Pledge your prayers and fasting for protection of the Church during the Synod on Synodality HERE
(LifeSiteNews) — The president of the Swiss Bishops’ Conference has made the heterodox claim that the Catholic Church should ordain women.
As reported by Swissinfo this past weekend, Bishop Felix Gmür, who is scheduled to attend the upcoming Synod on Synodality in Rome, told Swiss media outlet NZZ am Sonntag earlier this month that the Church needs to change its approach toward women in the Church.
The president of the #Swiss Bishops' Conference admits mistakes in dealing with abuse cases in the Catholic #Church and advocates for the abolition of #celibacy and the admission of #women to the priesthood. 👇https://t.co/Eo0rBvLDbL
— swissinfo.ch (@swissinfo_en) September 24, 2023
“The subordination of women in the Catholic Church is incomprehensible to me. Changes are needed there,” Gmür reportedly said.
The bishop also called for married priests.
“Celibacy means that I am available to God. But I believe that this sign is no longer understood by society today,” he remarked. “The time is ripe to abolish celibacy. I have no problem at all imagining married priests.”
READ: Archbishop Aguer: The Synod on Synodality is leading souls from the truth of Christ and His Church
The unchangeable teaching of the Catholic Church since its founding by Jesus Christ is that only men can receive Holy Orders because they, being males like Our Lord was, offer to God the Sacrifice of the Mass in persona Christi.
“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.
What’s more, Christ Himself explicitly chose only males to be His apostles. He instructed them alone in the Upper Room during the Last Supper to “do this in memory of me.”
“The fact that the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God and Mother of the Church, received neither the mission proper to the Apostles nor the ministerial priesthood clearly shows that the non-admission of women to priestly ordination cannot mean that women are of lesser dignity, nor can it be construed as discrimination against them,” Pope John Paul II wrote in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in 1994.
As previously reported by LifeSite, in 2017, Bishop Gmür approved a priest who had been convicted of sexually abusing several adolescent boys from 1999 until 2010 to be assigned to a parish in Riehen.
The priest had been put in pretrial detention for over a month and was ordered to pay a fine of 4,000 Swiss francs ($4,386 US dollars). Instead of keeping him sidelined, Gmür rehabilitated him, arguing that he deserved a second chance. The priest eventually withdrew his nomination after legal documents related to his sentencing were leaked to the public.
READ: Bishop Schneider: Catholics ‘cannot obey’ if the Synod on Synodality issues false teachings
LifeSite journalist Maike Hickson has reported that Gmür is “known for his rather progressivist and lax views.” In 2019, he applauded initiatives in Switzerland to legalize same-sex civil “marriage.” On Christmas Eve 2020, he told NZZ that he could imagine “a woman standing at the altar.” Gmür has been the president of the Swiss Bishops’ Conference since the beginning of 2019.
Switzerland is home to some of the most notoriously left-wing, dissident clergy in the entire Church. In 2020, women in the Swiss Diocese of Basel were discovered putting on vestments, standing at the altar, and essentially simulating a Catholic Mass, with Gmür reportedly doing nothing about it. Earlier this month, Bishop Joseph Maria Bonnemain of Chur decided not to punish two women who attempted to concelebrate at Catholic Mass in 2022 and to only issue a “formal reprimand.”
The Synod on Synodality is scheduled to begin October 4 and run until October 29. It will reconvene for its final session in October of next year. Speculation from Vatican experts is that the role of women in the Church will be a major point of discussion at next month’s gathering.
Pledge your prayers and fasting for protection of the Church during the Synod on Synodality HERE