The rapid developments in the US presidential election campaign in July and August 2024 have painted a picture that is of some relevance for the immediate future of the Catholic Church.
On July 15 Dominus and owner of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, nominated junior Senator JD Vance of Ohio as his vice presidential candidate. Vance’s views on women and family, influenced by his conversion to Catholicism in 2019 at the age of 35, appear to many Americans as paleoconservative. In the Democratic Party, the most powerful Catholic politician in Congress, Representative Nancy Pelosi from California, pushed US President Joe Biden out of the race after the disaster at the debate with Trump on June 27: a nun-trained (Trinity Washington University of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur), civil servant and first woman to hold the office of Speaker of the House, spoke on behalf of many in the party to US President Joe Biden, the “high priest” of America, “a nation with the soul of the Church” (GK Chesterton). This cleared the way for the nomination of current US Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate. She is the second female candidate after Hillary Clinton, who was defeated by Trump in 2016. Unlike the election campaign eight years ago, Harris and the Democratic Party have not spent much time and energy defending the idea that a woman can be President of the United States.
What happens in America rarely stays in America
American theologian Phyllis Zagano recently wrote, “The Catholic Church is in a bad position when the Democratic Party in the United States brings more hope and joy to people—especially women—than Pope Francis.” In the same two months that Harris was named the U.S. presidential candidate, potentially becoming the first female president of the United States, different events unfolded in the Catholic Church. On July 9, the Office of the Synod published and presented the Instrumentum Laboris for the Second Assembly of the Synod on Synodality in October 2024. At the press conference, the four speakers were all members of the clergy, although several women are members of the Synod and have served in various positions since the opening of the Synodal Process in 2021. The Instrumentum Laboris instructed the Synod not to deal with the question of the diaconate of women: “Some theological and canonical questions concerning certain forms of ecclesiastical ministry – in particular the question of the necessary participation of women in the life and government of the Church – were entrusted to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in dialogue with the General Secretariat of the Synod (Study Group No. 5)” (paragraph 30). At the same time, Instrumentum Laboris places this question at the heart of the text (paragraph 12), while addressing the May interview with the American television channel CBS in which Pope Francis expressed his firm opposition to female deacons, ‘as long as they are deacons with holy orders’.
Further reading: Deaconesses: “What seems unimaginable today will be self-evident tomorrow,” says Archbishop
What happens in America rarely stays in America. Harris could become the first female president of the United States. But even if she doesn’t, the message emerging from American politics in 2024 is that the country has moved beyond the question of “can a woman be president?” over the past decade. We’re watching the idea of a “madam president” become normalized, even in the face of more pressing issues, particularly the future of American democracy.
The reality of lived Catholicism in many churches
Now the situation in the Catholic Church presents a different picture. We don’t know what will happen at the Synod and after the Synod on women. It is clear that Pope Francis does not want the Synod to be hijacked by any one issue – such as women, but also gender and LGBTQ Catholics. But it is also clear that women in the Catholic Church today still have to say things that American (and not only American) women no longer have to say, or don’t have to say as much, in terms of their participation and leadership in politics and society. In the Church, it is more than a problem of doctrine, it is a problem of confronting pre-existing practices, the reality of lived Catholicism in many churches around the world (as was already clear at the Synod for the Amazon region in 2019).
The 2024 synod assembly and the post-synodal treatment of the women’s question by the Vatican Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, may decide to postpone the issue again. Currently, there is no Catholic Church document stating that women cannot be ordained to the diaconate, and the reports of the two commissions set up by Pope Francis to study this issue remain unpublished, so their content remains unknown. This is relevant because it would be important to know what Francis received in these reports and whether and how they influenced his decisions.
“Over the last century, the gap between women’s opportunities for participation in politics and the church has widened. Today, that gap has visibly widened, especially from the perspective of Catholic women in the United States.”
The Vatican may resort to the argument that women cannot be ordained to the diaconate because women cannot be an image of Christ. If that happens, regardless of one’s stance on the ordination of women to the diaconate, it will be difficult to persuade women – especially those who believe in the synodal process – not to conclude that the club of male celibates known as the Roman Catholic clergy is once again on the verge of doing its best to keep women in their place. Over the last century, the gap between women’s opportunities for participation in politics and the Church has widened. Now that gap has visibly widened, especially from the perspective of Catholic women in the United States, the Anglo-American world, and many European countries. This poses a serious problem for what the Church needs to do in terms of evangelization.
Massimo Faggioli @MassimoFaggioli
