NCR: Women’s ordination, synodality and hope for the future
Read Executive Editor Heidi Schlumpf’s March 11, 2022 column in NCR:
As the second anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic approaches, I recall (with the aid of Google Calendar) that my last work trip before the lockdown was in January 2020 to cover the lead-up to the Democratic presidential primary in Iowa. I interviewed Marianne Williamson the night before she dropped out of the race, and I won’t soon forget the treacherous drive home to Chicago in a blizzard.
My last pre-coronavirus flight was two months earlier, to Baltimore for the U.S. bishops’ annual fall meeting as they were debating whether abortion was a “preeminent” issue or not. So it’s been awhile since I’ve been on a plane, and it was with some trepidation that last week I finally did make my first flight since the beginning of the pandemic for a talk in Connecticut.
I’m glad I did.
The event was almost as rare as my flight: a panel discussion about women’s ordination at a Catholic institution. Of course, nearly all discussion of the topic has been halted in official Catholic circles after Pope John Paul II declared in 1994 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.”
But now we are in the process of a churchwide consultative process as part of the synod on synodality. Although Pope Francis has so far reaffirmed the ban on women’s ordination, he also has said that no topic is off the table as part of the synodal process.
So kudos to Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, whose Center for Catholic Studies invited the head of the Women’s Ordination Conference, Kate McElwee, and me, as executive editor of NCR, for a conversation about “Women’s Ordination and the Synodal Church.”
McElwee (who is the spouse of NCR news editor Joshua McElwee) said she is optimistic about the synodal process and hopes for “courageous conversations” to happen through it.