Toronto Globe and Mail: Pope Francis’s historic synod marks potential watershed as women’s equality, climate change take centre stage
By Eric Reguly
Five years ago, Kate McElwee, the young American woman who is the executive director of the Women’s Ordination Conference, led a small protest at the Vatican to call attention to the plight of the hard-working – yet utterly powerless – women in the paternalistic Catholic Church. “I was held by the police,” she said. “We were being called the Vatican suffragettes.”
Back then, it was hard to believe that women would ever be ordained deacons – the final rank before admission to the priesthood – let alone priests. Today, that notion is no longer unthinkable. The ordination of women and women’s empowerment in general within the Catholic Church has emerged as a central theme of Pope Francis’s latest synod, which began in Rome on Wednesday and marks his first in four years.