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The Synod on synodality meeting at the Vatican could be decisive for Pope Francis. Key agenda items include the role of women in the Church and welcoming divorced Catholics and LGBTQ+ Catholics.
Riccardo De Luca/AP
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The Synod on synodality meeting at the Vatican could be decisive for Pope Francis. Key agenda items include the role of women in the Church and welcoming divorced Catholics and LGBTQ+ Catholics.
Riccardo De Luca/AP
For more than a dozen years, Jazmin Jimenez was a Catholic school teacher. It was a job that she loved but which also highlighted certain contradictions. Among them, she teaches her students that the Church excludes women from the sacrament of ordination to the priesthood.
“We told them that we all had a common dignity and mission,” she said. “And then you quickly move on to a class on the sacraments, and we say, ‘Oh, yeah, well, but not here.'”
Her students also noticed the contradictions, as did many young Catholics who live in a world where equal opportunities between the sexes are taken for granted.
Jimenez is a member of the American Martyrs Catholic Church in Manhattan Beach, Calif., where for several years the congregation has been holding listening sessions in preparation for a major meeting – called a synod – to be held at the Vatican from from Wednesday.
The Synod on Synodality is a years-long process of discussion and listening, begun in 2021. Congregations around the world have held breakout sessions to discuss topics facing the Church, from the lack of men entering the priesthood to how the Church might better welcome divorced and remarried Catholics.
Jimenez and his congregation enthusiastically participated in the process.
“For me,” she says, “it was a place where we could talk about exclusion, marginalization and pain felt either by myself or by people I know and love, who are in the Church or who have left the Church. church.”
The results of these sessions were sent to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and then to the Vatican. The same process has happened in tens of thousands of parishes around the world. Jimenez says conversations with fellow Catholics clarified something for her.
“If women were allowed to be deacons in the Catholic Church, absolutely, tomorrow, I would seriously discern and consider becoming a deacon,” she says. “It’s a problem for me that it’s not something I’m able to discern right now.”
A Vatican report released this summer on these listening sessions, titled “Expand the Space of Your Tent,” found widespread interest in ways to officially recognize the ministry that many women already carry out in the world. Church.
The possibility of women in the official ministry of the Church
This month, Jimenez is traveling to Rome for the synod as an observer with Discerning Deacons, an organization that educates Catholics about the historical and contemporary role of women in ministry within the Church.
The Vatican meeting will bring together lay people and clergy who will speak and listen. And for the first time, around 10% of participants will be women.
“Which, by Catholic standards, is a big improvement,” says Massimo Faggioli, a professor of Catholic theology at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.
He says the inclusion of more people in the Church’s discernment process has been an important issue for Pope Francis, and that the presence of women – with an official vote – is a striking example of this inclusion.
Another example, Faggioli said, is openness to talking about women’s ministry. Francis broached the idea of women deacons early in his papacy.
“This broke a taboo,” says Faggioli, “because for many people, this question had been resolved forever by John Paul II and Pope Benedict, who had no interest.”
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The Synod’s workspace on synodality is the Paul VI Hall in the Vatican. Pope Francis will chair the global gathering of bishops and laity to discuss the future of the Catholic Church.
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The Synod’s workspace on synodality is the Paul VI Hall in the Vatican. Pope Francis will chair the global gathering of bishops and laity to discuss the future of the Catholic Church.
Gregorio Borgia/AP
Deacons are not priests and cannot preside over communion or hear confessions. But they are formal leaders who preach, teach and baptize — something Faggioli says women already do in many Catholic parishes.
“We allow you to do these things as long as you don’t ask to be officially recognized,” he says. “Many of us think it’s time to get rid of this hypocrisy.”
Across the world, the Catholic Church is experiencing an extreme shortage of priests – a shortage that could be alleviated by allowing women to become deacons. Many researchers argue that women deacons are not, in fact, a new idea but rather the recovery of an ancient tradition.
They highlight biblical passages that refer to women serving the early Church in various ways. For example, in his epistle to the Romans, Paul refers to Phoebe as a deacon.
Who is included when the Church says “everyone”?
At the beginning of September, the Catholic Church celebrates the life and service of Saint Phoebe. At St. Monica Catholic Community in Santa Monica, California, several women preached and helped lead worship that day.
The congregation is one of the largest in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and is known for its engagement with groups who often feel excluded from the Church. For example, the church has an active LGBTQ+ group that is recognized on a plaque in the congregation’s cafe.
Monsignor Lloyd Torgerson has been pastor here for 35 years. His congregation also held listening sessions in preparation for this month’s synod. He said the message from his flock was clear.
“Make sure there’s room in the tent for everyone,” he says. “They want to hear their pastors tell them that – that you are welcome. Where you can come and find our Lord and find each other and find honor and respect for one another.”
Torgerson says “everyone” includes divorced Catholics as well as gays and lesbians. He cites this synod as an example of the difference between Francis and his predecessors, who were more regimented than pastoral.
He smiles broadly as he quotes a saying from Francis: “Pastors, smell your sheep.”
For Torgerson, that means knowing what interests and worries his congregants and knowing what those in the pews yearn for church to be every Sunday.
A defining moment for Pope Francis
The participants gathered in Rome until October 29 will talk and listen to each other, but they will not vote on any positions or publish any documents at this time.
The Synod on Synodality is a long process that will continue until next October, when participants return to the Vatican for further conversations and deliberations. Some kind of press release is expected from this 2024 assembly.
Actual changes regarding any of the issues under discussion – from female deacons to blessing same-sex unions to better welcoming of divorced and remarried Catholics – would ultimately be in the hands of the Vatican hierarchy and Pope Francis .
Yet some conservatives in the Church are unhappy with the direction or tone Francis has set for this synod or his papacy in general. They say conversations about topics such as women in ministry and divorce only sow confusion among the faithful.
Vatican watchers, both liberal and conservative, say whatever ultimately comes out of this synod could define Francis’ legacy.
The Church’s more recent openness to dialogue, embodied in this synod, was revolutionary for lifelong Catholic Lupita Perez. It is a life that she divides between the time of Francis and that before he became pope.
“Previously,” she says, “I have to be honest with you: I wasn’t very involved in my community and my church, in my relationship with the church.”
Today, Perez is an active member of Our Lady of Guadalupe in San Diego, where she serves as youth minister. She is in Rome this week for the opening of the synod.
Perez says all this talking and listening makes her hopeful but cautious. She knows the Church is slow to change, and she fears that not moving forward on at least some of the issues addressed by the synod would be heartbreaking.
“Some people may be listening,” she says, “but are you really, truly open to change?”