Timeline of Catholic Women’s Ordination in the Context of Work by Women’s Ordination Worldwide

• c 33 AD: Mary Magdalene is the first apostle to witness the risen Jesus. Though she is not one of ‘The Twelve’, she is commissioned by Jesus to be the first to preach the Good News of the Resurrection. In doing so, she becomes known as ‘Apostle to the Apostles.’ Despite his choice of a woman as the first apostle to herald this news, a prohibition against women’s leadership begins to worm its way into the emerging Church.
  
  
  
  

• c 40 AD: Deacon Phoebe of Cenchreae is a first-century Christian woman mentioned by the Apostle Paul in his Epistle to the Romans, verses 16:1-2. A notable woman in the church of Cenchreae, she was trusted by Paul to deliver his letter to the Romans. Paul refers to her both as a deacon and as a helper or patron of many. The evolution of women’s ministerial leadership in early Christianity is a complex phenomenon.
  
  
  
  

• c 40 AD: The Apostle Paul refers to the woman Junia as an Apostle.

  
  

  Sidebar: In the twentieth century, the Vatican attempts to defend an all male priesthood by saying that Jesus’s choice of 12 male apostles is definitive. Yet scripture shows that he did not stop at 12 men. The first apostle he chooses to bear Good News of his Resurrection is a woman — Mary Magdalene. Throughout history she is known as ‘The Apostle To the Apostles’. Later in scripture, St. Paul refers to another woman apostle. She is Junia.
  For more, see The Apostleship of Women in Early Christianity by Harvard Divinity Scholar, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza.
  
  
  

• c 100 - 700 AD: Evidence of women priests in the southern Italy and Sicily from the 2nd to 6th centuries AD.
  
  
  
  

• c 50 AD to 1000 AD: Tens of thousands of ordained deacons serve in Catholic parishes during Christianity’s first millennium. Some minister in Italy and Gaul. The vast majority live and work in Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine and Egypt. At this time, the Orthodox East is still part of the Catholic Church. See http://www.womendeacons.org/ After 1000 AD, ordination of women deacons continues in various parts of the Orthodox East. Historical records and Women Deacons known by name confirm that the ordained women’s diaconate flourished for centuries, especially in Greece, Syria and throughout Byzantium.
  
  It is well documented that even though our earliest writings (Romans 16) give evidence that women served in apostolic ministerial roles alongside their brothers, over the next three centuries their public ministry was increasingly circumscribed. Wealthy women patrons, often widows, play an indispensable role in the expansion of Christianity throughout the Greco-Roman world. Evidence shows that they exercised significant political, liturgical and administrative leadership in the earliest Christian communities. Their work includes presiding at Eucharist in their homes (at least during the late first and early second centuries). In some places, including Rome, enrolled widows were accepted as a part of the clergy. Sadly, male church leaders soon sought to control and suppress women’s ministry in both the East and the West.
  
  
  
  

• 1194 - 1253 - St. Clare of Assisi is the first woman to write a religious rule (set of guidelines) for her religious community. At a time when most women's communities live according to rules written by men, Clare's decision to compose a rule for her own community is a bold gesture. Her decision is a radical departure from the religious norms of her time. Only after persistence did Pope Innocent IV finally approve the rule two days before her death on Aug. 11, 1253. A few years after Clare's death, Pope Urban VI charged a cardinal with writing a new rule for the Order of St. Clare. Radical rules written by women drew controversy among male church leaders 700 years ago. The fact is that women writing rules still do.
  
  
  
  

• c. 1270: Thomas Aquinas, the most influential theologian of the Middle Ages and blockbuster theologian in the Catholic Church believes women to be inferior to men. ‘The male sex is more noble than the female, and for this reason he [Jesus] took human nature in the male sex.’ Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae III:31:4 ad 1 Aquinas bases his reasoning on the works of Aristotle. Like Aristotle, Aquinas believes that only the male seed carried life. He (as did Aristotle) judged women as having less intelligence and weakness of character. Women are not ordered to intellectual operation. Though a woman is carnally united to a man in generation, she is not united to him in his higher faculties.

  
  These views were supported by science of the time, It is believed that semen alone is the source of life. Like a ploughed field provides space for a seed with complete life, a women’s role in procreation is to provide a space for growth and nourishment of the child that grows from the man’s seed. If child is born perfectly, the child is born a boy. The birth of a female child is explained away by reason of ‘a damp day on conception’ or ‘cold winds blowing during gestation.’ Aquinas holds that woman is misbegotten man. Only in the 19th century did science the confirm that the sperm does not act alone and that a material contribution from both man and woman is required (ovum) before conception can happen.
  
  Consequences for women in the Church? Inferior beings not worthy of presence at the altar.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• 1347 - 1380: St. Catherine of Siena discerns a call to priesthood. This is clear from passages of her biography written by her spiritiual director, Raymond of Capua (The Life of St Catherine of Siena). Catherine is one of the first two women proclaimed as Doctors of the Church. She and Teresa of Avila were elevated to this honour by Pope Paul VI on October 4, 1970.
  
  
  
  

• 1779 - 1865: Saint Magdalena Sofia Barat - founder of the Nuns of the Sacred Heart shares with her nephew, ‘I envy you because you men can become priests.’ She expresses her calling to priesthood.
  
  
  
  

• 1825 - 1887: French Sister Caroline Clement: her writings declare her calling to priesthood.
  
  
  
  

• 1880 - 1906 - Spanish mystic Sister Isabelle of Trinidad writes of her calling to priesthood.
  
  
  
  

• 1889 - 1943 - Mother Ignacia Nazaria, foundress of Missionaries of the Papal Crusade, discerns a calling to priesthood. She wants to be a Jesuit Missionary.
  
  
  
  
  

• 1896: St. Therese of Lisieux, later recognised as third of now four women doctors of the Catholic Church writes in her diary about her struggles to manage her calling to priesthood that she knows will not be received by the Church.
  
  
  
  
  

• 1911: St. Joan's International Alliance, the first Catholic group to work for women’s ordination, is founded in 1911.
  
  
  
  
  

• 1914 - 1999: Gertrud Heinzelman - Born in Switzerland, from a young age she is aware of the need of women priests. For Gertrud, the experience of having to go to confession at an early age is traumatic. She later observes, ‘Already when I had to make my first confession… I knew I would have revealed myself so much more easily to a woman than to a man since a man does not understand the fears and worries of a small girl . . . The woman whom I sought in my spiritual need did not exist.’
  
  
  
  

• 1917: Women as Altar Servers: The 1917 Code permits a nun to act as server during celebration of mass if the mass is in a convent chapel. But there are restrictions: ‘If a male server is readily available, the celebrating priest would commit a venial sin[by allowing a female server]’

  
  
  
  

• 1938 - 1991: Sr. Irene McCormack, an Australian missionary Australia who serves people in remote regions of the Andes and is martyred in Peru discerned her calling to priesthood. ‘It seems to me …that the preoccupation of our Church leaders with power and control over who can celebrate the Eucharist, who can and who can’t receive the Eucharist, is right up the creek. It’s a contradiction to be talking about a ‘sacred meal’, and have to sit and watch, not participate… Not only is it a contradiction to the proclamation of Jesus that there is no distinction between male and female, but a lack of appreciation of the plight of villagers like ours all over the world, that our Church continues denying in its official ministry that it is by natural ‘communion’. As we in our little Christian communities, high up in the Andes, gather in memory of Jesus, there is no power or authority on earth that can convince me that Jesus is not personally present.’
  
  
  
  
  

• 1959: Bishop Leon Uriarte Bengoa of San Ramon, Peru suggests the approaching Second Vatican Council should discuss the restoration of the permanent diaconate and the institution of ‘deaconesses,’ according to an article by Serena Noceti, a professor at a Catholic school of theology in Florence, Italy. She says Bishop Uriarte cites a need for more ordained ministers to preach the word of God and administer the sacraments in remote areas of the world.
  
  
  
  
  

• 1962: At the first German press conference at The Second Vatican Council, Bishop Kampe of Germany opens floor to journalists' questions. Josefa Theresia Münch, an advocate for women's ordination who has been petitioning the Popes (from Pius XII on) to address women leadership and participation in the Church and in worship, publicly addresses the absence of women at the Council for the first time when she asks, ‘Have women also been invited to the Council?’ Her question is met with awkward silence. Then a reply from Kampe stirs nervous laughter, ‘Perhaps at Vatican III.’ Eventually, 23 women are permitted to observe the proceedings of Vatican II (See book by Carmel McEnroy, Guests in Their Own House: The Women of Vatican II).
  
  
  
  

• 1963: Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris points to the advancement of women as one of the most important ‘signs of the times’. He acknowledges that women are ‘gaining an increasing awareness of their natural dignity. Far from being content with a purely passive role or allowing themselves to be regarded as a kind of instrument, they are demanding both in domestic and in public life the rights and duties which belong to them as human persons.’
  
  In paragraph 15 of the encyclical, he also says, ‘Human beings have also the right to choose for themselves the kind of life which appeals to them: whether it is to found a family—in the founding of which both the man and the woman enjoy equal rights and duties—or to embrace the priesthood or the religious life.’
  
  
  
  

• 1970:  January — The UK’s international Catholic weekly, The Tablet reports about a dispute between the Dutch Pastoral Council and Pope Paul VI, whose antagonists in the Netherlands were clashing over clerical celibacy and the ordination of women. “The Pope's Letter to the Dutch L ’Osservatore Romano has now published the text of a letter which the Pope sent to Cardinal Alfrink and all the Dutch bishops shortly before the opening of the recent Dutch Pastoral Council. In it he urged them to defend the celibacy rule at the council and expressed strong concern at some of the trends evident in the Church in the Netherlands … less than a week after the Pastoral Council voted in favour of making celibacy an optional choice and admitting women to the priesthood."

  The Pope asked the cardinal and the bishops “to express serenely, without any reticence, your total agreement with the universal Church on the contested points.” Priestly celibacy, he said, was an “incomparable treasure ” of the Latin Church and the bishops should “make known and support the indispensable conditions for its exercise.”
  
  
  
  

• 1970: Women as Altar Servers - March - The General Instruction on the Roman Missal provides for lay persons of either sex and without canonical limitation on age (although clearly they must be old enough to do the service appropriately) to supply some of the same services as installed lectors and acolytes. These additional roles had been classified in the pre-Code documents as liturgical ministries: ‘All the ministries below those proper to the deacon may be performed by laymen whether they have been commissioned for any office or not. Those ministries which are performed outside the sanctuary may be entrusted to women if this be judged prudent by the priest in charge of the church. (Gen. Instr. § 70)
  
  
  
  

• 1970: Women as Altar Servers: September - Liturgiae Instaurationes specifies which ‘ministries’ are permitted to women and which are not. Women’s service at the altar is still forbidden. Proclamation of scripture readings except for the Gospel, offering intentions for the Prayer of the Faithful, leading the congregation’s singing, playing the organ, giving explanatory comments to help with understanding the service, ushering people into the Church for mass, and collecting offerings are now permitted for women.
  
  
  
  

• 1970: December - Ludmila Javorova is secretly ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in the Czechoslovakian underground Church during the Communist regime and Soviet occupation of that country. Amidst great danger, she actively ministers in the underground church for 20 years during times when involvement with Catholicism particularly as a priest is punishable with imprisonment, torture and death. Drawn from interviews with Javorova, the biography Out of the Depths by Miriam Therese Winter chronicles the story of this courageous and pioneering woman.
  
  Javorova’s ordination on December 28, 1970 is given by Bishop Felix Maria Davidek. She serves as a secret priest until the Iron Curtain falls in 1990. The underground network established by the Church includes 19 bishops. Davidek ordains 68 priests to serve the Church who include other women and married men. The ordinations of the married men are eventually ‘normalised’ by the Vatican. Though Rome has never recognised the women, it has since forbidden them to act as priests. It later declares Davidek to be insane on account of his ordination of women. To date, Ludmila is the only woman to have made her identity public. Archbishop John Bukovsky later says the ordinations were illicit but valid.
  
  
  
  

• 1971: The first bishop to bring the question of women within the Church before a representative body of the Vatican was Cardinal George Flahiff, Archbishop of Winnipeg, Manitoba. At the third Roman Synod held in October 1971, he makes an intervention in the name of the Canadian episcopate. The Cardinal is aware that the early Church, especially in the eastern rites, had what he called ‘feminine ministers’ up to the sixth century. He indicates that he personally believes that restricting ordination to men only is no more than a consequence of cultural conditioning — ‘as far as I know…there is no dogmatic objection to reconsidering the whole question today.’ In the name of the Canadian hierarchy, he recommends that a study be made by a commission not just of ordination, but of the role for women in the ministry or better in the ministries of the church. This recommendation, he indicates, is the result of the Bishops’ consultation with Canadian Catholic women across the country. Once considered a contender for the papacy, by raising the question about women priests, that possibility is concluded.
  
  
  
  
  

• 1972: Dr. Bernhard Stein, bishop of Trier (Germany) and president of the liturgical commission of the German episcopal conference ‘sanctions the possibility of women admitted to the priesthood, his only doubts being the appropriate timing of such an action.’ Declaration taken up in Deutsche Tagespost, Nov. 17-18, 1972, p. 14, quoted by G. May in Zeitschr. Sav. Stift. R.C.K.A. 60 (1974) 384-385.
  
  
  
  

• 1976: Experts of the Vatican’s Pontifical Biblical Commission determines there are no scriptural reasons preventing women's ordination.
  
  
  
  

• 1976: The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith (formerly known as the Office of the Inquisition) issues Inter Insigniores stating the Church does not consider herself authorized to admit women to priestly ordination. Their reason: because women do not image Christ — because they do not look like him, people will be confused. Women, the CDF says, do not bear an iconic resemblance — imago Dei — of Christ therefore they cannot be priests.
  
  
  
  

• 1978: The second Women's Ordination Conference is held in Baltimore, Maryland. WOC membership exceeds 3,000 people. Responding to Inter Insigniores, the program heralds: ‘It’s time to lay to rest the heresy that women cannot image Jesus in the priesthood.’
  
  
  
  

• 1979: Pope John Paul II visits U.S. After an all night vigil in Washington, Women’s Ordination Conference members greet the pope as he emerges. Then President of Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), Mercy Sr. Theresa Kane addresses John Paul at National Shrine. She publicly urges him that all church ministries in the Church should be open to women.
  
  
  
  

• 1980: Women as Altar Servers: Clarifying a 1970 document permitting some expansion to include lay people in service during mass, Pope John Paul II stipulates that women are not permitted to be altar servers.

  
  
  
  

• 1983: The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith (formerly known as the Office of the Inquisition) calls upon bishops to refuse support to those who defend the priestly ordination of women.
  
  
  
  

• 1983: Women as Altar Servers: Canon law is revised so as to permit laypeople’s, including women, service during mass in special circumstances. Canon 230, § 3: ‘When the necessity of the Church warrants it and when ministers are lacking, lay persons, even if they are not lectors or acolytes, can also supply for certain of their offices, namely, to exercise the ministry of the word, to preside over liturgical prayers, to confer baptism, and to distribute Holy Communion in accord with the prescriptions of law.’ Women are still not permitted to serve as altar servers.

  
  
  
  
  

• 1994: Sister Lavinia Byrne, IBVM, of England learns that under pressure from the Vatican, the Liturgical Press of Collegeville, Minnesota orders all 1300 copies of her book, Women at the Altar: The Ordination of Women in the Roman Catholic Church to be burned. Published in 1993, the book is a ‘a journalistic account of reactions to the ordination of women priests in the Church of England.’ It argues that the Catholic tradition could be appropriately developed to encompass women's ordination, as the key building blocks are already in place. The arguments from Scripture and tradition had been revisited and found not to be absolute. In the introduction, she writes, ‘The ordination of women to the priesthood is the logical conclusion of all the recent work of Catholic theology about women and in particular about the holiness of all the baptised. It is not an aberation from what the Church teaches, but rather a fulfillment of it so that not to ordain women would now be to compromise the Catholicity of the church.’ Byrne intends her book neither as attack nor directive. The Vatican reacts otherwise. The Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith begins its investigation in earnest, bans the book, orders destruction of all copies printed by the Catholic publisher. Byrne states her intentions for the book were in good faith at a time when debate and discussion were open and free. Subsequent to the ‘burning of books’, in May 1994, Pope John Paul II issues his Apostolic Letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis which states that women’s ordination is no longer open to debate. He restricts priestly ordination to men only. As for Byrne, the CDF demands that she recant her work and make a public statement supporting the ban on women’s ordination. Rather than recant, Byrne asks to be dispensed from her vows. The Irish Times reports in its story, The Accidental Rebel that Byrne says, ‘I am resigning because of the pressure from the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. I'm being silenced as a member of a religious order. The CDF won't to talk me directly but to my religious superiors, and that strategy of not dialoguing with me has become untenable.’ BBC News, A Nun on the Run from Rome
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

• 1994: The Vatican attempts to silence discussion about women’s ordination. In what later comes to be known as ‘the papal No’, John Paul II issues Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (OS) stating that women’s ordination is no longer open to debate. He says the door is closed and forbids discussion about women’s ordination among faithful Catholics to the point of saying that mere discussion will put one out of communion with the Church. Since then, and the subsequent Responsum ad Dubium (1995) issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which claims the statement is infallible as an expression of the ‘ordinary and universal magisterium’, discussion remains officially forbidden. Key theologians and canon lawyers from around the world reject the notion that the document is infallible. Elizabeth Johnson, csj, Professor of Theology at Fordham University provides a concise summary in her, Disputed Questions, Authority, Priesthood, Women. OS does not fulfill the criteria for being an expression the ‘ordinary and universal magisterium.’ Theologian Nicholas Lash says that to claim that it is and to forbid discussion is ‘a scandalous abuse of power’ by the Vatican. Two fine articles explaining these points are:

  • Nicholas Lash, On Not Inventing Doctrine

  • Peter Burns, S.J., Was The Teaching Infallible? (both links open on website www.womenpriests.org).
  
  
  
  
  

• 1994: The Vatican changes canon law so as to permit women altar servers. The change is permissive and not prescriptive. Before 1994, women and girls were not permitted to serve in this capacity.

  
  
  
  

• 1995: Less than a year after Ordinatio Sacerdotalis is issued, Mercy Sr. Carmel McEnroy becomes its first victim when she is fired from her tenured position teaching theology at a US American seminary when she is accused of ‘public dissent’ from church teaching on account of being one of over 1,000 people who sign an open letter to Pope John Paul II asking him to reopen dialogue on women’s ordination. Her book, Guests in Their Own House: The Women of Vatican II (1996), is deemed to be the first and most insightful account to date of the 23 female auditors who participated in Vatican II. Her detective work for this book was done long before the days of online resources and connectivity. The book wins the 1997 Catholic Book Award for History/Biography.
  
  
  
  
  

• 1995: Women’s Ordination Conference celebrates its 20th anniversary with a conference in Washington, DC.
  
  
  

  
  

• 1996: Women’s Ordination Worldwide (WOW) forms after women from six countries draw up its charter. They point out that women play no part in the decision-making of the male, celibate, clerical hierarchy. The work by Women’s Ordination Worldwide for Catholic women's ordination means finding a way forward where there is no path.
  
  
  
  
  

• 1997: The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under the leadership of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger excommunicates Sri Lankan Father Tissa Balasuriya when he refuses to withdraw statements that include support for women’s ordination in his book The Eucharist and Human Liberation. Father Balasuriya appeals to Pope Paul VI. The Pope upholds the excommunication.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2001: Women’s Ordination Worldwide holds its first international conference, Now Is the Time, in Dublin, Ireland. Keynote speaker Sister Joan Chittister, osb is threatened with sanctions by the Vatican should she attend. With the full support of her order, she defies the hierarchy’s threats and delivers her address, Discipleship for a Priestly People in a Priestless Period.

  See here for statement of support from her prioress: Statement of Sister Christine Vladimiroff.
  
  WOW’s press releases about the event are here: Now is the Time: A Celebration of Women's Call to a Renewed Priesthood in the Catholic Church Dublin, Ireland 29 June to July 1, 2001 and here WOW International Conference Dublin 2001
  
  
  
  
  

• 2001: Women’s Ordination Worldwide participates in a Shadow Synod of the People of God - Voices of Catholic Christians Around The World. The People' s Synod assembles in Rome from 4 - 7 October 2001 to offer the concerns and needs of many at the grassroots of the Roman Catholic Church to the Tenth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2001: Women as Altar Servers: Boys and men preferred. The Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of Sacraments tightens up regulations about women or girls as altar servers when it prescribes, ‘The authorization [by a local bishop] to allow women servers may not, in any way, exclude men or, in particular, boys from service at the altar, nor require that priests of the diocese must make use of female altar servers, since it will always be very appropriate to follow the noble tradition of having boys serve at the altar.’
  
  
  
  
  

• 2001: The Vatican forbids women to train for the diaconate. Women’s Ordination Worldwide responds with a call for restoration of the ordained women’s diaconate. In it’s press release, WOW Challenges the Vatican On Its Declaration Against Women Training for the Diaconate - Oct. 3, 2001, WOW points out that ‘This declaration by men in positions of authority in the Roman Catholic Church forbidding women to train for the diaconate is another painful example of the entrenched sexism which afflicts the church. It is both a serious attack on the personal dignity of women, their sisters in Christ, and an attack on the Church who cannot fulfill her mission unless ALL the gifts of her members are put to the service of her mission to the world. A church in which women are not allowed to fulfill their God-given calling to serve as deacons and priests alongside their brothers is not a credible sacrament of the God of Jesus Christ, in whose image both women and men are equally made.’
  
  
  
  
  

• 2002: On June 29, seven women challenge canon law by accepting ordaination as Catholic priests. The ordinations happen on a ship on the Danube River between Austria and Germany. Now known as the Danube Seven (Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger, Adelinde Theresia Roitinger, Gisela Forster, Iris Muller, Ida Raming, Pia Brunner and Angela White) the women are from Germany, Austria and the United States. The Vatican does not recognise the women's ordinations but tries to crush the movement by excommunicating the women in 2003. Since then the movement has grown and is now known as Roman Catholic Womenpriests. Despite what some in the Vatican say, the ordinations are considered valid because they are in apostolic succession within the Roman Catholic Church. To date (2019), the movement has grown to include Canada, Europe, South and Central America, South Africa, Philippines and Taiwan.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2003: In the summer of 2003, two of the Danube Seven, Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger (from Austria) and Gisela Forster (from Germany) are ordained as bishops. The ordinations are done in secret and are not recognised by the Vatican. At the death of the male bishops who ordained them, the identities of the ordaining bishops will be revealed. Despite the Vatican saying it does not recognise these women as Bishops, it later excommunicates them. Roman Catholic Womenpriests is a member group of Women’s Ordination Worldwide.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2005: In response to the forthcoming Women’s Ordination Worldwide second international conference to be held in Ottawa, Ontario, that city’s Archbishop Marcel Gervais and other local clergy issue a stern warning denouncing the upcoming WOW Conference. He forbids Catholics to talk about women’s ordination. WOW responds with press release: Women Reject Attempts to Silence Discussion on Ordination: Why is the church so afraid of us?
  
  
  
  
  

• 2005: Women’s Ordination Worldwide holds its second international conference. This time it is in Ottawa, Ontario and is hosted by WOW member group, Canada’s Catholic Network for Women’s Equality. The conference is called Breaking Silence, Breaking Bread: Christ Calls Women to Lead
  
  
  
  

• 2005: Nine more Roman Catholic women are ordained in the Church’s Roman Catholic Womenpriest movement. The ordinations happen on international waters at the mouth of the St. Lawrence Seaway. See: Washington Post “Nine Women Defy Vatican’s Ban on Ordination of Women” by Doug Struck. Click here to read.
  
  
  
  

• 2006: First ordinations of women in the Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement happen in the US.
  
  
  
  

• 2007: Women’s Ordination Worldwide writes to Pope Benedict XVI urging him to open discussions about women’s ordination.
  
  
  
  

• 2007: Canadian Father Ed Cacchia is fired as pastor of St. Michael's Parish in the small city of Cobourg, Ontario, after he writes an article in the local paper urging his church to admit women to the priesthood and saying that he had celebrated mass with Roman Catholic womenpriests in the USA. An article in the Globe and Mail reports a spokesman for the diocese saying Cacchia’s newspaper article could have been overlooked - ‘People's memories are short and the Cobourg Star is not the New York Times - but celebrating the mass with women priests is a clear violation of church canon law.’ Cacchia, who is 56, is given a $1,000 a month to live on for the rest of the year (ie, two months) and then he is on his own - without pension, benefits or a roof over his head. Cacchia estimates about 95 per cent of his congregation support him.
  
  

  
  
  

• 2008: Women’s Ordination Worldwide writes to Pope Benedict XVI asking that he accept Ludmila Javorova’s valid ordination to ministerial priesthood.
  
  

  
  
  

• 2008: Women’s Ordination Worldwide writes to the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales asking them to support the rehabilitation and acceptance of Ludmila Javorova’s valid ordination to ministerial priesthood.
  
  
  
  

• 2008: Members of Women’s Ordination Worldwide march in Rome asking for ordination of women. The event happens during the Synod on the Bible. Several WOW members dress in purple and pink togas (as early women Church community leaders) and carry signs with the names of women named in the New Testament — Mary Magdalene, Phoebe and Junia. WOW attempts to deliver a petition to the Pope but the Vatican refuses to receive it. In a press conference, WOW points out that, ‘by excluding women from ordained ministry, the church is operating in the world as incomplete, with only one leg to stand on and one arm to extend. The radical equality of all people proclaimed in the Gospel requires the church to open ordained ministries to women.’
  
  
  

  
  

• 2008: Under the leadership of Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) formally decrees that a woman who attempts ordination as a priest and the person attempting to ordain her are automatically excommunicated. As a result, women ordained in the Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement are declared excommunicated latae sententiae (automatically excommunicated.) Women’s Ordination Worldwide issues a press release WOW Challenges Pope on Excommunications and Sexism in the Church - June 10, 2008
  
  
  

  
  

• 2008: The Vatican threatens to excommunicate Maryknoll priest Father Roy Bourgeois on account of his active and outspoken support for the ordination of Roman Catholic women. Bourgeois is a Nobel Prize nominee and recipient of Purple Heart for his service during a tour of duty in Vietnam. Women’s Ordination Worldwide issues a press release WOW Protests Excommunication of Maryknoll Priest Father Roy Bourgeois - Nov. 24, 2008
  
  
  
  

• 2010: Women’s Ordination Worldwide gathers in Rome to publicly protest the Vatican's ‘Year for Priests’ celebration. WOW’s issues a press release Vatican Year of Priest Celebrations - June 8, 2010 as it points out the hypocrisy of the Vatican being ‘all too happy to turn a blind eye when men in its ranks destroy the lives of children and families, but jumps at the chance to excommunicate women who, in good conscience, are prophetically answering their call to ordination and responding to needs of their communities.’ Vatican police briefly detain WOW members present and ask the women to leave.
  
  

  
  
  

• 2010: Delicta Graviora The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly known as the Office of the Inquisition) under the leadership of USA Cardinal Wm. Levada updates its list of grave crimes (delicta graviora) by adding 'the attempted ordination of a woman' right alongside priest pedophilia. Members of Women’s Ordination Worldwide leadership responds through media pointing out that from a penalty point of view, ordination of a woman is treated more severely than sex abuse by priests. In the situation of ordination, the cleric ordaining and the woman receiving ordination are automatically excommunicated, and the cleric can also be dismissed from the priesthood. But there is no requirement for excommunication or dismissal from priesthood of pedophile priests. [In fact, these priests are mismanaged, usually shuffled around, reassigned…something which later breaks into ongoing international scandal for the Church.]
  
  Against the backdrop of:

  • Pope Benedict giving a post in Rome to Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law who shielded pedophile priests;

  • Pope Benedict’s rejection of resignations tendered by two Irish Bishops named in the Murphy Commission. The findings of the Commission are that despite sexual abuse being 'endemic' in boys' institutions, the church hierarchy protects perpetrators and allows them to take up new positions teaching other children after their original victims had been sworn to secrecy;

  • the swift removal in 2011 of Australia’s Bishop Morris who in a pastoral letter merely indicates an openness to ordaining women and married men if church rules changed to allow such a possibility';

  • the automatic excommunication of women who become ordained in the Roman Catholic Womenpriest movement and of the men who ordain them;

  • Pope Benedict’s administration freely levying sanctions against modern women who challenge Church leadership to do better for women;

  it is evident that from the Vatican’s point of view, ordination of women is a crime that is more grave than priest pedophilia.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2010: Women’s Ordination Worldwide stands in solidarity with Catholic women in Ireland who call for a widespread boycott of Mass on Sunday, September 26, 2010. The boycott is initiated by 81 year old Jennifer Sleeman from Clonakilty, Co Cork who calls on women to stay away from Mass in protest at their treatment as ‘second-class citizens’ by the Church. The boycott receives substantial support including from the newly formed Association of Catholic Priests in Ireland. Those not wishing to stay away from mass but wanting to support the action wear green armbands to mass. WOW’s press release is here: WOW Supports Irish Boycott of Mass: Sept. 26, 2010
  
  
  
  
  

• 2010: TIME magazine names the work for women’s ordination as one of its top ten religious news stories of the year. Members of Women’s Ordination Worldwide are featured.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2011: In February, Augustinian priest and professor at Boston College School of Theology and Ministry John J. Shea sends a letter to his provincial, Fr. Anthony Genovese, and two of his superiors informing them he is stepping aside from active ministry until women are ordained priests in the church. In May, he receives a canonical warning from Genovese accusing him of violating Ordinatio Sacerdotalis -- the 1994 Pope John Paul II Apostolic Letter stating, “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” -- and asking him not to speak publicly on the issue. Shea agrees not to speak publicly against the official teaching of the church. In 2012, Boston College refuses to renew his teaching contract.
  
  
  

  
  
  

• 2011: Women’s Ordination Worldwide stands in solidarity with 225 courageous theologians from Germany, Austria and Switzerland who publicly name the ordination of women and open dialogue about structures of participation as urgent reforms needed in the Catholic Church. Women’s Ordination Worldwide calls 2011 a ‘Year of Departure' for the Church: ‘Let this Year of Departure be the year when the Church parts ways with the archaic arguments and excuses used to exclude women from priesthood. We urge our Church leaders to enter into dialogue both with women who experience a call to priesthood and with priests and laity who believe that that call comes from God.’ WOW’s press release is here: WOW Congratulates German Theologians for Support of Women’s Ordination - Feb. 24, 2011
  
  
  
  

  
  

• 2011: Swiss Bishop Markus Büchel calls for far-reaching reforms in the Catholic Church. He speaks openly for women’s ordination saying, ‘We must search for steps that lead there… I could imagine that women’s diaconate could be such a step.’ Pointing out that discussion about women’s ordination has not been permitted for a good while, he say, ‘We can’t afford this anymore.’ Regarding priesthood for women, Büchel says, ‘We can pray that the Holy Spirit enables us to read the signs of the times.’ The statement is considered explosive. Schweizer Bischof für Frauen als Priesterinnen
  
  
  
  
  

• 2011: April - In a moving ceremony at Vienna’s UN-City Church, 21 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the largest and best-known underground Church in the former Czechoslovakia – called Koinótés — founded by the late Bishop Felix Maria Davidek – receives the Herbert-Haag Foundation Award for Freedom in the Church. The award is bestowed annually on persons and institutions ‘for courageous actions within Christianity’. At the prize-giving ceremony in Vienna, Bishop Davidek’s Koinótés is for the first time publicly recognised for what it was – a valiant effort to assure the Church’s survival under persecution. Present at the ceremony is Ludmila Javorova, the first woman priest ordained by Bishop Davidek. At the ceremony she says, ‘The work has been begun. Others must continue it. Even if the Vatican considers the matter closed, it is my firm belief that at some point in the future this dossier will be reopened.' (Christa Pongratz-Lippitt, The Tablet, April 9, 2011).
  
  
  
  
  
  

• 2011: Women’s Ordination Worldwide stands in solidarity with Australia’s Bishop William Morris who is forced into early retirement by the Vatican because of his suggestion to open dialogue about women’s ordination. Morris’s pastorally sensitive suggestion is made out of his concern for growing numbers of Catholics being deprived of the Eucharist due to priest shortages. WOW issues a press release here: WOW Supports Australia’s Bishop William Morris - May 25, 2011. Bishop Morris’s removal happened in the context of Cardinal Bernard Law being given a post in Rome (and thereby escaping prosecution in the USA for protecting pedophile priests). Running parallel to this was the news of two bishops named in Ireland’s Murphy Commission whose resignations were rejected by the Vatican.The Murphy Commission found that despite sexual abuse being 'endemic' in boys' institutions, the church hierarchy protected perpetrators and allowed them to take up new positions teaching other children after their original victims had been sworn to secrecy.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2011: Cardinal Jose da Cruz Policarpo, seventy-five year old Patriarch of Lisbon, who has just been confirmed for another two years as head of Portugal’s Conference of Catholic Bishops, publicly states there are no fundamental theological obstacles to the ordination of women. At one time considered a contender for the papacy, he is immediately called to Rome for a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI. On return home, Cardinal Policarpo retracts his statement.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2011: Women’s Ordination Worldwide travels to Rome for a public demonstration with Father Roy Bourgeois. Two members of the WOW delegation and Roy Bourgeois are detained by police. The documentary film Pink Smoke Over the Vatican has its Italian premiere at Casa del Cinema in Rome. The documentary features (among others) the compelling stories of heroes in the work for women’s ordination, Patricia Fresen (excommunicated 3 times on account of her work in the movement) and Roy Bourgeois — a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, recipient of Purple Heart for his service during a tour of duty in Vietnam, and priest who is excommunicated and expelled from priesthood on account of his support for women’s ordination. Photographs of the WOW event are here:
  
  

  
  
  
  

• 2012 Lent: Augustinian priest and professor at Boston College John J. Shea writes to the US Council of Catholic Bishops asking them in their role as teachers to provide a clear and credible theological explanation of why women are excluded from priesthood in the Catholic church. Shea says he is not attacking the teaching about women’s ordination, but instead attempting to engage the bishops in dialogue about a topic with which many of his students grapple. “I’m just asking for a theological explanation, I’m not publicly attacking the teaching,” he said.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

• 2012: Religious writer and Redemptorist priest Tony Flannery is investigated and silenced by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for his published call asking for reconsideration of the church's teachings on a variety of controversial issues including the ordination of women. As a result, he was investigated by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. As of January 2013 he rejects the Vatican's orders to remain silent, stating, ‘I refuse to be terrified into submission.’
  
  
  
  
  

• 2012: Pope Benedict elevates Hildegard of Bingen to status of Doctor of the Church. This 12th century Bavarian mystic becomes the 4th woman in the 2,000 year history of the Church to be honoured this way. Women’s Ordination Worldwide applauds the move and challenges the Pope to begin including women in Church leadership. In its press release, WOW Praises Elevation of Hildegard of Bingen WOW observes: ‘While the Pope presents Hildegard as an inspiration for women of today, considering that his administration freely levies sanctions against modern women who challenge Church leadership to do better for women, we take little comfort in knowing that were she alive today, Hildegard, on account of her outspokenness, would still be an outsider.'
  
  
  
  
  

• 2012: 92 year old Father Bill Brennan, a Jesuit priest for 75 years, is sanctioned for joining a liturgy celebrated by a Roman Catholic Womanpriest. His priestly faculties are suspended. He is prohibited from leaving Milwaukee without permission. He is prohibited from appearing as a Jesuit at any public gathering, including protests and rallies. He is ordered not to contact the media ‘through phone, email, or any other means.’ In 2012, when the National Catholic Reporter contacts him to ask about his sanctions, he is hesitant to confirm the news. He says, ‘I'm risking my existence in the Jesuit order by talking to you.’
  
  
  
  
  

• 2012: The Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers announce that the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) has dismissed and canonically stripped Father Roy Bourgeois of his status as priest because of his support for women's ordination. Women’s Ordination Worldwide points out the grave scandal of implementing the harshest sanction against a priest in a Church that upholds primacy of conscience as a central tenet of faith. ‘It is disturbing that a pastor of outstanding character like Roy Bourgeois – a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, a Vietnam veteran decorated with the Purple Heart – is excommunicated, dismissed and laicised on account of what is deemed to be the grave offence of actively advocating the ordination of women as priests.’ WOW’s press release is here: WOW Dismayed by Laicisation of Roy Bourgeois - Nov. 27, 2012
  
  
  
  
  

• 2013: Pope Benedict steps down. Women’s Ordinations calls new Church leadership to end its sin of sexism. ‘Looking back, Pope Benedict has consistently refused dialogue with the faithful who call for the inclusion of women in all realms of Church leadership. WOW prays that his successor is not chosen with a mandate to continue this negative path of exclusion. The shameful culture of silence surrounding women's leadership only highlights the Vatican's persistent failure to uphold the Church’s own teaching on the primacy of conscience. We hope that in his last acts of guidance, Pope Benedict will show courage in urging future leadership to end the sin of sexism and open the doors to equal partnership with women and dialogue. Love can conquer fear.
  WOW’s press release is here: WOW Asks New Leadership To End Sin of Sexism in the Church - Feb. 14, 2013”
  
  
  
  
  

• 2013: Women’s Ordination Worldwide holds Pink Smoke Over the Vatican Vigil during the conclave that elects Pope Francis. ‘Bursts of pink smoke filled the air in Rome during the Papal Conclave as advocates from Womens Ordination Worldwide held vigil calling for women's equality in the church. We gathered from all over the world: Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Switzerland, the United States of America... all this while 115 elderly, celibate and male only Cardinals readied to the elect the next Pope. It was an interesting week to be Catholic ... and even more so, women committed to seeing the Roman Catholic Church truly become 'one' in the body of Christ.’ Photographs of the vigil and a copy of the liturgy are here: Pink Smoke Over the Vatican
  
  
  
  
  

• 2013: Pope Francis is elected. Women’s Ordination Worldwide responds with hope given that ‘he is a leader who takes seriously his sense of solidarity with the poor and marginalized. Our prayer is that during his papacy, he will extend that compassion for the marginalized to women in the Church.’ WOW’s press release is here: WOW Responds to Election of Pope Francis - March 13, 2013
  
  
  
  
  

• 2013: Pope Francis says that while our Church ‘doesn't yet have a truly deep theology of women’, on the question of the ordination of women, ‘the church has spoken and said no. John Paul II, in a definitive formulation, said that door is closed.' Women’s Ordination Worldwide responds and calls for an end to all forms of elitism and reminds the Pope that the church is made up of millions of women and men who are officially forbidden by the Vatican to even discuss women's ordination. Pope John Paul II may have spoken but he is not the Church. The ban on women priests may have been a definitive expression of prejudice by the hierarchy but it was not an infallible ruling and it does not reflect the will or best interests of the people of the Church. WOW’s press release, is here: No Women Priests? WOW Responds to Pope Francis - July 13, 2013
  
  
  
  
  

• 2013: In September, Pope Francis dismisses Melbourne Father Greg Reynolds from the clerical state and excommunicates him primarily on account of his public support for women’s ordination
  
  
  
  

• 2013: November -  In his Camino Address: ‘This Time in the Church,’ Fr. Frank Brennan, SJ, Professor of Law in the Public Policy Institute at the Australian Catholic University, Chief Executive Officer of Catholic Social Services in Australia and former Chair of Australia’s National Human Rights Consultation Committee calls for open discussion of women’s ordination. He acknowledges that:

  • women are essential for the Church;

  • without a cogent explanation for exclusion, the Church lacks credibility;

  • and that ‘authoritative declarations prohibiting discussion only undermine the authority of the speaker and of the enforcers.’

  He points out that many Catholics see no theological basis for the exclusion of women, and that ‘we cannot be credible as a Church claiming that we are committed ‘to broaden the opportunities for a stronger presence of women in the Church’ unless we tackle this issue of women’s ordination afresh, starting with the scriptural base and limitations (if any) on future action.’
  
  He expresses regret about the Church’s failure to release the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s 1975 Report on women’s ordination (that nothing in scripture precludes the ordination of women). He concludes: ‘A consistent exclusive practice does not preclude an inclusive development if that development is consistent with the possibilities left open by Scripture.  For the moment the door is firmly and definitively closed, and it will be until this Pope or one of his successors decides, perhaps even definitively, that there is scriptural warrant for opening it, given that in Jesus’ time it was not closed and locked shut, just left ajar, while some women, like their male counterparts, were recorded as having been there at the door performing a variety of ministries, making a positive collaboration in service to the Christian communities’. 
  
  
  
  

• 2013: Thanks to collaboration between Google and the Vatican, frescoes in the ancient Priscilla’s Catacombs are now accessible to anyone online. This is significant since the frescoes include depictions of women performing sacramental ministry in the early Church.
  
  

  
  
  

• 2013: In his first Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium Pope Francis challenges global leaders to act against poverty and inequality. He says, ‘We need to create still broader opportunities for a more incisive female presence in the Church.’ Women’s Ordination Worldwide (WOW) applauds the message as a breath of fresh air, but points out troubling aspects about the document’s context on women and equation of priesthood with pursuit of power. WOW reminds the Pope of his own words that the Church should not be afraid to reexamine customs – even those with deep historical roots – when they no longer serve as a means of communicating the Gospel. ‘A male only priesthood does not communicate Gospel. It jars against the message that there is neither male nor female in Christ. It jars against the proof of women's leadership in the early Church.’ Pope Francis: Priesthood is a Call to Services and Women Are Called - November 27, 2013
  
  
  
  

• 2014: Longtime peace and human rights activist, Franciscan Fr. Jerry Zawada is removed from public ministry for con-celebrating Mass with a Roman Catholic Womanpriest in 2011.
  
  
  
  

• 2014 Lent: In the first of a series of letters, Augustinian priest John J. Shea writes to the College of Cardinals and specifically Cardinal O’Malley to provide a credible, non-heretical theological explanation of why women are not ordained in the church. Shea reminds O’Malley that:

  • this is something he can do as part of his teaching responsibility as a bishop and as part of his caring and justice;

  • the teaching that excludes women has no credibility.

  Shea says he is not challenging the teaching but instead the lack of credible explanation for the teaching.
  Shortly after his first letter is mailed, Shea receives a second canonical warning from his provincial, Fr. Anthony Genovese who says that his continued public challenges to a church teaching that is closed for debate ‘could result in serious consequences beyond my control.’ The first warning arrived a year earlier after Shea had written to Genovese informing him he intended to step aside from the priesthood until ordination is opened to women.
  
  
  
  

• 2014: Women’s Ordination Worldwide marks the 20th anniversary of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis also known as ‘the Papal No’ with a press conference in Rome and a delivery of thousands of letters from faithful Catholics to Pope Francis via the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith asking that both the ban on dialogue and exclusion of women be lifted. WOW’s press release calling on Pope Francis to stop making Jesus a partner in gender discrimination is here: Pope Francis, It’s Time to Talk: WOW Calls for Dialogue and the End of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis- May 22, 2014
  
  
  
  
  

• 2015: The Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture’s Plenary Assembly about Women’s Cultures releases its Working Document for the gathering set to begin on February 4, 2015. Remarkably (or not), the document says there will be no discussion on women’s ordination because ‘[ordination] is not something that women want.’ In a response called Sexism Is The Original Sin Women’s Ordination Worldwide points out that this is a falsehood and that:

  • the Vatican’s refusal to dialogue shows contempt for the faithful and demonstrates that as a leadership, the male hierarchy is out of touch with the people it is called to serve.

  • Many qualified women, with the support of their communities, discern vocations to priesthood, and yet the hierarchy is comfortable in rejecting the obvious: God does not discriminate.
    
    
    
    
    

• 2015: Women’s Ordination Worldwide hosts its third international conference, this time in Philadelphia, USA. The conference happens days before Pope Francis’s first visit to the USA. The theme of the conference, Gender, Gospel, and Global Justice, links the exclusion of women from priesthood to the greater inequalities and injustices experienced by women worldwide. WOW urges Pope Francis to recognize that by maintaining false teaching to keep women excluded from priesthood, the Vatican legitimizes prejudice throughout the world. Pope Francis's integrity as a faith leader is compromised by his refusal to recognize women as fully human and able to discern their own vocations. His mission must include freeing the Church from the sin of sexism. WOW’s media advisory about the event is here: 500 Advocates for Women’s Ordination Gather Days Before Pope Francis’ Arrival in USA- September 18, 2015
  
  
  
  
  

• 2015: In an op-ed published in the New York Times just days before Pope Francis’s visit to the USA, Bishop Emeritus Francis A. Quinn (bishop of Sacramento 1980 to 1994) expresses support for women’s ordination. Quinn admits he has had ‘personal ideas’ about the ordination of women for decades, but in the past he ‘would never preach about it or say it publicly,’ since Pope John Paul II had taken it ‘off the table.’ In an interview with America on Sept. 16, he says that Pope Francis has made it clear that bishops should not censor their opinions based on what they think the pope wants to hear. ‘So I figured: Well, O.K.,’ Quinn explains.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2015: Two days after appearing at WOW’s Philadelphia conference, Precious Blood Fr. Jack McClure is told he can no longer celebrate Mass at Most Holy Redeemer parish in San Francisco.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2015: Women’s Ordination Worldwide applauds statements made by Canadian Archbishop Paul-Andre Durocher to the exclusively male voting body at the Vatican's Synod on the Family suggesting an emergence of a discussion about including women in the ordained permanent diaconate. Durocher highlights the relationship between the ‘degradation’ of women in Church and society and violence against women around the world. In it’s press statement Response on Women Deacons Discussed at Vatican Synod on the Family — October 6, 2015, WOW calls on ‘Church leaders to state clearly that domination over women is never acceptable, and until women are empowered as equals our Church perpetuates an inequality contrary to the Gospel. We pray that women's voices will not only be heard in forthcoming discussions, but given an equal vote.’ (Women cannot vote in Synods.) WOW also calls for restoration of the ordained women’s diaconate.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2015: Women’s Ordination Worldwide stands in solidarity with twelve Irish priests who publicly sign their names to a statement calling for open discussion on the need for equality for women in all aspects of Church life, including ministry. Calling the situation ‘damaging,’ ‘alienating’ and ‘scandalizing,’ the priests stress that the policy of discrimination against women upheld by the Catholic Church ‘encourages’ and ‘reinforces’ abuse and violence against women around the world. ‘We believe that we can no longer remain silent because to do so colludes with the systemic oppression of women within the Catholic Church.’ Women’s Ordination Worldwide issues a press release in response: Women’s Ordination Advocates Support Irish Priests’ Statement on Women: Call for Greater Moral Courage of Catholic Hierarchy to Join Grassroots
  
  
  
  
  

• 2016: Augustinian priest and Professor John J. Shea writes to President of US Conference of Catholic Bishops asking the conference to boldly speak out in favour of the ordination of women.
  
  
  

• 2016: Pope Francis calls for inclusion of women in Lenten foot washing ceremonies. Women’s Ordination Worldwide expresses hope that this might signify a a bolder approach to ending sexist exclusion. In its press release, WOW says: ‘Decrees such as this one from Pope Francis are important because they send an official signal to the entire Catholic world that change, even when it is incremental, is happening. Jesus was taught the symbolic ritual of feet washing by a woman and we know that there were women present at his last Passover meal on Holy Thursday. If we are to be truly faithful to our tradition, women must be included in all our rituals and sacraments and we must continue to challenge those clerics who cling to their own interpretation of tradition, based on sexism alone. As Pope Francis warned earlier this week, those 'who say “it’s always been done that way,” and stop there have hearts closed to the surprises of the Holy Spirit. They are idolaters and rebels who will never arrive at the fullness of the truth'. We eagerly anticipate the day when women, head, heart, hands and feet will be fully welcome in the sacramental and governing leadership of our Church.'
  
  
  
  
  

• 2016: Women’s Ordination Worldwide (WOW) is encouraged by Pope Francis’s exhortation, Amoris Laetitia as it appears to be moving away from strict doctrinal rules to ones of grace and growth. The document strongly condemns violence and discrimination against women and expresses support for the role of social movements to work for equality, dignity and rights of women. Yet while Francis says he ‘values feminism,’ he fails to include the modern sexism upheld by the Church’s hierarchy as part of the ‘patriarchal cultures that consider women inferior’ and which have ‘burdened history.’ WOW’s press release is here: WOW responds to Amoris Laetitia
  
  
  

  
  

• 2016: Pope Francis announces creation of commission to study restoration of ordained women’s diaconate. Women’s Ordination Worldwide responds by calling it a step forward but reminds the Pope that a diaconate alone will not be satisfactory progress.
  
  
  
  

• 2016: During Pope Francis’ Year of Mercy, Women’s Ordination Worldwide commemorates its own 20th anniversary by hosting a Jubilee for Women Priests in Rome. Staged as a shadow Jubilee to the Vatican’s Jubilee for Priests from June 1-3, the WOW event is aimed at lifting up all women called to the priesthood and those who work for equality in Church structures. Three events are held:

  • a conversation on theology, history, and the possibility of dialogue. Guests are Fr. Tony Flannery, an Irish Redemptorist priest censured by the Vatican and ordered to cease priestly ministry due to his support for the ordination of women; Rev. Dana English, Assistant Curate at All Saints’ Anglican Church in Rome; Jamie Manson, National Catholic Reporter Books Editor and acclaimed columnist, and Dr. Marinella Perroni, Professor of New Testament at Università Pontificia Sant’Anselmo in Rome, where she was president until 2013.

  • an exhibition of the work of photography artist Giulia Bianchi who through her womenpriestsproject.org that explores the life and faith of Roman Catholic Women Priests from the USA and Columbia who are excommunicated because they disobey a canon law that says only a male can be ordained priest. WOW assists with facilitating an exhibition of Bianchi's work in the streets of Rome in the areas of Trastevere and Saint Peter's by posting photos as manifests and bill on city walls.

  • WOW activists also hold a ‘purple stole’ witness (the purple stole is the international symbol for women’s ordination) and offer a visual guide to opening the ‘Door to Dialogue.’ WOW then walks the pilgrim’s path to St. Peter’s as the Jubilee Mass for Priests gets underway.  Pope Francis has said, “this Jubilee Year of Mercy excludes no one,” so WOW members take their places in prayerful vigil in the Square. 
    
    
    
    
    

• 2016: Augustinian priest John Shea writes an open letter to US Catholic Bishops Conference reminding them that their unwillingness to provide a credible explanation for exclusion of women from priesthood and their unwillingness to engage in dialogue about the subject is a sign of a sexist, rigid, and dialogically dead Church.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2016: Women’s Ordination Worldwide holds it international steering committee meeting in Poland and gathers with Polish advocates for women’s ordination to celebrate Feast Day of Mary Magdalene in Krakow
  
  
  
  

• 2016: November 1: Pope Francis is reported as saying on a flight from Sweden that the ban on priestly ordination for women will continue forever. Women’s Ordination Worldwide sees this as confirmation that Pope Francis has a blind spot regarding women. While he prefers to place women on a pedestal, it was Mary the Mother of Christ who was the first to say: ‘This is my body, this is my blood.’ In a press statement titled, Pope Francis confirms he has a blind spot regarding women priests, WOW reminds him that:

  • the oppression and poverty of women and girls around the world is reinforced when women and men are not seen as equally imaging God;

  • this inequality is reflected in the leadership, governance and ministry in our Church;

  • It is long over due that the Church rid itself of the sin of sexism and welcome women as equal partners in all realms of ministry and leadership.
    
    
    
    
    

• 2017: February - Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Cultural Council says in an interview with katholisch.de that he thinks ‘a diaconate for women would be possible.’ He calls for a stronger presence of women in the Vatican.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2017: Women’s Ordination Worldwide marks the 54th “Vocations Sunday” (May 7th) with prayerful witnesses around the world --‘from Dublin to Des Moines’ -- calling for women’s inclusion into all ministries of the Roman Catholic Church. In its press release, WOW observes that ‘While the Vatican encourages the global Church to pray for the ministers of the Church and for “young men and women to hear and respond generously to the Lord’s call to the priesthood, diaconate, religious life, [and] societies of apostolic life, ‘ the seemingly inclusive language neglects to footnote those ministries where women are rejected, silenced and punished for following their call to ordination. WOW recognizes that women are called to serve at every level of the Church, including the diaconate as well as priesthood.  The Roman Catholic Church’s exclusion of women perpetuates the inequality of women around the world.’
  
  
  
  
  

• 2017: Women’s Ordination Worldwide celebrates the feast of St. Mary Magdalene (22 July) with the launch of Dr. Annette Esser’s beautiful original painting, "Longing for the Sun of Justice." The painting symbolizes women’s calling to priesthood, not granted by men in the church, but through Christ. On the Feast of the Apostle to the Apostles, we are reminded that Mary Magdalene followed Jesus' call to go and tell the Good News of the Resurrection, inspiring women for centuries to answer God's call to preach, minister, and live the Gospel message of equality.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2017: Sweden’s first Cardinal, Cardinal Anders Arborelius proposes Pope Francis create a special advisory body of women similar to the College of Cardinals. Arborelius tells media in Rome, ‘It’s very important to find a broader way of involving women at various levels in the church. The role of women is very, very important in society, in economics, but in the church sometimes we are a bit behind.’ He continues, ‘We would be mad not to use women’s talents. In fact, it would be downright foolish…[The fact that only men can be ordained Catholic priests is] ‘certainly not helping the church come across as a pioneer of equal rights… [The church’s message must be inclusive. [T]that is why I want to emphasise that positions of responsibility and executive positions in the church that are open to lay people must be shared by both men and women’.

  
  
  
  
  

• 2017: Women’s Ordination Worldwide stands in solidarity with Limerick, Ireland parish priest, Fr. Roy Donovan, for his recent public statements in support of women's ordination to the Roman Catholic priesthood and diaconate. In its press statement, WOW expresses hope that more members of the clergy and hierarchy will speak out for women's full inclusion in our Church, joining the majority of Catholics around the world who support greater roles, including ordination, for women in the Church.  The Church hierarchy must rid itself of the sin of sexism and once and for all, model its own Gospel values by recognizing women as equal partners in faith. 
  
  
  
  
  

• 2018: In the face of Pope Francis’s repeated calls for dialogue, Women’s Ordination Worldwide expresses dismay that within Vatican bureaucracy the silencing and policing of women's voices continues to be the status quo. Former Irish president Mary McAleese and Ugandan activist Ssenfuka Joanita Warry are banned from speaking at a Vatican International Women’s Day event organised by Voices of Faith. It is reported that Cardinal Kevin Farrell, head of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life is responsible for the decision. No reason is cited, but McAleese is known as an outspoken advocate for women's ordination and LGBT rights. In its press release, WOW observes: ‘While this turn of events is unfortunate, perhaps it is an opportunity to bring the Vatican's role in the structural and spiritual oppression of women into this year's discussion.’ WOW applauds Voices of Faith for moving their conference to another location rather than accepting such censorship. The Jesuit Curia in Rome provides space for the event to proceed.
  
  In her keynote address (listen and watch to her precious words here) McAleese observes: The Catholic Church has long since been a primary global carrier of the virus of misogyny. It has never sought a cure though a cure is freely available. Its name is “equality”. The text of the address is here: The Time Is Now For Change in the Catholic Church
  
  
  
  
  

• 2018: Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, also a member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith publicly says a future Council should review the question of the ordination of women as deacons, priests and bishops. Responding to a ‘developing need,’ Schönborn believes these ‘big questions’ should not be left to the Pope alone, but rather decided by the Church community. In a press statement, Women’s Ordination Worldwide supports him saying, ‘No door can keep out the Holy Spirit nor silence God’s call in the lives of women. WOW urges our Church leaders to challenge the “closed door” of women’s ordination and break the silence on the exclusion of women for sacramental ministry and decision-making roles in the Church.’
  
  
  
  
  

• 2018: The new General Secretary of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer speaks publicly in support of women’s ordination. The statement is made on her own initiative. The Catholic politician from the Saarland, who is considered a possible successor to Chancellor Angela Merkel, says she personally has felt called to the priesthood. With her statement, she makes it clear that she trusts her Roman Catholic Church not to split itself on this question but on the contrary to grow positively and to be strengthened.  In its press statement, Women’s Ordination Worldwide welcomes her public witness.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2018: Women’s Ordination Worldwide launches a series, Catholic Women Called documenting short videos of women called to priesthood — women the institutional Church tries to discredit and dismiss.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2018: May 21 - Pope Francis voices alarm at the ‘vocational sterility’ and ‘haemorrhaging’ of nuns and priests in Italy and Europe. Women’s Ordination Worldwide responds through The Holy Spirit is calling Women and Men to serve in a renewed priesthood and reminds him that a ‘shortage of vocations to the outdated forms of the priesthood or religious life does not mean there are no vocations, as we can see many Catholics, both women and men, being involved as lay ministers or pastoral associates, or even taking steps toward ordination in movements such as the Roman Catholic Womenpriests.  New times require new models to fulfill God-given vocations. The most obvious ‘haemorrhaging’ in the Church today is the generations of talented and educated women who are leaving the Catholic Church to answer their call to priesthood or find equal rights and dignity in another faith. The People of God are following these women to communities that model equality and inclusion.’
  
  
  
  
  

• 2018: Archbishop Luis Ladaria, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith publishes an article in the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano claiming that ‘there are voices that put into doubt the definitive nature’ of the ban on the women’s priestly ordination, and ‘sowing these doubts creates serious confusion among the faithful.’  Women’s Ordination Worldwide responds with a press statement saying it is ill-informed arguments such as Archbishop Ladaria’s that are to blame for any ‘confusion’ of the faithful. WOW leadership reminds Ladaria that while the Vatican continues to defend policies that consider women inferior, limiting the reaches of God’s call to ministry, and maintaining a male-only hierarchy, women and young people are walking away.  The Christian solution to the “virus of misogyny” is equality.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2018: During Pope Francis’s visit to Ireland, police in that country grant permission for members of WOW member group We Are Church Ireland and Women’s Ordination Worldwide to offer Francis a special message as he lands in Dublin. WOW gathers on the east side of the Halfpenny Bridge and with 50 raised umbrellas that have the words ‘Women Priests’ and the LGBT rainbow flag shown on them. WOW holds a second action when it witnesses outside the Papal mass for women’s inclusion and ordination in a renewed Catholic Church. The purpose of the action is to draw attention to the absence of women on the altar and encourage mass goers to ask themselves and Church leaders: ‘How long must we tolerate this injustice?’
  
  
  
  
  

• 2018: Pope Francis reiterates a ‘closed door’ stance on women’s ordination. Women’s Ordination Worldwide calls on him to lead by example and dialogue with the many women who are called to priesthood. In a press release, WOW stands with the people of God who are deprived of women’s gifts and sacramental leadership and with the women who are alienated and dismissed by his discriminatory remarks as their call from God to priesthood is repeatedly denied by the Church hierarchy. Strangely, in the same interview, when referring to Vatican relations with China, Pope Francis is quoted as saying, ‘Dialogue is a risk, but I prefer risk rather than the certain defeat that comes with not holding dialogue.’ In its press release, WOW challenges Pope Francis to dialogue with women called to priesthood and to extend his encouragement for fearless dialogue throughout his pontificate to contexts of the Church's life that include women's priestly vocation and equality in the Church.
  
  
  
  

  
  

• 2018: Women’s Ordination Worldwide Calls for Votes for Catholic Women. In 2015, and again at the upcoming Synod on Youth, Faith, and Vocational Discernment, progress is made when religious brothers (non-ordained men) are named as voting members of the Synod. But while theologically and canonically “equal” to their brothers, women religious are still denied a voting role. At a press conference, WOW points out that ‘Even when even when the letter of the law is changed to be more inclusive, the culture and practice of gender inequality maddingly persists. The practice of sacralized gender discrimination within the Catholic Church not only erodes its credibility, it sends a clear message to women: stay silent, stay invisible, stay in your place.’ WOW says that ‘With new revelations of sexual abuse in the Church, we are facing the deep failures and sins of the current clerical system, a structure that risked the safety, faith, and trust of children and vulnerable people to protect itself. This kind of “boy’s club” clericalism cannot be trusted to lead a global discussion on Youth, Faith, and Vocational Discernment, where only 10% of participants (“observers,” “consultors,”) will be women.’
  
  "Knock, knock! Who's there? More than half the Church" was the chant by activists who gathered outside the walls of the Synod calling global attention to the Vatican's decision-making bodies that marginalize women and deny them voting rights.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2018: Augustinian priest John J. Shea writes to Council of Cardinals in care of Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Chairman of the German Catholic Bishops Conference asking them to speak boldly, freely, and without fear in support of women’s ordination.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2018: Women’s Ordination Worldwide holds a vigil in St. Peter’s Square during the Synod on Youth, Faith, and Vocational Discernment. WOW calls for Votes for Women. Vatican police attempt to intimidate those present.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2018: Augustinian priest John Shea writes a letter to Pope Francis stating that the exclusion of women from priesthood is a heresy. He points out that the continuing discrimination against women is puerile sexism.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2019: February - In a public address sponsored by WOW member group We Are Church Ireland, Ireland’s Minister of Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Josepha Madigan, lawyer, mediator and Catholic warns that Catholicism’s prohibition on women priests is ‘brazen discrimination’ and could bring about the Church’s ‘slow death’. In an address titled, ‘A Community of Faith: Why the Catholic Church Should Open All Ministries to Women’, she says that the role of women in the priesthood is still a taboo topic at the highest levels of Catholic Church. ‘What is the Church afraid of?’ she asks. She says further that unlike the priests who could be censured by the Vatican, as an ‘ordinary member of the Catholic Church’, she is ‘at liberty to speak about the inadequacies and the discrimination that I see in the church.’
  
  
  
  

• 2019: In February, Pope Francis acknowledges a longstanding dirty secret in the Roman Catholic Church — the sexual abuse of nuns by priests. It's an issue that has long been kept under wraps, but in the #MeToo era, a #NunsToo movement has emerged, and now sexual abuse is more widely discussed. Sexual Abuse of Nuns: Longstanding Church Scandal Emerges From The Shadows
  
  
  
  
  

• 2019: In an interview on Radio Canada’s Sunday evening chat-show, Tout le monde en parle (‘Everyone’s talking about it’), when he is asked to comment on the Vatican’s recent Summit on sexual abuse, Archbishop Paul-André Durocher of Gatineau, Quebec talks about the the idea of a female diaconate that would include the celebration of the sacraments of baptism and marriage. He goes further to say that as far as women’s ordination is concerned, the reality is more complex but not impossible: ‘The problem on that level is that the Pope has said that that could not change, that women could not be priests. The only way for that change would be for there to be a plenary council of all the bishops on that issue…’ He noticeably avoids any statement on a radical impossibility of women in priesthood.
  
  
  
  
  
  

• 2019: March - Founder, Lucetta Scaraffia and staff of an all-female monthly Vatican publication, Women Church World step down en masse, citing what they call a newly difficult work environment and a Vatican attempt to undercut the women’s voices on sensitive issues including sexual abuse of nuns. The monthly publication was distributed with the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. An article in February documents instances in which nuns were allegedly abused or raped by clerics and sometimes forced into having abortions. Scaraffia said the church has ‘never accepted taking responsibility’ for the abuse and has tried to keep the problem hidden.
  
  
  
  
  
  

• 2019: Women’s Ordination Worldwide writes to Pope Francis asking the hierarchy to stop mansplaining Easter ‘The hostage-taking of Christianity by the all male clerical caste is wrong. Why is Pope Francis allowing this injustice to continue when Jesus reminded us that we are all in his image and that we are all asked to bring his message of love to the world? Dear Pope Francis, if Jesus chose Mary Magdalene to be the herald of the Good News, why won't we be hearing a woman preaching the Gospel this Easter Sunday?
  
  
  
  
  

• 2019: April —Sr. Ruth Schönenberger, prioress of the monastery of the Missionary Benedictine Sisters of Tutzing, and responsible for Benedictine communities in Bernried, also in Bavaria, and Dresden, in Saxony (The Missionary Benedictine Sisters of Tutzing has 1,300 sisters in 19 countries) publicly calls for gender equality in the Church. ‘I take for granted that a woman can also be ordained. I do not understand the reasons against it. I am surprised that the presence of Christ is reduced to being a man. We have here also qualified theologians who only lack consecration — nothing else. I often wonder why this differentiation is made based on sex and not qualifications and further education. One should look for who is qualified for this task.’
  
  
  
  

• 2019: May - Statement of Indian Women Theologians Forum: ‘The servitude that is the lot of a great majority of women betrays male privilege that is normalized in families and in the Church. This situation makes us interrogate whether the ‘Gender Policy of the Catholic Church in India’ acclaimed as the first of its kind, has remained a failed promise even after 10 years of its existence… Speaking truth to power like the Syrophoenician woman of the Gospels, we reclaim our position, voice and rights as disciples of Jesus in the Church. Stepping beyond the boundaries of gendered identity constructions that have devalued us over the ages, we wish to retrieve our full humanity as persons created, graced and commissioned by the empowering God to build a new Church and social order which is egalitarian and inclusive. We resolve to continue our struggle to build a GENDER JUST CHURCH by exercising our collective agency and networking with individuals and communities committed to realizing the vision of the Reign of God in this world.’

  
  
  
  
  

• 2019: Pope Francis stalls on restoration of the ordained women’s diaconate. He claims a lack of clarity as to historical roots of the sacramental rite. Women’s Ordination Worldwide calls for action through its statement, Women’s Ordination Worldwide Responds to Pope Francis’s Delay on Women Deacons.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2019: German Catholic women launch a week long boycott by suspending voluntary work in churches. Their protest has crystallized fury over a male-only priesthood and bishops' foot-dragging on sex scandals. The grassroots Catholic women's movement Maria 2.0 holds its own services, without priests, outside Catholic churches in 50 cities and towns in Germany. From May 11 until May 18, participating women do not enter churches or perform volunteer work in their parishes in order to make known how empty the churches are without women. Ruth Koch, a leader of Maria 2.0, calls on the Vatican to open the priesthood to women and to drop the celibacy requirement for priests. She explains that the name Mary (Maria in German) is chosen for the movement because she is the most important woman in the Bible. The term 2.0 refers to a new and modern version. It is reported that Bishop Franz-Josef Bode of Osnabrück supports the campaign.
  
  
  
  

• 2019: May - Fr. Frank Brennan, SJ, Professor of Law in the Public Policy Institute at the Australian Catholic University, Chief Executive Officer of Catholic Social Services in Australia and former Chair of Australia’s National Human Rights Consultation Committee renews his call for Church to consider women priests. Saying he has long been a supporter of women’s ordination, he observes the Church must adapt and ensure equality for everyone. He expresses his fear for the future of the Church unless it engages in open dialogue on issues such as women priests. In a talk at a Concerned Catholics of Canberra Goulburn forum, he refers to Pope Francis's view that a church that loses its humility and stops listening to others ‘loses her youth and turns into a museum’. Yet this thinking has not been extended to speaking about women priests. He observes: ‘The official position is no longer comprehensible to most people of good will, and not even those at the very top of the hierarchy have a willingness or capacity to explain it.’
  
  
  
  
  

• 2019: June - SANTIAGO, Chile — Pope Francis accepts the resignation of the auxiliary bishop of Santiago, Carlos Eugenio Irarrázabal, just 24 days after the pontiff appointed him to the post, and weeks after the bishop makes comments that there no women at the Last Supper. His short tenure began with a television interview in which he noted that there were no women seated at the table at the Last Supper and that ‘we have to respect that…Jesus Christ made decisions, and they were not ideological,’ he says, ‘and we want to be faithful to Jesus Christ.’ He also says that perhaps women ‘like to be in the back room.’ The bishop’s comments anger women’s groups and critics of the church in Chile at a time when confidence in church leadership in the once staunchly Catholic nation has plummeted. In a statement issued by the archdiocese, Bishop Irarrázabal says he wanted to ‘reiterate my apologies to those have been affected by my comments.’
  
  
  
  
  

• 2019: July - Dr. Ally Kateusz, research associate with Women’s Ordination Worldwide member group Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research releases research now compiled in a book that shows through ancient art women’s service as clergy in the early Church. Researcher: Artifacts show that early church women served as clergy: Women are seen at the church altar in three of the most important churches in Christendom.' The book, Mary and Early Christian Women is available for free download through Kindle on Amazon.

  
  
  
  
  

• 2019: July - Pope Francis who has said repeatedly said that ‘time is greater than space,’ and some six years and three months into his pontificate, appoints seven women — superiors general of religious orders — to the space of a Vatican congregation. This is a first. As members of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, these women will have a voice as part of the global body most directly involved in matters related to their vocation. A call is made for a ‘Synod on Women.’
  
  
  
  
  

• 2019: August - Retired Father Joseph Patrick Breen speaks out publicly in support of women’s ordination. Citing that ‘women in most every Christian church today can be priests or ministers’ and that women in Judaism, the faith of Jesus, are ordained, he says, ‘We need to study this and overcome prejudice we inherited from the past and fully appreciate the greatness of womanhood and equality. I also believe it is a matter of justice. I would encourage us, as a church, to study, pray and have a sincere discussion to perhaps come to a better understanding. Women priests would certainly enhance the quality of our church and our faith experiences, and in turn be a great blessing to our church. I believe that we must respond to the signs of the times and make changes, if we want people to stay with us and return to the church.’

  
  
  
  
  

• 2019: October - Radicals and the Rule - Member group of Women’s Ordination Worldwide , Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC) hosts a ‘not-to-be-missed fall event’, ‘Radicals and The Rule,’ a conversation between Benedictine sisters Joan Chittister and Teresa Forcades. These radical sisters follow the Rule of Benedict - but they're not afraid to challenge other rules. The event is a first encounter between these Catholic feminist leaders, and an her-storic evening for WOC.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2019: October: Bishop Dom Adriano Ciocca Vasino of the prelature of São Félix, Brazil says there are women in his community who are already trained in theology, and ‘they know that if this synod, with the [permission] of the pope, opens up the possibility of the diaconate for women… I will ordain them.’
  
  
  
  
  

• 2019: October - Women’s Ordination Worldwide publicly gathers at the Vatican’s Synod on the Amazon to remind Synod Bishops who gather to discuss priest shortages in Amazonia that women are already serving in priestly roles and to demand that they too are recognized as equal leaders of the Church. Women’s Ordination Worldwide joins the call for ecological justice and says that it cannot be separated from the call for spiritual and sacramental equality. WOW’s message to the Synod is: ‘Empowered women will save the Earth, Empowered women will save the Church’. Click here for WOW’s Press Release WOW at the Amazon Synod to Demand that Women Are Finally Recognized as Equal Church Leaders. Although police issue WOW a protest and procession permit, procession is disallowed when police see that WOW umbrellas have the subversive words ‘Women Priests’ printed on them. Unmarked umbrellas, say police, are fine but not ones that say women priests. The action is covered by international media.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2019: October - Women’s Ordination Worldwide is encouraged by the renewal of the Catacomb Pact, signed by 40 Bishops from the Synod on October 20, demanding that the church: ‘Recognize the services and real diakonia of a great number of women who today direct communities’ and for ‘an adequate ministry of women leaders of the community’. Without women, the Catholic Church would not exist in the Amazon and it is a matter of justice that they too are finally empowered as equals rather than being supplanted by local men whilst women continue to do the work of serving the communities.
  
  
  
  
  
  

• 2019: Bishops presiding at the Vatican’s Synod on the Amazon give married men a the green light to be ordained as priests but keep women’s ministry marginalised by saying that a possible restoration of the ordained women’s diaconate requires still more study. Women’s Ordination Worldwide Responds to the Amazon Synod Conclusion that Women’s Ministry Requires Further Study by saying, ‘Adding married men to sacramental ministry in the Amazon will further push aside the women the Synod recognised are currently doing the work. This reinforces prejudice and signals the supplanting of women whose spiritual leadership will be sacrificed in the name of God but is for the sake of men.’
  
  
  
  
  

• 2019: San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy publicly announces his support for restoration of the ordained women’s diaconate. This appears as the first such public disclosure of a U.S. prelate since Pope Francis reopened consideration of the history of women's diaconal ordination in 2016.
  
  
  
  

• 2019: November - International Catholic Women's Council holds a planning meeting in Stuttgart, Germany for an International meeting at World Church level. The women's network agrees that in view of the catastrophic church crisis, urgently needed reforms must now be tackled. They call on Catholic initiatives, associations, women's orders and church bodies to courageously work for an equal and just church.
  
  
  
  

• 2019: November 2- Women the Vatican Couldn't Silence WOW member group We Are Church Ireland, Voices of Faith, Trinity College Dublin jointly host former President of Ireland, Mary McAleese and Sister Joan Chittister OSB speak their truth about issues besetting the Catholic Church today that are mobilizing Catholic women and men into action and what our current leaders need to do...for a start, listen.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2019: December - German Synodal Path opens: With growing dissatisfaction in the Catholic Church in Germany, the German Church begins a ‘synodal path’ aimed at renewal. The loudest voice for a transformation of the church comes from Catholic women who are no longer willing to accept a subordinate role in a male-dominated church. ‘The grief that women have had to endure through the power of churchmen was too great, and the hope for real change is too small,‘ says Mechthild Heil who is the leader of the Catholic Women's Association in Germany and a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union Party in the Bundestag. Women are calling for full equality between women and men, and women's access to all ministries in the church. ‘This includes all ordained ministries and governing ministries,’ she says.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2019 Advent: USA - Augustinian priest John Shea writes to Pope Francis and the College of Cardinals reminding then that Advent is a time to wake up to the injustices against women in the Church.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2019: German Synodal Path - The Catholic Women’s Association of Germany (KFD) draws ‘red lines’ for that country’s Church’s ‘synodal path’ reform process: full equality in Church responsibility and a call to Rome for women’s ordination. With an eventual petition to Rome to ordain women, Agnes Wuckelt, Vice President of KFD says German Bishops must send a signal that the desire for female priests is ‘not only in the Church in Germany, but also in the world Church.’ Wuckelt is a member of the synodal path forum on Women in Service and Offices of the Church. She tells katholische.de: ‘If that [petition to Rome] does not happen, in our eyes definitely a red line will be crossed.’ Her Association pushes for the access of women to priestly ordination via the first step, if necessary, of the sacramental diaconate. The KFD recognises that the German Church can’t take such a step on its own without the rest of the world Church. But the Association states its expectation that if the synodal path calls for women’s ordination, the German Bishops will take that call to the Vatican.
  
  
  
  
  

• 2019 Advent: France - French Bishop Vesco publicly admits, ‘Sometimes, I have the impression that Jesus’ view of women was much more open than ours. Is it that the Word of God cannot be commented on by a woman at Sunday Mass? This is really a question that touches me. Today, we have women trained in theology. Why can’t we ever hear them preach?’
  
  
  
  
  

• 2019 Advent: Germany - Cardinal Walter Kasper, President Emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, former member of the International Theological Commission, and known as ‘the Pope’s theologian, says he is convinced that ‘in time, doors will be opened’ to women at the altar, celebrating the Mass.
  
  
  
  

• 2019: South America - Pew Research Centre releases results of polling showing strong support for women’s ordination. On the question of whether the Catholic Church should allow women to be ordained as priests, support in the Amazon nations is highest in Brazil. Almost eight-in-ten Catholics in Brazil back women as priests (78%), followed by Bolivia (51%), Colombia (43%), Peru and Venezuela (both 42%), and Ecuador (34%). Across the 19 Latin American countries and territories surveyed, roughly half or more of Catholics in eight places said women should be welcomed as priests.
  
  
  
  

• 2019 December: Canada - In demanding release of names of credibly accused sex abusers in clerical ranks, Canadian priest André Poilièvre, an Order of Canada recipient publicly names the current system of the church as ‘overly hierarchical and sexist.’ He says the church needs to end the ‘unhealthy’ ban on female, married and gay priests.
  
  
  
  

• 2019 December: Belgium - Father Charles Delhez, SJ publicly expresses support for women’s ordination in a December editorial on the radio programme Bruxelles ma Belge.
  
  
  
  

• 2019 December 31: Bishop of Limburg Georg Bätzing makes observations about the Church’s oppression of women in a New Year’s Eve message. The prelate admits that he must ‘take seriously as a bishop that the exclusion of women from ordination offices is perceived as fundamentally unjust and inappropriate in a social environment that has long equated women and men in their rights.’ Other German bishops ringing in the New Year speaking for reform in the Church included Bishop of Essen Franz-Josef Overbeck. In a New Year’s sermon in the cathedral he says that the Church is at a ‘turning point’ in which ‘a lot of questions are being asked [and] reforms are being called for’, and that ‘requires a thorough turn away from the institution towards the individual and their needs… Above all, we learn that the Church has to be there for people and serve them again and again. It is not an end in itself.’
  
  
  
  

• 2020 - January 1 - Pope Francis opens the New Year with a strong condemnation of violence against women. Reminding his audience that the manner in which a society treats women and their bodies is a measure of its level of humanity, he says that in God’s plan of salvation, ‘The rebirth of humanity began with a woman…From her, woman, salvation arose and therefore there is no salvation without the woman…Women are sources of life…Yet they are continually offended, beaten, raped, forced into prostitution and forced to suppress the lives they carry in their wombs….Every violence inflicted on women is a profanation of God, born of a woman.’ While there are signs of potential progress for women in the Church in his homily — at one point he suggests that women ‘must be fully associated with decision-making processes,’ he does not address where the Church’s humanity is in continuing to make women powerless and voiceless in their own church simply because they are women? He emphasizes that allowing women to participate in making decisions is because he believes that women are givers and peace mediators. He argues that when women give out their gifts, the world becomes more united and peaceful. Therefore, a win for women is a win for the entire humanity. But he does not mention woman's place in the Catholic Church and the reasons they do not have permission to move high up the church ranks. Catholic conservatives still do not even allow girls to serve at the altar reserving the role for boys only.
  
  
  
  

• 2020 - January - Pope Francis and the Vatican are in the news with the appointment of a woman, Dr. Francesca Di Giovanni, to Undersecretary for Multi-Lateral Affairs. This is international news, hailed as first and as a signal for more in the way of positive change for women in the Church. WOW responds: ‘The global Church, and particularly the curia, can only benefit from elevating women into positions of leadership, decision-making, and ordained ministry. However, we long for the day when the bar for celebration is raised. WOW suggest the radical idea that qualified persons are empowered in their work and ministries, regardless of gender. For as long as the Vatican continues to exclude women from decision-making processes and ordained ministry, our Church continues to endorse the second-class status of women wherever they may be.’

  See WOW’s Statement here: WOW Statement on Appointment of Dr. Francesca Di Giovanni to Undersecretary for Multi-Lateral Affairs - January 17, 2020

  
  
  
  

• 2020 - February 12 - Pope Francis Drops the Ball for Women in His Apostolic Exhortation on Women

  Pope Francis releases Querida Amazonia, his Post Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Amazon in which he completely sidesteps the issue of shortage of priests in the region. He writes beautifully about the environment but disastrously about women. Presiding bishops at the October 2019 Synod had signaled a green light for married men in priesthood but kept women’s ministry as deacons marginalised by calling for more study. WOW responded that, ‘Adding married men to sacramental ministry in the Amazon will further push aside the women the Synod recognised are currently doing the work. This reinforces prejudice and signals the supplanting of women whose spiritual leadership will be sacrificed in the name of God but is for the sake of men.’ In his Exhortation, Francis utterly fails to connect the marginalisation of the environment (a ‘she’) with the marginalisation of women in the world and in particular, women in his own Church. He endorses the broken concept of ‘complementarity’ as an attempt to justify continuing exclusion of women from priesthood.
  
  WOW’s response: ‘ Astonishingly, Francis holds up defense of the all-male priesthood on the untenable foundation of spousal imagery that says priest stands in for groom and the Church as bride. In application, this practice dramatically underlines how men can fill all the roles through a gender fluid pansexuality granted for male priests.  While the male priest stands in for groom, he also and stands in for bride. Women in this broken view are but passive recipients in the source and summit of our faith. Women are categorically unnecessary for the function of the Church except for the production of children and to prop up the man show. This theory betrays a blind belief in a concept called complementarity used by the Vatican to claim that women and men are destined for different roles but which in reality just means men can do everything and women can only do what the men want them to and that serves them.
  
  See WOW’s press release here: Francis Drops the Ball for Women in His Apostolic Exhortation on Women

• 2021 January - Pope Francis has amends the Catholic Church laws so that women may be Bible readers at Mass, serve at the altar and distribute communion. These practices already common in many countries.
  
  See WOW’s press release: Pope Francis Nudges Canon Law in the Right Direction

• 2021 June 1 - Pope Francis makes it formally illegal to ordain a woman as a deacon. Or as a priest. Or as a bishop when he promulgates revisions to the Code of Canon Law detailing crimes and punishments. The new Book VI: Penal Sanctions in the Church takes effect Dec. 8. Most of the revisions have to do with crimes of sexual abuse and the responses (or non-responses) of bishops and religious superiors. Some have to do with financial crimes.

  And then there is the one about women's ordination: "Can. 1379 § 3. Both a person who attempts to confer a sacred order on a woman, and the woman who attempts to receive the sacred order, incur a latae sententiae excommunication reserved to the Apostolic See; a cleric, moreover, may be punished by dismissal from the clerical state."
  
  From Phyllis Zagano in National Catholic Reporter: “the wording duplicates the CDF's 2007 decree and Benedict's 2010 modifications to legal norms. Proponents of women moving into the clerical ranks may be disappointed, but there is nothing new.

  However, the new canon specifies "a sacred order." That could be just priesthood, at least if history is to be respected. By the time the canonist Gracian collected canon laws in the 12th century, few women and fewer men were ordained to the diaconate as a permanent vocation. The law developed so that no (man) could be ordained a deacon unless he was destined to become a priest. Only more modern arguments conjoin the diaconate and the priesthood, such that that the diaconate is part of priesthood. It is not. The Orthodox have no such confusion, and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I has said nothing bars the ordaining women deacons. In fact, to conjoin the two orders is to argue for women priests, because there is a long and documented history of women sacramentally ordained as deacons. What the church has done, it can do again.

  The important thing to remember is that the now codified restriction against ordaining women, at least as deacons, is a "merely ecclesiastical law." That is, it can be changed. Recall, if you will, that Francis modified canon law to allow all laity — male and female — to be installed as lectors and acolytes. That represented a development of doctrine. And the current discipline is that all persons who are ordained deacons must first have served in these two installed lay ministries.

  We know "merely ecclesiastical laws" can be modified. So does Francis.’ New canon on women's ordination nothing new, can be changed

• 2021 February: Pope Francis appoints Sister Nathalie Becquart as one of two new undersecretaries of the Synod of Bishops. One Vote For Women, see WOW’s Press Release here:

Founded in 1996 at the First European Women's Synod in Austria, Women's Ordination Worldwide (WOW) is an ecumenical network of national and international groups whose primary mission at this time is the admission of Catholic women to all ordained ministries.

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