Soline Humbert was a seventeen-year-old studying history and politics at Trinity College in Dublin when she first felt a calling to enter the priesthood. She did not welcome it. A cradle Catholic who was born and raised in France, Humbert knew that in the Roman Catholic Church only men could be priests—it was an indisputable rule anchored in official teachings and traditions. This was in the early nineteen-seventies, and in other religions, and in society at large, women’s roles were being recast under the influence of second-wave feminism. Most of the major Protestant denominations had already either recognized the ordination of women or were moving toward it. Reform Judaism had just ordained its first female rabbi. But the Catholic Church, so ingrained with symbols, held fast to the notion that a priest must bear a physical resemblance to Christ in order to stand in persona Christi. Vatican authorities often noted that Jesus chose only men as his twelve apostles—the model for the priesthood and for the foundation of his church. Moreover, his omission of the Virgin Mary from those ranks meant that women could be revered without being ordained. Other Christian traditions found countervailing inspiration in the knowledge that Christ picked Mary Magdalene to witness and proclaim the Resurrection—and in Catholic theology she was sometimes known as the apostle of the apostles. But the Vatican did not see that story, or stories of Christ’s openness to women, as justification for allowing them into the priesthood.
Humbert told me that the sudden conviction that came over her was profoundly dislocating. It felt like “a delusion rooted in pride, or in a rejection of my female nature and of God.” She was a capable, grounded person: she had weathered the death of her beloved mother from cancer, when she was twelve, and she had moved from France to Ireland on her own. Now she wondered if she was losing her mind. She saw a psychiatrist, then confided in a chaplain, who laughed at the idea. Finally, she began to pray: “Do not call me—your Church doesn’t want me.”
Humbert tried to put her sense of vocation behind her. She graduated from college, earned an M.B.A. and a master’s degree in theology, and got married and had two sons. She worked as a management consultant and volunteered at her local diocese, as a marriage counsellor. Then, one day in 1990, the yearning came back, like a dormant volcano that resumes rumbling. She was happy with her husband, Colm Holmes, a businessman who had a warm, twinkly manner and easygoing, egalitarian convictions—he’d grown up on stories of his great-aunt, a suffragist. Their boys, eight and six, were flourishing. There was nothing outwardly, or even inwardly, wrong with her life, except for her enormous longing to serve God by preaching the Gospel, hearing confessions, and blessing the bread and wine of the Eucharist. She went to tell the archbishop of Dublin, thinking that, given the dwindling supply of priests, he might be glad to know that God was calling women. Humbert recalls, “He told me, ‘Why do you want to be a priest? You could be a saint.’ And I said, ‘Well, I could be a priest and a saint. Men can be both.’ ”
For months, Humbert wept at the thought that her deepest sense of herself would never be realized. “If you are an acorn, you are meant to be an oak, not a pine tree or a cactus,” she told me. She was moved when a nun friend gave her the unexpected gift of a chalice and a Communion plate, telling her, “The Catholic Church is not ready, but you are.”
The years went by, but her desire did not fade. One summer, Humbert and her husband decided to drive with their boys from Dublin to France, to visit her family. As they were about to leave the house, a religious newsletter dropped through the mail slot. Humbert grabbed it to read on the long ferry ride across the Bay of Biscay. That evening, she opened it up to an article about the nineteenth-century saint Thérèse of Lisieux, a Carmelite nun sometimes called the Little Flower of Jesus. Humbert knew quite a bit about her, but she hadn’t been aware that Thérèse had also felt a powerful calling to the priesthood. Thérèse’s sisters had given testimony at her beatification proceedings that she had asked them to shave the top of her head so that she would have a tonsure—an emblem of priestly devotion. Thérèse had written in her diary, “I feel in me the vocation of a PRIEST,” and she had declared that she would die at the age of twenty-four, because that is the age at which she would have been ordained—and God would surely spare her the pain of not being able to exercise her calling. Thérèse died at twenty-four, of tuberculosis.
Humbert read deep into the night. It struck her that she had not known this thrilling information about Thérèse because the Church was embarrassed by it: she had been taught about Thérèse’s sweet simplicity, but not about her fierce calling. When the ferry landed in France, the family made a pilgrimage to the town of Lisieux, in Normandy, where a basilica commemorates Thérèse. In subsequent years, Humbert returned nearly a dozen times.
In 1994, Pope John Paul II issued a stern official letter that seemed to preclude even speaking about women’s ordination. He lamented that, despite the “constant and universal Tradition of the Church,” the possibility of women priests was “considered still open to debate” in some parts of the world. John Paul went on, “I declare that 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.” Humbert told me that the Pope’s words were devastating: “It’s hard to describe how sort of violent, spiritually violent, that felt to me, because, after all, it’s a document. But it felt like it was intended to put an end to people like me—to any woman who had that sense of vocation. It felt like it was trying to kill what was most alive in us, what was bound up with the divine.” Humbert believed that a true vocation—whether religious or artistic or scientific—would always be coursing through you. If you were born to do something, she said, “you resist it at your own peril.”
Unlike Humbert, Myra Brown was not born into a Catholic family. Her parents were Southern Baptists who left that church after moving from Arkansas to Albion, New York, as migrant farm laborers, in the early sixties. A few years later, her father got a job at a steel mill, and the family relocated to Rochester. When Brown, the youngest of eight children, was a teen-ager, her father died of hypothermia, after being mugged. The family was poor, but her mother kept them all fed with government assistance, an abundant vegetable garden, and work cleaning other people’s houses. Brown and her siblings were allowed to go to church with whoever would take them on a given Sunday. They went to a Baptist church with their grandmother, to a Pentecostal church with friends, and to a Catholic church, St. Bridget’s, with neighbors and with Brown’s older sister, who had converted to Catholicism.
Brown fell in love with the rituals, the music, and the fervent way the priest talked about Jesus. As an African-American, she liked that St. Bridget’s had a significant number of Black parishioners, and incorporated gospel singing into its services. Brown was a good speaker and a beautiful singer. Yet in 1992, when she was twenty-four, she was taken aback by an invitation from the priest, Father Bob Werth, to preach a homily sometime. Official Catholic teaching kept women away from the altar as well as from the priesthood. It wasn’t until 1994 that the Vatican permitted altar girls, and even today there are priests who balk at the idea. One of the leaders of the flourishing conservative-Catholic movement in the United States, Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, the former archbishop of St. Louis, has attributed young men’s declining interest in the priesthood partly to the presence of altar girls. “Young boys don’t want to do things with girls—it’s just natural,” he told a Web site punningly titled the New Emangelization Project, in 2015. “The girls were also very good at altar service. So many boys drifted away over time.” Youthful altar service was a proving ground for the priesthood, Burke contended, and it required “a certain manly discipline.”
It was only this past January that Pope Francis amended canon law to officially recognize women as acolytes and lectors—roles in which laypeople read from the Bible and assist with such tasks as lighting candles and setting up the altar. At the discretion of local bishops, women had been fulfilling these duties for years, especially in parts of Latin America where priests and male lay ministers were in short supply. Traditionalist Catholics found these reforms objectionable, too.
At first, Brown told Father Bob that she simply couldn’t deliver a homily. Then she went home and, as she was vacuuming her living room, she felt a tug on her shirt. She went upstairs to her bedroom, dropped to her knees, and prayed. She heard a voice say, “Yes, I’m calling you to preach, and teach my Word.” Brown told me, “I thought, You’ve got to be kidding me. And I started to argue with God. I said, ‘I’m Black, I’m Catholic, and I’m a woman. They don’t do that in my church!’ ” She told Father Bob yes.
Will the Roman Catholic Church ever ordain priests who are not men? Plenty of women feel that they have a priestly vocation, and many Catholics support them: according to a survey from the Pew Research Center, roughly six in ten Catholics in the United States say that the Church should allow women to become priests (and priests to marry). The figure is fifty-five per cent for Hispanic Catholics, the Church’s fastest-growing demographic. In Brazil, the Latin-American country with the largest Catholic population, nearly eight in ten Catholics surveyed by Pew endorse the idea of women priests.
The Pew survey also indicated that American Catholicism is suffering “a greater net loss” than any other faith tradition. If you Google the word “lapsed,” the word “Catholic” comes right up. By some accounts, in the past few years women—long the backbone of the Church—have been withdrawing from active involvement in greater numbers than men. Many people peel away because they can no longer abide teachings that refuse to recognize same-sex marriage, endorse contraception, allow divorced and remarried people to take Communion without obtaining annulments, or permit women to be priests. “My grown sons are not churchgoers,” Soline Humbert told me. “I’m not surprised. When they were young boys, we sat in church during those homilies about the great, terrible sin of sexuality, and of childbirth out of wedlock, and how it fell particularly on women and girls—homilies all delivered by people who would never get pregnant in their lives. I thought, I hope my boys aren’t listening. As soon as they were old enough, they relieved me of that worry by never going back.”
But, even if many Catholics would welcome women’s ordination, the prospect seems as distant as ever. The Roman Catholic Church is not a democracy, as its traditionalists are forever reminding its would-be reformers. Its governance is elaborately and rigidly hierarchical. And successive Popes have made a point of issuing fresh pronouncements on the incompatibility of women with the priesthood. They have also punished priests who have publicly expressed support for women’s ordination, sometimes going so far as to defrock or excommunicate them. In early June, the Vatican published a revision of its canon laws codifying automatic excommunication for “both a person who attempts to confer a sacred order on a woman, and the woman who attempts to receive the sacred order.”
Some progressive Catholics have suggested that revelations in recent decades about clerical sex abuse—and the unflattering light that the scandal cast on the all-male leadership, which covered up misconduct for so long—have bolstered the case for permitting women priests. But, at the top levels of the Vatican, the scandals do not seem to have influenced views on gender roles in the Church. In 2010, the Vatican, under Pope Benedict XVI, issued new rules making it easier to discipline pedophile priests, but the same document classified the “attempted sacred ordination of a woman” as a graviora delicta—a category of offense that includes pedophilia.
It wasn’t until 2007, when Anne Tropeano was in her thirties, that she found a church to reanimate the wan Catholicism of her childhood. She had a background in marketing and communications, and had been managing a rock band called TapWater, living with the musicians on a lavender farm outside Portland, Oregon. She was slim, with long hair parted in the middle and a retro-cool seventies vibe. The people she hung out with, including her boyfriend, were secular types who loved her fun-girl energy; her increasingly serious spiritual yearnings wigged them out a little. One Sunday, she went alone to Mass at St. Ignatius, a Jesuit parish in Southeast Portland. When the opening rites began, she noticed the priest, Tom Royce, at the back of the procession. He was in his early eighties, white-haired and hunched over. Tropeano said to herself, “This guy is, like, a million years old—what’s he gonna do?” She was surprised, and deeply moved, when he got to the altar and delivered “the most joy-filled, authentic homily about filial fear and the appropriate way to ‘fear’ God—not to fear God as a punisher but to have a respect-filled awe for this majestic Creator who loved us into being.”
Tropeano kept returning to St. Ignatius, a plain white structure on a busy street near a bus stop. Homeless people rolled out sleeping bags in the doorway. Inside, tiles sometimes fell from the ceiling, and parishioners regularly mopped up puddles of water that seeped through the floor. But the pews were packed, and Tropeano found the congregation to be unusually diverse. There was a significant Vietnamese and Filipino membership, along with families whose Croatian and Italian ancestors had filled the congregation in its early decades; there were a number of parishioners with disabilities. Tropeano, whose years of spiritual questing had included New Age and Buddhist interludes, found that the “Jesuit flavor of spirituality”—“the seeing God in all things, the commitment to social justice and serving people on the margins, and the intellectual acumen”—was precisely what she had been seeking. She threw herself into the life of the parish, and helped attract hundreds of new worshippers to the Novena of Grace, an annual nine days of prayer. Katie Hennessy, a palliative-care social worker who is active in the St. Ignatius community, noticed unusual qualities of charisma and compassion in Tropeano, but also signs of a solitary, solemn intensity. Hennessy sometimes went by the church in the middle of the day and saw Tropeano praying alone, kneeling at a pew as watery light streamed through the stained-glass windows of the darkened church.
In 2014, when Tropeano was forty, she enrolled in a Jesuit divinity school in Berkeley, California, where most of the other students were men preparing for the priesthood. A friend thought that Tropeano herself seemed very much like a priest in the making. Tropeano “worked so hard to wrestle with everything from liturgy to Scripture to Vatican II,” she recalled. “And she seemed so prepared to lead a church community.” (The friend asked not to be named, because she teaches at a Catholic school, and believes that speaking about Tropeano’s calling could get her into trouble.)
Hennessy thought that in the past, when even the idea of becoming a woman priest would have been beyond her imagining, Tropeano might have joined an order of nuns. But many of those orders were dying off. When Tropeano confided that she felt called to the priesthood, it made sense to Hennessy, who told me, “With her fervor and zeal, Anne needed to have a priestly role within the faith community and perform all parts of the Mass.” Tropeano’s dilemma reminded Hennessy of the Biblical parable of the talents, in which a man going on a long trip entrusts his servants with some money. Two make investments, generating a profit, but a third buries his share in the ground, for fear of losing it. The story is often interpreted as an exhortation not to let timidity get in the way of acting on one’s God-granted gifts. Hennessy told me that the Church “was burying talent out of fear.”
Pope Francis, for all his populism, warmth, and commitment to social justice, has expressed no more interest in seeing women ordained than his predecessors did. At a 2015 press conference, he referred to John Paul II’s 1994 Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, the proclamation that had so distressed Soline Humbert, saying, “Women priests, that cannot be done. Pope St. John Paul II, after long, long, intense discussions—long reflections—said so clearly.” When a Swedish journalist asked Francis about it again, in 2016, he reiterated his fealty to John Paul’s line on the matter.
That year, Pope Francis appointed a commission to study the question of women serving as deacons. In the Roman Catholic Church, deacons are ordained ministers who perform baptisms, weddings, and funerals, among other ministerial duties, but cannot celebrate Mass, hear confessions, or consecrate the bread and wine of the Eucharist. People who wanted to see women enter the diaconate—and perhaps, eventually, the priesthood—were hopeful. Among those appointed to the commission was Phyllis Zagano, an outspoken scholar at Hofstra University who has devoted years of research to making the case that women did serve as deacons in the early centuries of the Church. (The apostle Paul refers to the first-century Christian woman Phoebe as a deacon.) But Francis was not keen to take action. Saying that the commission’s findings were too disparate—“toads from different wells,” as he put it—he appointed a second one, with all new members, in 2020. It has yet to issue any deliberations. When he officially permitted women to serve as acolytes and lectors, he took care to emphasize that these are lay ministries “fundamentally distinct from the ordained ministry that is received through the Sacrament of Holy Orders.”
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