing that women’s ordination “can be the subject of study.”
Writing in response to a dubium submitted earlier this year by a group of five conservative cardinals on whether “priestly ordination can be conferred on women,” particularly in reference to Pope John Paul II’s definitive statement that it is impossible to ordain women, Francis stated that “a clear and authoritative doctrine on the exact nature of a ‘definitive statement’ has not yet been fully developed.”
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Continuing, the Pope added that the denial of female ordination “is not a dogmatic definition, and yet it must be adhered to by all.” While on the one hand asserting that “No one can publicly contradict” the Church’s Tradition on the male priesthood, the Pope immediately pivoted, stating that “yet it can be a subject of study,” comparing the matter to “the case of the validity of ordinations in the Anglican Communion.” The Catholic Church declared all Anglican orders “absolutely null and utterly void” in Pope Leo XIII’s 1896 apostolic letter Apostolicae curae.
The question on the ordination of women was posed to the Pope as part of a formal dubia, expressing serious doubts and concerns about the Synod on Synodality and recent papal comments. The five cardinals – namely Walter Brandmüller, Raymond Burke, Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, Robert Sarah, and Joseph Zen – had written to the Pope on July 10, and received a reply from him on July 13, in a letter dated July 11.
It was in the July 11 letter that the Pope responded to the five concerns made by the cardinals: namely on possible attacks on the Church’s doctrines, the possibility of homosexual “blessings,” the weight of teaching afforded to the Synod, female ordination, and the necessity of repentance in sacramental Confession. The letter they received from Francis was seven pages in total, with a page and a half given to responding to the issue of same-sex “blessings.”
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So “vague” was the Pope’s letter, that the five cardinals wrote to him again on August 21. In their follow-up letter, on the matter of female ordination, the cardinals noted that the Pope appears to suggest that opening the priesthood to women “can still be explored,” and thus reformulated their dubium to ask:
… could the Church in the future have the faculty to confer priestly ordination on women, thus contradicting that the exclusive reservation of this sacrament to baptized males belongs to the very substance of the Sacrament of Orders, which the Church cannot change?
The August 21 formulation of the five dubia, posed in a manner to elicit the traditional “yes” or “no” response, remain unanswered, which prompted the cardinals to publish their letters publicly.
According to veteran Vatican reporter Sandro Magister, who published the dubia, the initial papal response of July 11 – a seven-page document written in Spanish – bore Francis’ signature but “the letter displayed the writing style of his trusted theologian, the Argentine Victor Manuel Fernández,” who was recently elevated to the cardinalate in a September 30 consistory and serves as the Prefect for the Dicastery (formerly Congregation) of the Doctrine of the Faith, the second-highest ranking position in the Catholic Church.
The unchangeable teaching of the Catholic Church since its founding by Jesus Christ is that only men can receive Holy Orders.
“Only to the apostles, and thenceforth to those on whom their successors have imposed hands, is granted the power of the priesthood, in virtue of which they represent the person of Jesus Christ before their people, acting at the same time as representatives of their people before God,” Pope Pius XII taught in his encyclical Mediator Dei in 1947.
Pope John Paul II reaffirmed this teaching in his 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.
She [the Catholic Church] holds that it is not admissible to ordain women to the priesthood, for very fundamental reasons. These reasons include: the example recorded in the Sacred Scriptures of Christ choosing his Apostles only from among men; the constant practice of the Church, which has imitated Christ in choosing only men; and her living teaching authority which has consistently held that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is in accordance with God’s plan for his Church.
John Paul II furthermore declared 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.”