The women who are turning the Church upside down

Everyone wants their lifetime to leave the world at least a tiny bit changed, and for the better; and it is possible that a piece I wrote for The Tablet in January 2020 could yield me my footnote. I wrote the piece in a pretty exasperated mood, fed up with the fact that Pope Francis says all the right things about women, and yet has done next to nothing to put our talents to use in leadership roles in the Church.

Catholicism, I argued, has its back to the wall and desperately needs to emancipate its women. In a world where women are at least legally entitled to parity at all levels (they may not always have it in practice, but that is another issue), where democracy is widely held up as the best form of rule and where girls are raised with every expectation that they can aspire to anything their male classmates can aspire to, it makes no sense to exclude them from a more equal role in the way the Catholic Church is run.

What was needed, I argued, was a synod. “A synod that, instead of ending with women [as the Vatican synods on young people and the Amazon both did], starts with them. And focuses on them. A synod that ends with not just the right sort of words but with a proper commitment to make change, inside the Church, centre stage.”

A few weeks later, at a meeting of the pressure group, Catholic Women’s Ordination, historian Penelope Middelboe was keeping her head down. “I was lying low, because I’ve been working for change for so many years and I’d begun to think nothing is ever going to happen,” she says. “But then, someone mentioned your piece. And then one of our group, Mary Ring, said: ‘We should do something about this. We should try to make it happen.’  They started asking for volunteers, and I thought, you know what? I’m going to give it one more go.”

Middelboe joined Ring; and a third campaigner, Pamela Perry, also put her hand up. Since then, the three women have been working tirelessly – through lockdown, on Zoom, meeting in person – to plan a lay-led, women-centred synod which will take place on 5-12 September, in Bristol and online. The vision has expanded to include other issues as well as the women question; and the original three are certainly no longer on their own. More than 900 others have signed up to be involved with the organisation they have founded, Root & Branch. Equally excitingly, they have teamed up with similar lay-led organisations in other parts of the world, and the Bristol synod will include contributions from like-minded Catholics in the United States, Australia, India, France and Austria, among others.

The Bristol synod, explains Ring, is taking its lead from Pope Francis, who has promoted the idea of synodality throughout his papacy, and who has intimated that he would encourage those who want to see change in the Church to take up the challenge, and make it happen. “The problem for Francis is that he’s trapped, because the Church doesn’t have a listening mechanism,” says Ring. “It has a teaching mechanism and it knows how to tell us what we should believe, but it doesn’t have the structures to allow lively debate amongst the people, and to take those forward.”

It is not only the Pope, says Ring: priests, bishops and other clerical leaders are stuck in the same quandary; many are convinced that opening up dialogue with laypeople and giving them more traction in the way decisions are made about the Church’s future is the only way forward in the twenty-first century.

“We’ve had a bishop or two, and many priests, get in touch with us and say privately that they’re very interested to see what ­happens in Bristol,” says Ring. “One problem is that there’s a terrible fear amongst many ordained clerics about supporting an initiative like ours publicly. We’d love to have one brave bishop there in the hall in Bristol – not wearing his robes, much better to have him there in his jeans, sitting amongst us as one of us, and listening to what’s being said.”

One of the most forceful voices at the Bristol synod will be that of Mary McAleese, who for many represents the lay leader the Catholic Church desperately needs. Like many other campaigners for change, McAleese, who studied for a doctorate in canon law at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University after 14 years as president of Ireland, is critical of the official top-down synodal process that will begin in October, when dioceses across the world have been asked to consult with laypeople in the run-up to the next Synod of Bishops in Rome in October 2023.

As reported in The Tablet last week, the vision of the bishops of England and Wales for the synodal process reserves discernment around what topics should be taken forward from the parish level to the global synod to the bishops alone. While all members of the Church have the right to speak, they also have “the obligation to allow those charged with the work of discernment the freedom to do so”. This means, Ring says, that the bishops’ voice can “trump” that of the layperson. In other words, Rome’s idea of synodality falls at the first hurdle, in that it gives laypeople the right to express themselves in name only; because it’s bishops, not laypeople, who decide what issues and points of view go forward.

McAleese is characteristically straight­forward in her summation of this process: it will, she says, give laypeople a nominal or at best negligible role. Bishops will make all the important decisions – just as they have done for hundreds of years. “It’s the twenty-first century, but the Catholic Church is still in the Middle Ages when it comes to democracy in its own processes,” she says. “The Church champions democracy in other contexts, but it’s still operating as an imperial power, in a world where the imperial system has broken down: it’s drained of all validity, and by sticking with it, the Church is running out of juice.”

In speaking out as he has done on synodality, and in seeming to encourage freedom of speech and a more equal decision-making within the Church, the Pope, according to McAleese, has “opened a Pandora’s box” that he isn’t going to be able to close. Synods in Germany and Ireland where laypeople have had an equal or leading voice alongside clerics have alarmed Francis, McAleese believes; he saw a “synod on synodality” as a way of ­mopping up the enthusiasm his words had sparked, but which he realised too late would be dangerous for Rome’s authority.

“Francis is a populist, and after his election in 2013 there was a mood for something to happen, and he quickly started talking about synodality. In other Churches, like the Church of England, synodality means all the faithful speaking together – and indeed in the Early Church that’s how decisions were made,” says McAleese. But Francis hadn’t got a proper plan – “he’s undisciplined, he’s not a strategist” – even though his words tapped into a zeitgeist in the Catholic West that felt its pressing concerns, such as the inequality of women, homophobia in the Church and forbidding divorced people to remarry, were not being properly addressed by the powers that be in Rome and in bishops’ conferences.

“The horse has bolted, and he can’t stop it now,” says McAleese. “In Germany, in Ireland, and now in Bristol, laypeople are taking ­matters into their own hands – this is a wake-up call for the hierarchy. But they’re not good at listening: they hear our voices as shrill, not as loving critics. They tend to respond in a martyred tone, or with a deaf ear. But if they don’t hear us now, the Church is in danger of becoming a largely irrelevant cult.”

What chance is there, though, of success for the women at the heart of Root & Branch, given that there is no requirement for Rome or the hierarchy to share power? Another speaker at the Bristol synod is American author James Carroll, formerly a priest, who has argued that the priesthood must be dismantled to “return the Church to the people”. He says he takes his sustenance from the events that led to the end of the Cold War in the 1980s. “All the experts said a violent cataclysm was inevitable, but along came a grass-roots movement that ignited people to demand change, and change happened. What the Church needs now is a Mikhail Gorbachev figure who will work out a humane way to end a corrupt, authoritarian system that’s in a state of internal collapse.”

Penelope Middelboe, Mary Ring and Pamela Perry hope that their eight-day “Inclusive Synod”, which starts with evening online events and culminates in weekend sessions that are open to both in-person and virtual participants, will open a new pathway for laypeople in the Church. Their event will culminate with “The Bristol text”, which will cover issues such as diversity, moral theology, the role of women and the role of authority in the Church. They hope to take their findings to Rome. No one who has met the women behind Root & Branch will have any doubts: these hopeful, committed individuals will make their voices heard. And if you’re a bishop reading this, I’d be so bold as to say, it’s very much in the interests of the Church that you listen to what they say.

Full information on the Inclusive Synod can be found at rootandbranchsynod.org

Joanna Moorhead is The Tablet’s Arts editor and will chair the Rethinking Moral Theology panel at the synod on 7 September.