Vatican officials refuse to say whether women will have a vote when Pope Francis convenes the Catholic hierarchy and experts at the Vatican for a meeting on the Catholic church in 2023
ROME – Vatican officials on Tuesday refused to say whether women could vote on concrete proposals on the future of the Catholic Church at the end of a two-year consultation process of ordinary faithful that Pope Francis will begin next month.
For years, activists and even nuns have been pushing to be able to vote at meetings of the Synod of Bishops, which bring together the Catholic hierarchy in Rome to discuss urgent issues facing the 1.3 billion strong church.
Francis has tried to make them more inclusive, participatory, and reflect on the real-world problems that ordinary Catholics face. But so far women have not been able to vote, not even the religious superiors who participate as representatives of the world’s 641,000 nuns.
The Vatican on Tuesday outlined the key steps of the next synod process, which will focus specifically on the “synodality” or decentralized nature of the church and the role of Catholic laity in it.
The process begins on October 10 with a papal mass in St. Peter’s and ends in October 2023 with the bishops ’vote on a final document. In between, the Vatican envisages a process of consulting grassroots Catholics at the diocesan level and through national bishops’ conferences to hear what Catholics in their church want during the third millennium.
Earlier this year the appointment of Sister Natalie Becquart as undersecretary in the office of the Vatican Synod had indicated that she would at least probably be able to vote, as her predecessors had this right by the nature of her office.
But asked on Tuesday if other women invited to the final meeting in October 2023 could vote, her boss, Maltese Cardinal Mario Grech, declined to say.
Instead, Grech stressed that women could and should participate in diocesan levels of consultation and that the goal was consensus.
“This attention to the vote doesn’t leave me serene,” he told reporters. “It’s not the vote that counts.”
Becquart, meanwhile, did not refer to the vote when asked what her hopes were for the process, saying only that women “are part of the People of God.”
“What is very important is that they could be heard and be protagonists of this synodal process from the beginning,” he said. “It’s an important point that this synod can involve and listen to women.”
Women have long complained that they have second-class status in the Catholic Church, despite doing most of their work teaching in Catholic schools, running Catholic hospitals, and passing on the faith to future generations. Francis has appointed a handful of women, including Becquart, to senior Vatican positions and has called for women to play a more important decision-making role in church government, but has confirmed ecclesiastical doctrine banning women from the priesthood.