WOC responds to the final Study Group 5 Report
For Immediate Release: March 10, 2026
Today, the Vatican released its “Final Report” on the multi‑year study “The Participation of Women in the Life and Leadership of the Church,” an extension of Pope Francis’ Synod on Synodality inviting all Catholics to discern the needs of the church today. The work of “Study Group 5” reveals an institution caught between the urgent pull toward greater equality and the enduring constraints of a patriarchal framework. While there is much to affirm in this report, the women of the Catholic church deserve more.
The Women’s Ordination Conference welcomes the report’s acknowledgment of women’s “discomfort” in the church and the exodus of women driven by clericalism, male chauvinism, and structural exclusion. The text concedes that failing to address women’s concerns could “compromise the church’s fidelity to her mission,” recognizing that “the question of women” is a question for the entire church. It even affirms that “the mere fact of being a woman does not, in itself, prevent women from assuming roles of leadership in the church.” And yet, some of the church’s most significant leadership roles remain profoundly and unjustly closed to women.
There are clear, concrete ways to heal the church of this injustice and, as the authors of this document know, women are not waiting for symbolic crumbs, auxiliary “women’s ministries,” or empty words devoid of a commitment to reform. This separate and unequal treatment of women’s vocations only further perpetuates the second‑class status of women in the church. When it comes to sacramental equality, we cannot accept theological equivocation or cowardice.
Women are already responding to the call of the Spirit and of their communities to offer sacramental service, which the hierarchy cannot dismiss as a simple desire for “power over” others.
The authors of this report are frustratingly close to, and yet so far from, recognizing that women’s access to Holy Orders is a natural response to their equal dignity and to the open invitation of the Holy Spirit to fully live out their vocations. It is clear from the document’s own language that the church knows this half‑hearted embrace of women’s equality is not enough.
In drafting the next step of “operative proposals” to be presented to Pope Leo, the hierarchy must take some of the courage it recognizes in the women it lifts up as examples in this report and boldly chart a single path where all people, regardless of gender, can discern and live out all of the vocations the church offers. God calls people by name, not by gender.
CONTACT: Kate McElwee, Executive Director, Women’s Ordination Conference
Founded in 1975, the Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC) is the oldest and largest organization working to ordain women as deacons, priests, and bishops into an inclusive and accountable Roman Catholic Church. A feminist voice for women in the Roman Catholic Church, WOC is a grassroots-driven movement that promotes activism, dialogue, and prayerful witness to call for women’s full equality in the Church.
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