The leaders of the German Synodal Way decided to make waves in 2023 by leaving Biblical theology and anthropology at the door and endorsing whatever they thought secular society wanted them to endorse. This included female ordination.
There are some very compelling reasons why we do not need women priests in the Catholic Church, and they have names: Mary, Maria, Teresa, Mother Teresa, Therese, Teresa Benedicta or Edith, Bernadette, Bakita—to name just a few. If we consider parish leadership or the administration of sacraments as the only paths to spiritual success, then indeed, we have a problem. However, all the aforementioned women were able to achieve the highest accolade of sanctity without holy orders. In Catholicism, the ultimately goal is to become saintly, not to become a priest, and our female canonised Saints fare pretty well on that score.
Without doubt, the most revered and loved Saint who transcends all apparent gender-related barriers is Our Lady. The pilgrimage site of Fatima in Portugal, where Our Lady appeared to three shepherd children, hosted 10 times more annual pilgrims than the Holy Land in 2022 (roughly 5 million vs 500,000), and it isn’t even the most visited Marian pilgrimage site in Europe. Lourdes takes the number one Marian spot with six million annual visitors. But even that is dwarfed by the Shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, which boasts a whopping 20 million annual visitors, making it the world’s most visited Catholic site. While in the US, about 25 per cent of all parishes are named after Mary, making Her the most popular recipient of parish dedications.
Critics might dismiss Mary’s saintly prowess as being a notable exception. Admittedly, one venerated woman does not make the Catholic Church the bastion of original wave feminists. Some may say Catholics’ devotion to Mary may even prove pernicious to women, with lauding her humility a way of suppressing the fairer sex. But the Church’s embrace of female Saints goes well beyond the Mother of Our Lord. When we consider the most important Saint of recent history, there can only be one winner: the tiny Albanian and adopted Bengali, Mother Teresa.
Revered and loved by Catholics throughout the world, Mother Teresa became one of the fastest-ever canonisations, being proclaimed a Saint just nineteen years after her death; compare that to the average canonisation time span being 181 years. Catholics have named universities, churches and hospitals after her, and the 5,000 plus members of her congregation carry on her work of caring for the poorest of the poor in more than 130 countries.
Mother Teresa is not just a significant figure for Catholics. Her universal appeal is evidenced by her winning a Nobel Peace Prize, having her face on an Indian 5 rupee coin, being worshipped as a god by some Hindus, and making it onto TIME magazine’s 100 Persons of The Century list, right next to Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.
But a too often missed characteristic of Mother Teresa, both by Catholics and secular types, was her exercise of power. Upon winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, she used the opportunity to decry abortion as “the greatest destroyer of peace today”. In 1982, when fighting between Israel and Palestine spilled over into Lebanon, one hundred disabled children were left stranded in a hospital in West Beirut. Arriving in East Beirut, Mother Teresa informed the local Catholic clergy that she would call for a ceasefire and pick up the children from the hospital herself. Wielding diplomatic skill and panache, she called various diplomats and UN representatives, after which a ceasefire was called and the children were collected.
A hundred years before Mother Teresa’s death was broadcast on every major news outlet around the world, another professed religious died who shared a common name: Thérèse. However, Thérèse of Lisieux, as she would become known, might well have died all but unknown outside her convent walls. But in another example of the prowess of femininity in Catholicism, Thérèse of Lisieux became one of the best-loved saints of the past 500 years. Her autobiography, which posthumously introduced her to the world, has produced an estimated 500 million copies and been translated into fifty different languages. Canonised in 1925 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1997, she is seen as the gold standard for everyday Catholic piety and is credited with procuring numerous miracles for the faithful throughout the world, including the eyesight of Édith Piaf.
Those who suggest that Catholics push their holy women to the front of Church life in a bid to explain themselves to a modern world should look to a period that had no interest in female representation: the mediaeval period. Back then women had two well-trodden routes to becoming eminent: through nobility and sanctity. Since being noble is a societal accolade that generally is given to you, rather than being something you make happen, it does not serve as a great example of women’s progress. However, sanctity is something which you, with the grace of God, achieve through your own agency – the ultimate expression of self empowerment that modern-day feminists claim they are fighting for.
From the kingmaker and war winner, Joan of Arc, to the mystical writers Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, the Church has often provided a societal-norms-breaking way for women to become trailblazers. Before Radcliffe, Austen, and the Bronte sisters pushed out more female-written literature than ever before, women in cloisters and confraternities, often illiterate, were shaping the ecclesiastical and cultural scenes of their day. St. Catherine of Siena was a powerful diplomat, working to keep the Papal States together and is credited with convincing the last Avignon Pope to return to Rome. St. Hildegard of Bingen is generally considered to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.
Rather than taking lessons from secular society, the Church, which gave women a voice long before the public realm did, should be teaching the world what true equality between the sexes means: the equal opportunity to become what God meant you to be. Wherever the Catholic Church has shone, so have powerful women, alongside the all-male priesthood—and that is the way it should remain.
Photo: Mother Teresa of Calcutta (left), the humble nun known as the ‘saint of the gutters’, walks together with the brother Roger Schutz-Marsauche, founder and preacher of the community of Taize, during her pilgrimage to Taize, 23 October 1983. Mother Teresa was beatified 19 October 2003 by Pope John-Paul II. (Photo credit: LUC NOVOVITCH/AFP via Getty Images.)
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