ROME (LifeSiteNews) — A group advocating against Catholic teaching for women’s ordination is making its presence felt in Rome during the Synod via public protest and nightly vigils outside the Vatican.
Every night during October at 7 p.m. Rome time, activists take their positions outside St. Peter’s Basilica. It is here they make their regular protest against the Synod on Synodality and Catholic teaching generally for not allowing female ordination.
The protest is part of a series of actions orchestrated by Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC) and Women’s Ordination Worldwide (WOW).
Dating from 1975, WOC describes itself as the “largest organization working to ordain women as deacons, priests, & bishops into an inclusive and accountable Roman Catholic Church.”
They call for a change in the Church’s teaching on ordination, attesting that “it’s time to lay to rest the heresy that women cannot image Jesus in the priesthood.”
The Catholic Church has clearly pronounced the impossibility of women’s ordination to any part of the Sacrament of Holy Orders. The diaconate, as part of the Sacrament of Holy Orders, is not possible to be opened to women.
In his 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, Pope John Paul II taught, “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.”
During the opening meeting of the 2024 Synod, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández – leading the current Synod study group into the question of female deacons – declared that “there is still no room for a positive decision by the Magisterium regarding the access of women to the diaconate, understood as a degree of the Sacrament of Holy Orders.” He added the Vatican will continue an in-depth study.
READ: Vatican declares ‘no room’ for female deacons but will ‘continue the work of in-depth study’
But this declaration has not dissuaded women’s ordination activists. “The Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC) decries this hollow performance of ‘synodality,’ as inconsistent with the synodal promise of inclusivity, and a betrayal to Catholics worldwide who believed they were engaging in a sincere process of renewal of church structures,” the group responded.
“The Vatican would rather let women’s gifts rot on the vine than recognize their equality,” they argued.
Kicking off their presence in Rome during the current Synod meetings, WOC and WOW held a ceremony in the ancient Basilica of Santa Prassede, which houses the pillar on which Christ was scourged.
The para-liturgical ceremony featured testimonies and prayers for women “ordained” as priests and bishops – thus, individuals who have automatically incurred excommunication according to Canon 1378 of the Church’s law.
According to Catholic pilgrimage tour guide Mountain Bucorac, “(w)hen asked why women were wearing stoles and preaching, the sacristan said ‘it’s sacrilege, but the priest said they could pray.’”
“(T)he Vatican continues to hide behind shadowy commissions, endless study, and misogynistic theology to maintain the patriarchal status quo,” WOC wrote, announcing its series of actions in Rome this month. “That may be the Vatican’s status quo; but WOC believes in a church on the move and a God who came into the world in a place where there was ‘no room.’ In the spirit of Jesus, we will continue to live the Gospel call to equality.” {Emphasis original}
WOC and WOW have also sponsored a series of billboards around Rome promoting the slogan “Catholic women can be priests too.”
Two public protests have also been staged on the borders of the Vatican, calling on the Vatican to “ordain women” and asking “why not me?”
Commenting on the series of events during the Synod, WOW stated that they “provide a unique lens into the growing global movement advocating for the ordination of women and reflect the voices of those who believe the Church can only be whole when it embraces all its members.”
As feminist theologians, activists, and Catholics deeply committed to justice, we will continue to be an uncompromising voice for the full equality of women and LGBTQ+ people in the life of the Church. We call upon the Vatican to model the Church of equals that Christ envisioned, where all are welcome at the table.
Aside from the nightly vigils at the Vatican – which involve “two minutes of silence as we connect with the Source underneath the noise of our daily lives” – the activists have promised further “surprises yet to come” in Rome.
But though the topic of female deacons is persistently raised by certain voices in the media, the Synod and external activists, the Church’s teaching regarding ordination is not subject to change.
“It is certainly without doubt, however, that this definitive decision from Pope John Paul II is indeed a dogma of the Faith of the Catholic Church and that this was of course the case already before this Pope defined this truth as contained in Revelation in the year 1994,” declared now-former CDF prefect Cardinal Gerhard Müller in 2019, in reference to Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.
He further noted how “the impossibility that a woman validly receives the Sacrament of Holy Orders in each of the three degrees (deacon, priest, bishop) is a truth contained in Revelation and it is thus infallibly confirmed by the Church’s Magisterium and presented as to be believed.”
Indeed, in 2018, the then-prefect of the CDF, Cardinal Luis Ladaria Ferrer, S.J., defended the teaching of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis as bearing the mark of “infallibility,” with John Paul II having “formally confirmed and made explicit, so as to remove all doubt, that which the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium has long considered throughout history as belonging to the deposit of faith.”