Soline Humbert was a seventeen-year-old studying history and politics at Trinity College in Dublin when she first felt a calling to enter the priesthood. She did not welcome it. A cradle Catholic who was born and raised in France, Humbert knew that in the Roman Catholic Church only men could be priests—it was an indisputable rule anchored in official teachings and traditions. This was in the early nineteen-seventies, and in other religions, and in society at large, women’s roles were being recast under the influence of second-wave feminism. Most of the major Protestant denominations had already either recognized the ordination of women or were moving toward it. Reform Judaism had just ordained its first female rabbi. But the Catholic Church, so ingrained with symbols, held fast to the notion that a priest must bear a physical resemblance to Christ in order to stand in persona Christi. Vatican authorities often noted that Jesus chose only men as his twelve apostles—the model for the priesthood and for the foundation of his church. Moreover, his omission of the Virgin Mary from those ranks meant that women could be revered without being ordained. Other Christian traditions found countervailing inspiration in the knowledge that Christ picked Mary Magdalene to witness and proclaim the Resurrection—and in Catholic theology she was sometimes known as the apostle of the apostles. But the Vatican did not see that story, or stories of Christ’s openness to women, as justification for allowing them into the priesthood.
Humbert told me that the sudden conviction that came over her was profoundly dislocating. It felt like “a delusion rooted in pride, or in a rejection of my female nature and of God.” She was a capable, grounded person: she had weathered the death of her beloved mother from cancer, when she was twelve, and she had moved from France to Ireland on her own. Now she wondered if she was losing her mind. She saw a psychiatrist, then confided in a chaplain, who laughed at the idea. Finally, she began to pray: “Do not call me—your Church doesn’t want me.”
Humbert tried to put her sense of vocation behind her. She graduated from college, earned an M.B.A. and a master’s degree in theology, and got married and had two sons. She worked as a management consultant and volunteered at her local diocese, as a marriage counsellor. Then, one day in 1990, the yearning came back, like a dormant volcano that resumes rumbling. She was happy with her husband, Colm Holmes, a businessman who had a warm, twinkly manner and easygoing, egalitarian convictions—he’d grown up on stories of his great-aunt, a suffragist. Their boys, eight and six, were flourishing. There was nothing outwardly, or even inwardly, wrong with her life, except for her enormous longing to serve God by preaching the Gospel, hearing confessions, and blessing the bread and wine of the Eucharist. She went to tell the archbishop of Dublin, thinking that, given the dwindling supply of priests, he might be glad to know that God was calling women. Humbert recalls, “He told me, ‘Why do you want to be a priest? You could be a saint.’ And I said, ‘Well, I could be a priest and a saint. Men can be both.’ ”
For months, Humbert wept at the thought that her deepest sense of herself would never be realized. “If you are an acorn, you are meant to be an oak, not a pine tree or a cactus,” she told me. She was moved when a nun friend gave her the unexpected gift of a chalice and a Communion plate, telling her, “The Catholic Church is not ready, but you are.”
The years went by, but her desire did not fade. One summer, Humbert and her husband decided to drive with their boys from Dublin to France, to visit her family. As they were about to leave the house, a religious newsletter dropped through the mail slot. Humbert grabbed it to read on the long ferry ride across the Bay of Biscay. That evening, she opened it up to an article about the nineteenth-century saint Thérèse of Lisieux, a Carmelite nun sometimes called the Little Flower of Jesus. Humbert knew quite a bit about her, but she hadn’t been aware that Thérèse had also felt a powerful calling to the priesthood. Thérèse’s sisters had given testimony at her beatification proceedings that she had asked them to shave the top of her head so that she would have a tonsure—an emblem of priestly devotion. Thérèse had written in her diary, “I feel in me the vocation of a priest,” and she had declared that she would die at the age of twenty-four, because that is the age at which she would have been ordained—and God would surely spare her the pain of not being able to exercise her calling. Thérèse died at twenty-four, of tuberculosis.
Humbert read deep into the night. It struck her that she had not known this thrilling information about Thérèse because the Church was embarrassed by it: she had been taught about Thérèse’s sweet simplicity, but not about her fierce calling. When the ferry landed in France, the family made a pilgrimage to the town of Lisieux, in Normandy, where a basilica commemorates Thérèse. In subsequent years, Humbert returned nearly a dozen times.
In 1994, Pope John Paul II issued a stern official letter that seemed to preclude even speaking about women’s ordination. He lamented that, despite the “constant and universal Tradition of the Church,” the possibility of women priests was “considered still open to debate” in some parts of the world. John Paul went on, “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.” Humbert told me that the Pope’s words were devastating: “It’s hard to describe how sort of violent, spiritually violent, that felt to me, because, after all, it’s a document. But it felt like it was intended to put an end to people like me—to any woman who had that sense of vocation. It felt like it was trying to kill what was most alive in us, what was bound up with the divine.” Humbert believed that a true vocation—whether religious or artistic or scientific—would always be coursing through you. If you were born to do something, she said, “you resist it at your own peril.”
Unlike Humbert, Myra Brown was not born into a Catholic family. Her parents were Southern Baptists who left that church after moving from Arkansas to Albion, New York, as migrant farm laborers, in the early sixties. A few years later, her father got a job at a steel mill, and the family relocated to Rochester. When Brown, the youngest of eight children, was a teen-ager, her father died of hypothermia, after being mugged. The family was poor, but her mother kept them all fed with government assistance, an abundant vegetable garden, and work cleaning other people’s houses. Brown and her siblings were allowed to go to church with whoever would take them on a given Sunday. They went to a Baptist church with their grandmother, to a Pentecostal church with friends, and to a Catholic church, St. Bridget’s, with neighbors and with Brown’s older sister, who had converted to Catholicism.
Brown fell in love with the rituals, the music, and the fervent way the priest talked about Jesus. As an African-American, she liked that St. Bridget’s had a significant number of Black parishioners, and incorporated gospel singing into its services. Brown was a good speaker and a beautiful singer. Yet in 1992, when she was twenty-four, she was taken aback by an invitation from the priest, Father Bob Werth, to preach a homily sometime. Official Catholic teaching kept women away from the altar as well as from the priesthood. It wasn’t until 1994 that the Vatican permitted altar girls, and even today there are priests who balk at the idea. One of the leaders of the flourishing conservative-Catholic movement in the United States, Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, the former archbishop of St. Louis, has attributed young men’s declining interest in the priesthood partly to the presence of altar girls. “Young boys don’t want to do things with girls—it’s just natural,” he told a Web site punningly titled the New Emangelization Project, in 2015. “The girls were also very good at altar service. So many boys drifted away over time.” Youthful altar service was a proving ground for the priesthood, Burke contended, and it required “a certain manly discipline.”
It was only this past January that Pope Francis amended canon law to officially recognize women as acolytes and lectors—roles in which laypeople read from the Bible and assist with such tasks as lighting candles and setting up the altar. At the discretion of local bishops, women had been fulfilling these duties for years, especially in parts of Latin America where priests and male lay ministers were in short supply. Traditionalist Catholics found these reforms objectionable, too.
At first, Brown told Father Bob that she simply couldn’t deliver a homily. Then she went home and, as she was vacuuming her living room, she felt a tug on her shirt. She went upstairs to her bedroom, dropped to her knees, and prayed. She heard a voice say, “Yes, I’m calling you to preach, and teach my Word.” Brown told me, “I thought, You’ve got to be kidding me. And I started to argue with God. I said, ‘I’m Black, I’m Catholic, and I’m a woman. They don’t do that in my church!’ ” She told Father Bob yes.
Will the Roman Catholic Church ever ordain priests who are not men? Plenty of women feel that they have a priestly vocation, and many Catholics support them: according to a survey from the Pew Research Center, roughly six in ten Catholics in the United States say that the Church should allow women to become priests (and priests to marry). The figure is fifty-five per cent for Hispanic Catholics, the Church’s fastest-growing demographic. In Brazil, the Latin-American country with the largest Catholic population, nearly eight in ten Catholics surveyed by Pew endorse the idea of women priests.
The Pew survey also indicated that American Catholicism is suffering “a greater net loss” than any other faith tradition. If you Google the word “lapsed,” the word “Catholic” comes right up. By some accounts, in the past few years women—long the backbone of the Church—have been withdrawing from active involvement in greater numbers than men. Many people peel away because they can no longer abide teachings that refuse to recognize same-sex marriage, endorse contraception, allow divorced and remarried people to take Communion without obtaining annulments, or permit women to be priests. “My grown sons are not churchgoers,” Soline Humbert told me. “I’m not surprised. When they were young boys, we sat in church during those homilies about the great, terrible sin of sexuality, and of childbirth out of wedlock, and how it fell particularly on women and girls—homilies all delivered by people who would never get pregnant in their lives. I thought, I hope my boys aren’t listening. As soon as they were old enough, they relieved me of that worry by never going back.”
But, even if many Catholics would welcome women’s ordination, the prospect seems as distant as ever. The Roman Catholic Church is not a democracy, as its traditionalists are forever reminding its would-be reformers. Its governance is elaborately and rigidly hierarchical. And successive Popes have made a point of issuing fresh pronouncements on the incompatibility of women with the priesthood. They have also punished priests who have publicly expressed support for women’s ordination, sometimes going so far as to defrock or excommunicate them. In early June, the Vatican published a revision of its canon laws codifying automatic excommunication for “both a person who attempts to confer a sacred order on a woman, and the woman who attempts to receive the sacred order.”
Some progressive Catholics have suggested that revelations in recent decades about clerical sex abuse—and the unflattering light that the scandal cast on the all-male leadership, which covered up misconduct for so long—have bolstered the case for permitting women priests. But, at the top levels of the Vatican, the scandals do not seem to have influenced views on gender roles in the Church. In 2010, the Vatican, under Pope Benedict XVI, issued new rules making it easier to discipline pedophile priests, but the same document classified the “attempted sacred ordination of a woman” as a graviora delicta—a category of offense that includes pedophilia.
It wasn’t until 2007, when Anne Tropeano was in her thirties, that she found a church to reanimate the wan Catholicism of her childhood. She had a background in marketing and communications, and had been managing a rock band called TapWater, living with the musicians on a lavender farm outside Portland, Oregon. She was slim, with long hair parted in the middle and a retro-cool seventies vibe. The people she hung out with, including her boyfriend, were secular types who loved her fun-girl energy; her increasingly serious spiritual yearnings wigged them out a little. One Sunday, she went alone to Mass at St. Ignatius, a Jesuit parish in Southeast Portland. When the opening rites began, she noticed the priest, Tom Royce, at the back of the procession. He was in his early eighties, white-haired and hunched over. Tropeano said to herself, “This guy is, like, a million years old—what’s he gonna do?” She was surprised, and deeply moved, when he got to the altar and delivered “the most joy-filled, authentic homily about filial fear and the appropriate way to ‘fear’ God—not to fear God as a punisher but to have a respect-filled awe for this majestic Creator who loved us into being.”
Tropeano kept returning to St. Ignatius, a plain white structure on a busy street near a bus stop. Homeless people rolled out sleeping bags in the doorway. Inside, tiles sometimes fell from the ceiling, and parishioners regularly mopped up puddles of water that seeped through the floor. But the pews were packed, and Tropeano found the congregation to be unusually diverse. There was a significant Vietnamese and Filipino membership, along with families whose Croatian and Italian ancestors had filled the congregation in its early decades; there were a number of parishioners with disabilities. Tropeano, whose years of spiritual questing had included New Age and Buddhist interludes, found that the “Jesuit flavor of spirituality”—“the seeing God in all things, the commitment to social justice and serving people on the margins, and the intellectual acumen”—was precisely what she had been seeking. She threw herself into the life of the parish, and helped attract hundreds of new worshippers to the Novena of Grace, an annual nine days of prayer. Katie Hennessy, a palliative-care social worker who is active in the St. Ignatius community, noticed unusual qualities of charisma and compassion in Tropeano, but also signs of a solitary, solemn intensity. Hennessy sometimes went by the church in the middle of the day and saw Tropeano praying alone, kneeling at a pew as watery light streamed through the stained-glass windows of the darkened church.
In 2014, when Tropeano was forty, she enrolled in a Jesuit divinity school in Berkeley, California, where most of the other students were men preparing for the priesthood. A friend thought that Tropeano herself seemed very much like a priest in the making. Tropeano “worked so hard to wrestle with everything from liturgy to Scripture to Vatican II,” she recalled. “And she seemed so prepared to lead a church community.” (The friend asked not to be named, because she teaches at a Catholic school, and believes that speaking about Tropeano’s calling could get her into trouble.)
Hennessy thought that in the past, when even the idea of becoming a woman priest would have been beyond her imagining, Tropeano might have joined an order of nuns. But many of those orders were dying off. When Tropeano confided that she felt called to the priesthood, it made sense to Hennessy, who told me, “With her fervor and zeal, Anne needed to have a priestly role within the faith community and perform all parts of the Mass.” Tropeano’s dilemma reminded Hennessy of the Biblical parable of the talents, in which a man going on a long trip entrusts his servants with some money. Two make investments, generating a profit, but a third buries his share in the ground, for fear of losing it. The story is often interpreted as an exhortation not to let timidity get in the way of acting on one’s God-granted gifts. Hennessy told me that the Church “was burying talent out of fear.”
Pope Francis, for all his populism, warmth, and commitment to social justice, has expressed no more interest in seeing women ordained than his predecessors did. At a 2015 press conference, he referred to John Paul II’s 1994 Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, the proclamation that had so distressed Soline Humbert, saying, “Women priests, that cannot be done. Pope St. John Paul II, after long, long, intense discussions—long reflections—said so clearly.” When a Swedish journalist asked Francis about it again, in 2016, he reiterated his fealty to John Paul’s line on the matter.
That year, Pope Francis appointed a commission to study the question of women serving as deacons. In the Roman Catholic Church, deacons are ordained ministers who perform baptisms, weddings, and funerals, among other ministerial duties, but cannot celebrate Mass, hear confessions, or consecrate the bread and wine of the Eucharist. People who wanted to see women enter the diaconate—and perhaps, eventually, the priesthood—were hopeful. Among those appointed to the commission was Phyllis Zagano, an outspoken scholar at Hofstra University who has devoted years of research to making the case that women did serve as deacons in the early centuries of the Church. (The apostle Paul refers to the first-century Christian woman Phoebe as a deacon.) But Francis was not keen to take action. Saying that the commission’s findings were too disparate—“toads from different wells,” as he put it—he appointed a second one, with all new members, in 2020. It has yet to issue any deliberations. When he officially permitted women to serve as acolytes and lectors, he took care to emphasize that these are lay ministries “fundamentally distinct from the ordained ministry that is received through the Sacrament of Holy Orders.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Francis has been more accommodating on L.G.B.T.Q. matters—at least, in off-the-cuff remarks. At a press conference in 2013, he said of gay people, “If they accept the Lord and have good will, who am I to judge them? They shouldn’t be marginalized.” A recent documentary about him, “Francesco,” contained a news-making scene in which he spoke in support of civil unions. Miriam Duignan, a campaigner for women’s ordination who is the director of communications for the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research, outside London, suggested to me that the Pope’s “softening tone about same-sex relationships is based on his personal conversations with many gay men whom he may encounter within the Vatican walls.” She went on, “They may be personally lobbying him, helping him to understand that that teaching is cruel. But has he ever had an encounter with a woman who has a vocation to the priesthood? I don’t think so.”
Moreover, whatever Francis’s own sympathies might be, there is a limit to what he can change when so much of his hierarchy remains intransigent. In March, he surprised some people who had noticed his benign attitude toward same-sex unions by signing a decree, from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, saying that priests could not bless such unions. The liberal National Catholic Reporter called it “another tricky move in Francis’ tightrope walk of upholding Church teaching while also trying to extend a warmer welcome to L.G.B.T.Q. persons.”
When Francis talks publicly about women, his words often echo traditional Catholic teaching about the complementarity of men’s and women’s roles. He lauds women’s special virtues as wives and mothers, their inherent dignity, their selfless service to their parishes. He speaks about the Church as the bride of Jesus Christ. In 2015, he told reporters that women should be consoled and uplifted by the knowledge that the Church is feminine and that “the Madonna is more important than popes and bishops and priests.” For that reason, he implied, they shouldn’t need—or want—the authority that comes with ordination. Last year, in a papal document titled “Querida Amazonia,” he wrote that it would be a grave mistake to assume that women could be “granted a greater status and participation in the Church only if they were admitted to Holy Orders.” Ordaining women as priests would “subtly” undermine the “indispensable” roles they currently play: “Women make their contribution to the Church in a way that is properly theirs, by making present the tender strength of Mary, the Mother.”
Natalia Imperatori-Lee, a professor of religious studies at Manhattan College and a Catholic, finds the Pope inspiring when he talks about poverty or ecological devastation, but is unhappy with his rhetoric about women: “A lot of what he says is so wrapped up in femininity as beauty and enhancement, as uniquely spiritual and safeguarding the morality of the world. He does speak out against violence against women—but often it’s couched in ‘don’t-sully-this-precious-flower’ language. It’s really problematic for women who just want to be seen as human beings with the capacity for self-determination.”
Massimo Faggioli, a professor of historical theology at Villanova, told me, “Of the main issues on which Pope Francis has been a hero to liberal Catholics, the most disappointing to them is the issue of women. He is less conservative than some former Popes in saying that women should work, but he is still close to the traditional narrative of separate and complementary—not equal—spheres. In that way, he is a typical cleric born in the nineteen-thirties.” There are certainly Catholics, women among them, who respond to such language and even wish that Francis would go further. Last year, in an essay for the conservative Catholic magazine Crisis, Constance T. Hull wrote that, if women in the Catholic Church have a proper calling, it is not to become priests but “to love priests with the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which means a selfless love that seeks their ultimate good, that is, their sanctification.” Hull added, “To be a spiritual mother is to die to self, just like natural motherhood.”
Francis has taken some novel steps toward involving women in decision-making and Church leadership. He has appointed women to roles in Vatican governance which they had never before occupied—including the directorship of the Vatican Museums and the council that oversees Vatican finances. In February, he chose Sister Nathalie Becquart to be the first woman to serve as an under-secretary in the Synod of Bishops, an influential committee that advises the Pope.
Such concessions might seem meagre: Mary McAleese, a former President of Ireland and a leading Catholic feminist, has called the change in canon law formalizing women’s roles as acolytes and lectors “the polar opposite of earth-shattering.” But in the Catholic Church even the tiniest tectonic shift can set off a temblor. News outlets around the world covered the acolytes-and-lectors decree. The small but vocal set of conservative Catholics who have arrayed themselves against Francis were agitated once more. There wasn’t much objection when he elevated the July 22nd memorial of Mary Magdalene to a feast day on the liturgical calendar. But, when he issued a decree saying that women could have their feet washed in an Easter Week ritual previously reserved for men, some of his traditionalist critics denounced the prospect as indecent.
It’s possible that Francis is playing a long game, making incremental changes that will one day allow a future Pope to go as far as admitting women to the priesthood. This may not be what Francis personally wants, but he trusts the Jesuit concept of discernment—the examination of personal conscience as a way for the Church to find its way forward—and he values the voices of laypeople. And if some future Church, having accustomed itself to more women occupying leadership roles and standing at parish altars as acolytes and lectors, were to ordain women as priests, Francis’s actions will be seen as having contributed to that outcome. Imperatori-Lee told me she thought that the sight of women acolytes at the altar, in cassocks and sashes, might occasion in some Catholics “an imaginative shift, one toward seeing the priesthood as something open to all people of God.” She pointed out, “There’s a reason why we use stained glass as catechesis—the images you’re presented with form your understanding of the possible.”
There is at least one scholarly precedent that some softened-up Church of the future could dust off to justify the presence of female priests. In 1976, the Pontifical Biblical Commission, a body established by Pope Leo XIII, voted in favor of the position that nothing in Scripture alone prevents the ordination of women, and that it would not necessarily violate Christ’s intentions were the Church to do so. Campaigners for women’s ordination also know that they have certain demographic realities on their side: the clerical population is aging, and fewer young men want to enter the priesthood. But the movement to ordain women does not tend to rely on practical arguments. It focusses instead on a moral idea: that barring people from Holy Orders because they aren’t biological males enforces misogynist values that have harmed both women and the faith.
I recently spoke with the novelist Alice McDermott, a lifelong Catholic and an advocate of women’s ordination. She invoked “the damage that’s been done by confining an entire group of people to a lower caste.” McDermott believes that the exclusion of women is part of what made the widespread clerical abuse of children possible. Erin Conway, a former Catholic-school teacher who recently graduated from the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, told me, “There’s this theological argument against women—that the priest is in persona Christi, and that since Jesus was a man you can’t be a priest if you’re not a man. But I come back to the idea that God is bigger than that. It just seems too limiting to say God only wants half of the population to be priests. I want a God who isn’t worried about your anatomy but is interested in your call.”
Advocates for female ordination point out that Jesus welcomed women into his community. The Holy Roman Empire, however, eroded the faith’s early egalitarianism, and medieval theologians enshrined the idea of women as inferior, impure, and unfit for ministerial service. (Aquinas: “Woman is naturally subject to man.”) Deborah Rose-Milavec, the co-director of FutureChurch, a Roman Catholic church-reform organization, told me, “There is nothing more radicalizing than to realize that the early Church looked very different from the Church you grew up with.” Mary Magdalene, for example, was long seen “only as a repentant prostitute, when really she was this crucial, powerful figure.”
A network of church-reform organizations around the world have been pushing for women’s ordination for decades, and in recent years they have become feistier. The Women’s Ordination Conference, which was founded in the mid-seventies, has been headed since 2017 by an energetic thirty-five-year-old American, Kate McElwee, who is based in Rome. She has organized protests at the gates of the Vatican—a bold move, given that the police take security around the Holy City seriously. McElwee told me, “I figure, the biggest threat to the Vatican is a woman’s body and voice, so let’s use our bodies and our voices.” She was delighted when, in 2018, Pope Benedict’s personal secretary told the press, “I am of course aware that there is a noisy movement which has as its main ideological goal the fight for the female priesthood.” McElwee told herself, “That’s us—let’s be a noisy movement!”
In Germany, where laypeople have played significant roles in running the Church, a grassroots movement for women’s ordination has been particularly influential. In December, Georg Bätzing, the head of the German Bishops’ Conference, told a journalist that “there are well-developed arguments in theology in favor of opening up the sacramental ministry to women.” The Catholic Church in Germany is such an outlier on the issue that some think it could split off, triggering what the Vatican most dreads: a schism. “Could Germany break away?” Massimo Faggioli said. “That’s the one-million-dollar question. The Catholic Church there is very powerful. It enjoys the status of an established church. It gives a lot of money to the Vatican, to Latin America and Africa.” Yet it has a “tradition of theologians and entire academic institutions that are fully behind women’s ordination.”
Some women who want to be priests have not waited for permission. On June 29, 2002, on a rented boat in the Danube River, near Passau, Germany, seven women took Holy Orders contra legem—in knowing defiance of canon law. The river is considered an international waterway, and so no diocese could be blamed for having allowed the ceremony to occur. The Danube Seven, as the women became known, had asked Bishops Rómulo Braschi, of Argentina, and Ferdinand Regelsberger, of Austria, to help perform the service. (Neither of the men was in good standing with the Vatican: Braschi had broken with the Church in the nineteen-seventies, over what he saw as its inadequate response to Argentina’s Dirty War, and he had ordained Regelsberger himself, just a month before the Danube ceremony.) Less than two weeks later, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith warned the women that they would be excommunicated if they did not “acknowledge the nullity” of their ordination and ask “forgiveness for the scandal caused to the faithful.” They did not, and the Church expelled them.
In 2005, four more women were ordained as priests (and five as deacons) in a boat at the mouth of the St. Lawrence Seaway, off the coast of Canada; the next year, ordinations took place on the Bodensee, between Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, and at the convergence of rivers in Pittsburgh. There are now about two hundred women priests, many of them in the United States. They call themselves Roman Catholic Womenpriests. After a while, the Vatican stopped bothering with individual warning letters to women, given that womenpriests are automatically excommunicated at the moment of the ceremony. As many in the Church hierarchy seemed to see it, an ordination, like a plant in inauspicious soil, would essentially not take hold in a woman’s body; it could not be real, only a presumptuous charade.
Jane Via, a former theology professor and a retired deputy district attorney for San Diego, was ordained as a priest in the Bodensee ceremony. She told me that the ensuing excommunication was painful; it saddened her that she wouldn’t be buried in a Catholic cemetery. One of her teen-age sons tried to reassure her by saying that if she agreed to be cremated he’d put her ashes in his pocket, cut a hole in it, and walk through a Catholic cemetery.
Via went on, though, to lead a thriving congregation that is not recognized by the canonical Church. There are dozens of other womenpriests leading their own worship communities. They often meet in church spaces rented to them by other denominations, and appeal to Catholics who have been alienated by the Church’s teachings on gender and sexuality but are still drawn to its rituals, its liturgy, and its tradition of service to the poor. In 2005, Via and her friend Rod Stephens—a priest who had voluntarily resigned his orders because he is gay and wanted to live with the man he loved—founded a parish in San Diego, the Mary Magdalene Apostle Catholic Community. Via wanted it to serve “disenfranchised Catholics: driven-away Catholics, like my husband; fallen-away Catholics, like my children; divorced-and-remarried-without-annulment Catholics, like my colleagues in my office; L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics; and people like me, who have no place in the Catholic Church to worship with integrity anymore.”
Joe Stewart, who is retired from a job in printing services for the Navy and the Department of Defense, has been attending Mary Magdalene from the start. He and his wife, Margie, liked the idea of ordaining women, but soon found other things to appreciate about Mary Magdalene. Previously, they had attended a Black Catholic church in San Diego where the entire congregation joined the priest in saying the words consecrating the bread and wine—a practice that he and Margie found moving. Then their priest told them that he’d had a visit from the bishop, who warned him that the congregants were not allowed to do such things, and the practice ceased. At Mary Magdalene, the congregation spoke the blessing along with the priest, and nobody worried about breaking the rule—they’d already broken a bigger one.
Soline Humbert is now sixty-four, with shoulder-length hair that is mostly silver. She has an emotional seriousness that is lightened by bursts of merriment. Humbert considered becoming a Roman Catholic womanpriest, but in the end it did not feel like the path for her. Instead, she began informally celebrating the Eucharist in her home, a bungalow built in the nineteen-sixties in Blackrock, a quiet suburb on the coast outside Dublin. At the first such ceremony, on the Feast of the Epiphany, in 1996, there were only three others present, all of them men: Colm Holmes, her husband; a Catholic priest friend; and a man who had once trained for the priesthood. They all sat around the rosewood dining-room table she and Holmes had bought soon after getting married. Despite the reassuring familiarity of the surroundings, the act felt momentous and defiant and a little frightening. Humbert went out to the garage to find some wine that could be consecrated, and smiled when she realized that the bottle she’d grabbed at random from the cupboard was a Château Sainte-Marie—St. Mary’s wine. To lift the chalice and the bread above the makeshift altar where they’d eaten so many family meals, and to utter the familiar words of blessing that she had heard male priests say all her life, Humbert had to push through a paralyzing fear of succumbing to hubris. But once she overcame this feeling, she told me, “I was not playing a role, not acting—instead, I was giving expression to something very much within me.”
Holmes has also become deeply involved in the movement for women’s equality in the Church. He is one of the two heads of the reform group We Are Church Ireland, and he does Zoom interviews in front of a large painting, which he commissioned, showing women at the Last Supper. Irish television reported on the couple’s activities, and some of the reactions were harsh: Humbert received letters accusing her of being unstable, hysterical, power-hungry, and in urgent need of more children. Her sense of calling has lasted through five Popes, and she does not think she will see it officially sanctioned in her lifetime. When people cheer such reforms as the recognition of female acolytes and lectors, she told me, she feels that they are being placated by “crumbs from the patriarchal system that will not satisfy the hunger, the God-given hunger, for equality and dignity.” Still, the house Eucharists have brought Humbert a deep sense of satisfaction. Since the pandemic began, the Dublin group has been meeting on Zoom, and to her wonderment people have listened to her homilies from Pakistan, the United States, South Africa, Australia, Brazil, and all over Europe.
For many years, Myra Brown worked as a nurse while heading the hospitality ministry at a church in Rochester called Corpus Christi. Gradually, she told me, she had begun to feel “like the ministry was following me.” She went on, “It didn’t just happen to me in churches. My life was being flooded with it. I’d go to a grocery store to shop, and ninety per cent of the time somebody would come up to me and say hello, and I’d say hello, and it would end up being some kind of aisle confession. And I would walk away saying to myself, ‘That person just told me their whole life.’ ” She’d go shopping at a mall, or to a restaurant, or to a gas station, and have the same sort of encounter, often culminating in people asking her to pray for them. “I was aware that those experiences kept following me, but I didn’t know what that meant.”
The priest at Corpus Christi, Father Jim Callan, was progressive, and he allowed a female associate pastor, Mary Ramerman, to lift the Communion cup and say prayers at Mass. The congregation also recognized same-sex unions, and invited everyone to take Communion—not just Catholics in good standing. In 1998, the local diocese fired the staff. The next year, a congregation of a thousand Corpus Christi parishioners reconstituted itself as Spiritus Christi, with Ramerman as their founding pastor and Callan as her associate. The Catholic Church claimed that, in doing so, they and their flock had excommunicated themselves. Today, Spiritus Christi holds services at a red-sandstone Presbyterian church in downtown Rochester. In 2017, at a ceremony presided over by one of the Danube Seven, Brown was ordained, contra legem, as a Roman Catholic woman priest. At Spiritus, she now heads a congregation that is fifteen hundred strong.
Spiritus has a gospel choir, and Brown preaches wearing a stole that is embroidered with the words “Black Lives Matter.” At the altar, she talks about racism “as the worst invention of human effort,” but one that can be dismantled because “we created it.”
In divinity school, Anne Tropeano found herself increasingly convinced that the “tight grip the institutional Church is keeping on the priesthood is choking the life out of the entire Church.” Privately, she believed that she would be a “phenomenal pastor of a parish,” and it filled her with despair to know that the Vatican would not allow it. So she decided to pursue ordination with the Roman Catholic womenpriests movement. The ceremony is scheduled to take place in October. For now, she is working at a nonprofit in Albuquerque, but she hopes to become a full-time priest and build, from the ground up, a big, busy, social-justice-oriented parish. Most Roman Catholic womenpriests are married, and many have children and grandchildren, but Tropeano, who is now forty-six, has decided that celibacy will be part of her vocation and that she will wear the Roman collar. (Many women in the movement do not.) She recently started a blog called “Becoming Father Anne,” and likes to call herself a “Vatican reject.” In an e-mail, she explained that she aims to “challenge and mock the absurdity and narrow-mindedness of this idea that women cannot live out the role of priest within the Catholic Church.” She went on, “You say women can’t be priests? Watch me. I will strive to be a completely kick-ass priest.”
Kori Pacyniak was eight when they told their grandmother they wanted to become a priest. (Pacyniak, who is nonbinary and uses the pronouns “they” and “them,” grew up as a girl.) “Only boys can be priests,” Pacyniak’s grandmother replied. Pacyniak recalls saying, “ ‘Fine—when I grow up I want to be a boy.’ That’s just how my eight-year-old mind worked.” Pacyniak’s parents, a journalist and a public-school administrator, had immigrated to the U.S. from Poland, and the family’s devout Catholicism was inextricably bound up with its Polish identity. Pacyniak was brought up in Chicago, and went to Polish Scouts and Polish folk-dancing classes along with Mass, and at home they burrowed into the lives of the saints. “I loved martyrs,” Pacyniak recalls. “I loved Joan of Arc. I was, like, ‘Slaying dragons is a job description? Excellent, I’m there.’ ” In high school, Pacyniak played competitive soccer—and in their spare time read Thomas Merton and Thérèse of Lisieux. One day, Pacyniak wrote to an order of Carmelite nuns in Baltimore and to an order of Poor Clares in the Netherlands, asking how to join a convent. To Pacyniak’s disappointment, the nuns told them to go to college before making such an inquiry.
Pacyniak studied religion and Portuguese at Smith College in the early two-thousands, got a master’s in divinity from Harvard, and then went to Boston University, for a master’s in theology and trauma. At all three institutions, they encountered friendly people from the Episcopal Church—the perpetual temptation of liberal Catholics fed up with the Church’s teachings on gender and sexuality. But Pacyniak felt Catholic to their bones. They happily went to chapel with their new friends, but, as Pacyniak put it to me, “I was, like, ‘I’m not going to become an Episcopalian just because they ordain women.’ ” They did not want to be driven away and leave Catholicism to what they saw as antediluvian forces. They thought, “I’m going to stay and fix my church somehow.”
On February 1, 2020, in San Diego, I attended the ordination of Pacyniak, who would soon become the leader of the Mary Magdalene Apostle Catholic Community. Womenpriests are no longer ordained by men on international waters: enough of them have become bishops in the movement that they can perform such rituals themselves, without involving male bishops, and, since the Vatican automatically excommunicates womenpriests, local dioceses can generally escape any suspicion of being linked to them (and, indeed, try to ignore them completely). The Vatican’s teachings on transgender people are no more progressive than its stance on women priests, but the Mary Magdalene community was warmly welcoming to Pacyniak, the first known transgender and nonbinary person to be ordained within the Roman Catholic womenpriest movement.
A local Episcopal cathedral, St. Paul’s, had lent itself out for the occasion, and the pews were mostly filled. Pacyniak’s parents, Basia and Bernard, were there, as were their brother, Gabriel, a law professor, and his wife and their two young children. So was the woman Pacyniak describes as their “platonic life partner,” an illustrator named Jessica. Before the service, people called out greetings and hugged in the aisles. An elegantly dressed woman in front of me asked her companion if he had any Kleenex: she knew that she was going to cry.
At a reception afterward, in the church hall, there were fairy lights and a long table laden with food. Pacyniak and their brother spun around the room doing a traditional Polish folk dance that they’d learned as kids. I talked with a woman named Heather Berberet, a psychologist who is a Mary Magdalene parishioner and one of its church musicians. Berberet is a lesbian, and she and her partner have a fifteen-year-old daughter. Berberet told me that she would have ceased being a practicing Catholic long ago if it weren’t for Mary Magdalene: “I would never have been able to participate in church life like this, never have been able to have my daughter, with her two moms, baptized.” Later, I asked her if she thought the official Church would ever recognize the callings of people like Jane Via and Kori Pacyniak. “It may choose not to,” she said. “And, if so, it will continue to fall into irrelevancy. The Church may die because it won’t change.” But, she added, “we will continue to create our own spaces that meet our needs. Because that’s what humans do.”
In the past year, people from elsewhere have been attending Mass at Mary Magdalene by Zoom. Among them are Pacyniak’s parents. They had always worshipped at a mainstream Catholic church, but it wasn’t just Pacyniak’s preaching that attracted them to Mary Magdalene. Basia Pacyniak told me that the participatory elements, and the church’s obvious respect for laypeople, made her think it was more like “what I imagine the original Church was like.” She went on, “What was it that Christ said—‘Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there’?” Basia began to cry. “It’s basically saying we are all the Church.”
At Pacyniak’s ordination, sunlight shone through the stained-glass windows, illuminating a blue streak in their hair. I thought about what a religious-studies scholar, Jill Peterfeso, had written not long ago—that the ceremonies involving womenpriests are transgressive because they are traditional. Aside from the fact that women and a transgender person were wearing long white robes and crimson vestments at the front of the church, and that the ceremonial language had been rendered inclusive, the occasion looked and sounded a lot like a traditional Catholic service. Pacyniak knelt before two women bishops, Jane Via and Suzanne Avison Thiel, for the laying on of hands. Via, the first to do so, placed her hands gently on Pacyniak’s bowed head. People walked silently down the aisle to do the same. “Loving God,” Thiel said during the Prayer of Consecration, “shower Kori, your servant, with grace. Bless them anew with the spirit of holiness.” ♦
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