A Woman’s Place

In the corner of a busy home, an altar stands. Perhaps there’s a picture of a saint atop the table, perhaps a candle waiting to be lit for times of quiet reflection and prayer. Life happens around the altar. Kids grow and learn. Traditions are transmitted.

“The family becomes the first church community that children know. Parents are tasked with the religious education of their children,” says theologian Pearl Maria Barros, assistant professor of religious studies at Santa Clara University. And, in most families, “Women are the ones who are seen as the keepers of the faith, in terms of transmission.” In many households across many faiths, mom or grandma leads the predinner prayer, drags half-awake children to weekly and holiday religious services, and fosters fidelity to what has come before.

But outside the home, women’s roles in faith often shrink.

In the Catholic Church, as the number of men entering the priesthood has sharply declined, women are being called upon to work more, in both informal and formal roles. But only as unordained Church members. Conversations about allowing women to become deacons earned much attention in the 2023 opening of the Synod, an assembly of bishops and other leaders in Rome to discuss and resolve doctrine issues. While the panel created to examine the issue of women’s role in the Church won’t release its report until next year, recent statements strongly suggest women will not be able to become deacons any time soon.

Despite many barriers restricting their access to ordination and high leadership, Catholic women are still finding ways to minister, accompany the faithful, and share faith experiences, blazing paths both new and old.

How We Got Here

If the person who found Jesus’ tomb empty was a woman—Mary Magdalene—how did the Church end up with a hierarchy that excludes women from nearly all higher levels?

Appropriation. No, really.

Barros says in the early Church, women held many leadership roles. They were followers of Christ, spreading the good word through ministry. In a letter to the Romans, St. Paul refers to a woman deacon named Phoebe. In fact, the discussion of ordaining women or allowing them to become deacons is largely based on Phoebe’s title and work.

 That changed in 312 C.E., when the emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, and Christianity became more Roman and therefore patriarchal.

“In the early Church, women had pivotal roles in terms of leadership and authority. We have women enacting the functions we now associate with being a priest,” Barros says. “The fact that these women are in leadership roles challenges the patriarchy of the Roman establishment.”

Signs of this shift factor elsewhere. In the First Epistle to Timothy, the apostle Paul writes that women are not to preach. The fact that these notes exist, Barros says, shows us that women had been actively preaching.

“You don’t tell your child to stop doing something that they aren’t already doing, for example,” she says.

Over the ensuing centuries, as Church roles became formal, women and men found themselves in different worlds with different access to power. Ordination and, with it, the authority to preside over baptisms, weddings, and confession belonged to the world of men. The Church, the thinking went, was bound by the example of Jesus’ apostles—all men. Women, of course, still found ways to express their faith and be informal leaders in the Church. By the 13th century, women who felt called served in abbeys or as nuns, now known as women religious. They became leaders in education, opening up schools in rugged places like gold rush-era San Francisco. They provided care as nurses and ran hospitals. Some, like Mother Teresa, garnered international renown for their works of service. Laywomen, including journalist and social activist Dorothy Day, launched widespread movements grounded in faith.

In 1994, Pope John Paul II cemented the divide within the Church with an apostolic letter prohibiting women from the priesthood. Pope Francis noted the authority of the letter in 2016 when a Swedish reporter asked about the possibility of change.

“St. Pope John Paul II had the last clear word on this, and it stands, this stands,” Francis said.

Women continue their acts of faith in various ways, but roles involving consecration, including consecrating the Eucharist or delivering homilies during Mass, remain closed.

How it Plays at the Parish

“I don’t want people to think there are no women in the Church, because that’s just not true,” says Julie Hanlon Rubio, a professor of Christian social ethics and associate dean at SCU’s Jesuit School of Theology. “Parishioners encounter women as transmitters of faith at the sacraments. They are often the ones running the education programs.” Of course, women don’t administer the sacraments, but they are often the ones hosting the classes leading up to the ceremonies in some parishes. They do volunteer work, laying out the Bibles and making coffee. They visit the ill and the elderly. They may not give homilies, but in some parishes, they are permanent lectors, a change made in 2021 by Pope Francis. Women may read the Scriptures or give a reflection during Mass, as well as assist with communion. Since 1994, churches may allow girls to become altar servers, but bishops could not force parishes to do so.

As the number of priests shrinks, Rubio says more and more women are filling in. “There’s an awful lot that women are doing, and some women do have titles that go with that,” she says. “They are directors of parish life, with all of the responsibilities that entails, and priests are coming in for the sacraments. People work long, long hours and it should be named.”

In some parishes, particularly those that are smaller or have fewer resources, such roles are not formalized, and women are working without a title or the benefits that one would convey.

And yet the evidence of women of faith is everywhere. Often, it is a woman who welcomes new parishioners to the fold.

“Women have power and influence and wisdom that they are sharing,” Rubio notes. “Some people have gifts. They have gifts of leadership or gifts of preaching or prayer. When we let people use those God-given gifts, it is a real gift to the community.”

Still, some women are frustrated with the lack of formalized roles and choose to leave the faith.

Rubio has found a place for her gifts at JST, where women have taught and studied for the past 40 years. In her recent book, Can You Be a Catholic and a Feminist?, she probes what it means to stay in the faith she is called to.

“To be a feminist and a Catholic means to stay and see more of the good,” she says. “Digging deeper into the institutions while also maintaining a critical stance is hard, but it is what we are called to do.”

Pope Francis has also elevated women into roles previously inaccessible to them at the Vatican. In the Synod discussion, he tasked leaders to consider the roles of women, as well as how to minister to those in the LGBTQ+ community and improve seminary education, among other topics. The first similar meeting of Church leaders to council the pope, Vatican I, was held in 1869 and included no women at all. By 1964 at Vatican II, 23 women auditors were allowed to watch the proceedings and participate in planning sessions. The Synod of Bishops was established after the Second Vatican Council as a way to provide regular council to the pope. This Synod, launched in October 2023, is the 16th such gathering. It is the first time that laypeople, including women, are voting members.

While women being named deacons seems to be out of consideration, Rubio believes it isn’t the end of the discussion. “There are so many roles that are closed not because of cannon law but culture,” she says. “I think there are a lot of other roles that are going to come up.”

The Power of Education

Growing the space for women to share their God-given gifts is something that Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator has dedicated himself to long before being named the dean of the Jesuit School of Theology and a member of the Synod. Formerly serving as the provincial superior of the Jesuits of the Eastern Africa Province, Orobator saw the problem firsthand in Eastern Africa.

“The Church is a space that is very much gendered. Men have access to authority, and they have space to exercise their skills and pursue their interests within the Church,” he says. “And because of the gendered nature of this arrangement, it means for women to access this kind of space and exercise any modicum of authority, they would also need to be empowered. They would need to, in a way, show credentials.”

Orobator and his colleagues in Africa looked for ways to enable women to exercise their callings to ministry and authority. Education, they believed, was the key.

“Women do not have the access to education that men have, which is no news. That’s very widespread worldwide,” Orobator says. “And, if they do, they don’t have the means or the resources it takes to thrive.”

Indeed, even in the United States, only 29% of the students enrolled in Catholic theological schools in the United States were women in 2023, according to The Association of Theological Schools. About 27% of the faculty and administrators are women. Many seminaries, but not all, opened to women under Pope John Paul II’s decree granting ecclesiastical degrees to laypeople, including women.

Orobator and others in the Eastern Africa Province went about setting up a program for women to attend seminary and earn theological degrees. They secured funding from a foundation. And then they began recruiting capable and interested women from religious communities in across Africa to study for advanced degrees. In the recruitment, however, Orobator saw just how deeply the gender divide cut. Some communities were reluctant to send qualified students. Such an opportunity was new, and leaders feared that the highly educated women wouldn’t return to communities where their service was needed.

The program ran for eight years. Its students went on to leadership positions within their communities. Some went on to teach at the university level.

“It just proves the concept that if people get resources, they get the support, it’s not a question of gender. That is a construct,” Orobator says. “People are capable of pursuing their goals and achieving their highest ambitions if given the opportunity. It is just the way the Church and society are structured that favors one side over the other.”

There are proven benefits to the communities where women serve as well. It opens other people’s eyes to the potential of women, allowing women and girls to imagine themselves in new roles.

In Rome, the Synod study group looking at how to better prepare priests to serve has lighted on this topic. Having more experience with women and other laypeople will help priests understand the communities they minister to, the group says.

Importantly, Orobator notes, providing opportunity is about human flourishing and allowing the expression of God’s gifts. “No, it is not a favor [to women]. These are competent people, and they are able to function at the same level as anybody else,” he says.

At JST, a new strategic plan specifically outlines the goal of establishing an international hub of inclusion and education of lay women and religious sisters for leadership and ministry. With dedicated funding, the program could provide women with the opportunity and resources they need to thrive and help their communities do the same, just like those sisters in East Africa.

So, while the Synod favors opening educational spaces to more women, leadership opportunities, including ordination, remain closed.

“It’s slow work,” Orobator says, “and it’s hard work, because there is resistance.”

The Digital Age

It was during quarantine for the COVID-19 pandemic that Porsia Tunzi discovered a new religious community. Stuck at home, she looked for connection where so many did, on social media. There, she found a new space for Catholic women to convene and take control of their spiritual lives. Through computer and phone screens, these women—some active members of parishes, others turned off by the lack of opportunity in the Church—were leading prayer, ministering to others, and publishing religious art.

As a doctoral candidate in historical and cultural studies of religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Tunzi was intrigued. Here was a space where women were way out front in ministry, not running the show behind the scenes.

“I was thinking about what I saw in my own lived experience. I was being thrown onto social media to explore my own religious identity and the idea of belonging,” she says. “I was stumbling onto these accounts. Person after person had public accounts. Anyone could follow them, and they were really sharing their thoughts of faith.”

These women were building Church-like communities outside the physical realm. Under the guidance of JST’s Associate Dean Rubio, Tunzi began working on her thesis. She interviewed more than 70 Catholic women who are content creators.

Rubio notes that these women are influencers in every meaning of the word. “These social media accounts have far more followers than likely most theologians have readers of our papers,” she says with a laugh.

These accounts can amass thousands of followers to whom women talk about their faith every day. Smaller accounts may have more intense communities, Tunzi says. In her research, she found that in some of them, the content creator will respond to every message, send notes to those going through health crises, and some- times arrange to meet in person.

“For some of these women who follow these accounts, this is taking the place of a priest, or spiritual guide, that feels different than what you are getting in the parish,” Tunzi says.

It is in these online communities and through these creators that some young women are seeing their life, faith, and struggles with both reflected back to them. They feel seen.

“In my interviews, they’d say things like ‘I’ve always wanted someone to know how I feel,’” Tunzi says. Sometimes, the videos or photos posted online include a crying toddler or a breastfeeding infant. One creator shares her experience raising five kids—and all the joy and difficulty that come with it. “It’s absolutely gritty work,” Tunzi says. “Being faith-filled isn’t pretty. It’s messy. And it can be dark.”

Authentically sharing the mundanity and the mess of the ways faith works in everyday life can feel like a calling. And women watching women harness their faith in this way can feel like a door opening wider to the Church. Women feel welcome here.

“There is a sense of, ‘Come into my house, come into my apartment, this is me in all of the messiness,’” Tunzi says. “You can be mess and be worthy of standing before God.”

Online, she found a wide world of women with access to new tools and resources, pushing their faith forward, as they have long done.