VATICAN CITY (AP) — Earlier than changing into Pope Leo XIV, Cardinal Robert Prevost presided over probably the most revolutionary reforms of Pope Francis’ hold forth by having ladies serve on the Vatican board that vets nominations for bishops.
However he additionally has mentioned decisively that ladies can’t be ordained as monks, and regardless of having labored for years in Peru the place ladies usually lead church communities, appears noncommittal on whether or not ladies might ever serve in any ministerial capability.
Nonetheless, the ladies who’ve labored carefully with Prevost lately have praised his management model, capacity to pay attention and respect for his or her opinions. In interviews with The Related Press, they are saying they count on that as pope, Leo will proceed to advertise ladies in church governance positions, albeit with limits.
Maria Lia Zervino was among the many three ladies Francis appointed to the Dicastery for Bishops in 2022 to assessment doable appointments. It was a job beforehand held by cardinals and bishops, an previous boy’s membership that has jealously guarded the key course of behind the appointment of bishops.
Zervino rejoiced when Prevost was elected pope, saying the respect he confirmed for her and different ladies on the board and their opinions gave them religion in him as a frontrunner.
“I’m convinced that he doesn’t need to learn how to work (with women), how to let them speak, to listen to them, to have them participate in decisions, because that’s what he does anyway,” mentioned Zervino, the Argentine former head of the World Union of Catholic Ladies’s Organizations.
Zervino mentioned she anticipated Leo would proceed Francis’ reform processes, albeit in his personal model.
“He’s a simple man, serene, always with that smile that we saw that seems to come from an interior peace,” she mentioned in an interview. “So when you see someone who is balanced, peaceful and respectful and who welcomes what you say and is always ready to hear the other, you have faith in him.”
A 2023 touch upon ladies as monks
However he drew some very clear strains.
“I think we’re all familiar with the very significant and long tradition of the church, and that the apostolic tradition is something that has been spelled out very clearly, especially if you want to talk about the question of women’s ordination to the priesthood,” he mentioned within the Oct. 25, 2023, briefing.
Catholic ladies do a lot of the church’s work in faculties and hospitals and are often chargeable for passing the religion to the following technology. However they’ve lengthy complained of second-class standing in an establishment that reserves the priesthood for males.
Prevost acknowledged Francis had created two commissions to check whether or not ladies may very well be made deacons, who carry out most of the identical capabilities as monks. Whereas he mentioned the difficulty was nonetheless open, he warned that turning ladies into clerics “doesn’t necessarily solve a problem, it might make a new problem.”
Simply because a girl in society may be president doesn’t imply there’s an “immediate parallel” within the church, he argued.
“It isn’t as simple as saying that at this stage we’re going to change, if you will, the tradition of the church after 2,000 years on any one of those points,” he mentioned.
Deacons are ordained ministers who preside at weddings, baptisms and funerals. They will preach however can’t rejoice Mass. Married males may be ordained as deacons whereas ladies can’t, though historians say ladies served as deacons within the early Christian church.
A prudent and personal listener
Karlijn Demasure, emeritus professor of sensible theology at St. Paul College in Ottawa, served on a Vatican fee with Prevost proposing reforms to the authority of bishops and the way they’re chosen. She mentioned Prevost was completely satisfied of the necessity to contain lay individuals and nuns within the choice of bishops, not less than at an preliminary degree.
“He listens well,” Demasure mentioned. “He hears what has been said, and if he doesn’t agree, he says it but in a nice way: ‘I wouldn’t say it like this, or I wouldn’t do it like that.’”
She mentioned Prevost was quiet, “prudent and private.” She wonders, although, what’s going to occur with the work of the fee, certainly one of 10 teams which might be finding out significantly thorny questions, such because the position of girls, and had been because of report again to the pope by July.
Sister Nathalie Becquart, one of many highest-ranking ladies on the Vatican, labored with Prevost throughout Francis’ assembly, generally known as a synod, on the way forward for the church. She additionally occurs to be his neighbor, residing in the identical Palazzo Sant’Uffizio contained in the Vatican gates, and was among the many well-wishers who greeted Leo when he got here dwelling the night time of his Could 8 election.
Becquart posted a joyous selfie with the pope within the courtyard in one of many first non-public moments after his election. “I had time to greet him, not just as a neighbor,” she mentioned.
The ladies’s diaconate
Becquart recalled that she had been at a convention of the 900 nuns who run the world’s feminine non secular orders when the white smoke got here out of the Sistine Chapel chimney. It didn’t hassle her that the nuns had no vote within the conclave, for the reason that cardinals “could see that the church is the people of God.”
“Synodality is about feeling we are from the same body, we are interdependent, we have a deep inner connection, and for me that was a deep spiritual experience I could never imagine before,” she mentioned.
Additionally throughout the conclave, advocates for girls’s ordination set off pink smoke flares over the Vatican to protest their exclusion from the priesthood and the election course of.
“The discrimination and exclusion of women is a sin, and we’re here to say the next pope will inherit this question and needs to work quickly to correct it,” mentioned Kate McElwee, govt director of the Ladies’s Ordination Convention.
Hofstra College researcher Phyllis Zagano, who was on Francis’ first Vatican fee on ladies deacons, stays optimistic. She pointed to Prevost’s acknowledgement that the deacon situation was nonetheless open and that he ministered in Peru, a area that has pushed for years for the church to acknowledge ladies as ministerial deacons to assist offset the priest scarcity.
“Women deserve the ordained diaconal ministry of women,” she mentioned in an interview.
