Pope Francis did more to elevate women than any other pope. Will his successor cement or narrow his reforms?

By Julia Baird, ABC

Analysis: For centuries, it was believed that in the Middle Ages, a woman who was particularly astute and talented disguised herself as a man and rose through the ranks of the Catholic Church, until she eventually became pope.

For two years, it was said, Pope Joan led the church, until her gender was shockingly discovered during a procession and she was stoned to death.

This was spoken of from the 13th to the 16th century, when writers began to query the lack of evidence, although some historians claim to have now gathered some clues.

I might have asked a few questions too, given the first time this story was likely mentioned was by Dominican Jean de Mailly, who described Joan's unveiling like this: "One day, while mounting a horse, she gave birth to a child."

While mounting a horse. Gave birth. Just popped out a baby, mid-air.

Find me one woman who has ever given birth whilst hopping onto a horse and I'll tell you the name of the next pope.

I understand people's fascination with the story though - so fierce and enduring has been the church's tamping down of any suggestion of full equality for the women in their midst.

Nuns have been disciplined, sisters hushed, laity forbidden from speaking about women priests, for challenging the idea that - because Jesus's apostles were male - all priests must always be.

There's good reason women get impatient with the institutional church. A century or so after being granted the right to vote, several decades after they began occupying the highest political positions in the world - Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher - the pace of change in the Catholic Church remains, to an outside eye, glacial.

With the passing of the widely admired Pope Francis - and the soon-to-be-seen spectre of 130-odd men dressed in scarlet robes, gathering to vote for their next leader - we are reminded yet again of the complete absence of women in the upper echelons of the church, in rooms where decisions are made that will impact even the most intimate parts of their lives.

This is despite the fact that Francis did more to elevate women than any other pope, often angering traditionalists in his ranks by doing so.

As a cardinal, he had washed the feet of a young mother in a maternity hospital. As pope, he washed the feet of two women in a juvenile detention centre - one of them a Muslim.

This practice is a holy ceremony based on Jesus washing the feet of his disciples - for 200 years, the Pope had only washed the feet of men. To include women was quietly radical and startled conservatives.

He also called domestic violence "a poisonous weed that plagues our society and must be torn out at the roots". He supported equal pay, saying: "Why should it be taken for granted that women must earn less than men?

"No! They have the same rights."

Why won't the church rethink the place of women?

Importantly, Francis appointed more women to influential positions in the Vatican than any of his predecessors. Earlier this year, he made a religious sister the head of a department and appointed the first female president of the Vatican City State's government.

He included women in the world 2024 Synod and 57 had voting rights. He refused, though, to talk about the possibility of women in the priesthood and repeatedly blocked the ordination of women deacons, saying "not now".

Among Catholic intellectuals, the debate about women was centred on the diaconate - it remained frowned upon to even discuss women being made priests. John Paul II actually forbade any mention of it.

While on the lowest rungs of clergy, deacons are the entry point to clerical status and would implicitly possess some decision-making ability.

In the Catholic tradition, jurisdiction is the authority granted to individuals to govern or lead within the church. To lead, you usually need to have been ordained - with a few exceptions of abbesses in the Middle Ages and the early church female diaconate.

All the while, a growing number of people in the pews have wondered why a church with thinning clerical ranks wouldn't rethink the place of women.

In 2023, a survey of 17,000 Catholic women from 104 countries found 84 percent wanted the church to reform, more than two-thirds thought women should be made priests and more than three-quarters thought women should preach at mass.

More specifically, in 2024, a Pew Research Center study found that 64 percent of American Catholics supported the ordination of women as priests. The numbers were higher in South America - the figure in Brazil was 83 percent.

Not long after Francis was elected, the Pontifical Council for Culture's annual assembly acknowledged younger women in western countries were turning from the church, with a drop in the number of women going to mass and in those finding vocations there, along with "a certain diffidence toward the formative abilities of religious men".

In 2021, a worldwide listening session on the future of the church instituted by Francis and called 'Synod on Synodality' began. In February this year, the National Catholic Reporter reported that: "What Catholics in dioceses around the world consistently wanted to talk about, along with abuse reform and welcoming LGBTQ+ Catholics, was women."

Many have questioned whether the presence of more women higher up in the church could have punctured cultures of impunity when it came to child abuse years ago, but Francis insisted: "The fact that the woman does not access ministerial life is not a deprivation, because her place is much more important."

Francis also admired what he called "feminine genius", even if he caused some eye-rolling with, let's say, old-fashioned comments about women. After he put several female theologians on a theological commission, he called them "strawberries on the cake".

He likened Europe to a grandmother who is "no longer fertile and vibrant", told nuns to "be a mother and not an old maid" or spinster, and cautioned against women in senior positions being simply "machismo in a skirt".

The Vatican remains overwhelmingly male

When asked to explain opposition to women becoming priests, he often cited two principles - the 'Marian', which means that women, like Mary, are meant to serve the church in a motherly role, and the 'Petrine', which means that men, like Peter the Apostle, are given the duty of ordained institutional leadership.

He also sought to de-clericalise the church and to decentralise authority. He devised a way to usher in more women, by allowing people who were not priests to have more senior roles.

At the local level, he allowed women to become catechists and lectors.

In 2022, he reformed the Roman Curia's constitution, formally separating the power of governance in the Vatican from sacramental power (the power bestowed on a man by holy orders). In other words, this separated administrative work from priestly work, which enabled him logically to appoint women to functional roles previously only held by male cardinals and bishops, while refusing to contemplate a woman might ever have the sacramental power of a cardinal or bishop, let alone deacon or priest.

Francis openly praised women's efficiency in government and finance. In 2010, women formed 17 percent of Vatican employees and, nine years later, this had risen to 24 percent.

Still, the Vatican remains overwhelmingly male and feminists shrugged off these changes as marginal, pointing to the fact that women are still locked out of rooms where the most important decisions are made.

As Benedictine nun and high profile author Joan Chittister wrote in a statement this week, Pope Francis's commitment to poverty and mercy was unquestioned, but for all of his advocating for more women in the hierarchy, "the roles of women in the church remain minimal and largely unchanged from those of his predecessors".

"The call for women in official positions at higher echelons in the church is promised - but ignored," Chittister wrote. "Women have nothing to do with the theological commissions where decisions are made that affect the spiritual lives of their half of the church."

They have nothing to do with the choice of the next pope or the core decisions about marriage, contraception, divorce, sexuality, abortion - about what it means to live in a woman's body.

Many millions are grieving the loss of the much-loved pope, who worked until his last moments, who lived humbly and eschewed the trappings of high office, who continued to serve when infirm and in pain, who spent his final days addressing the faithful at Easter, calling for the ceasing of war in the Middle East and meeting with the American vice president - a man whose immigration policies he had been sharply critical of.

In an open letter to American bishops, Francis said that deporting people, especially those in tough situations, violates the "dignity of many men and women, and of entire families".

Here lies the rub

Pope Francis steered the church away from a focus on sin to a focus on suffering, and while many conservatives protested what they saw as his liberalism, he softened the image of the church, and tried to portray it as a place of healing, tenderness and understanding.

He powerfully described the church as a field hospital, a place where the wounded should be bound, the sick cared for, the migrants housed, the lost embraced and the marginalised heard, before any other matters be addressed.

But Chittister, former president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, previously wrote in an open letter to the Pope that, while she commended his work on poverty:

The truth is that women are the poorest of the poor.

Men have paid jobs, few women in the world do. Men have clear civil, legal and religious rights in marriage, few women in the world do.

Men take education for granted, few women in the world can expect the same. Men are allowed positions of power and authority outside the home, few women in the world can hope for the same.

Men have the right to ownership and property, most of the women of the world are denied these things by law, by custom, by religious tradition. Women are owned, beaten, raped and enslaved regularly, simply because they are female.

Worst of all, perhaps, they are ignored - rejected - as full human beings, as genuine disciples, by their churches, including our own.

Our own - here lies the rub. Recent revelations of poor treatment of women inside the church caused considerable alarm and resentment.

In 2019, historian Lucetta Scaraffia quit her job as editor of Women Church World - a monthly women's magazine published by the Vatican newspaper - along with the 10 other women on their all-female board, after they ran an exposé of the sexual and labour abuse of women religious in Rome by other members of the clergy, revealing them to be paid poorly, treated as inferiors, regarded as on-call volunteers and "worth less than men".

Scaraffia said the board resigned as a group, because a campaign was run to discredit them after the stories ran and attempts were made to put them under the control of men. More recently, Scaraffia said the women who appointed by Francis were "chosen for their unquestioning obedience".

This is not entirely fair. In 2021, sociologist Maria Lia Zervino called for more women in decision-making roles.

In an open letter, she wrote to the Pope: "I dream of a church that has suitable women as judges in all the courts in which matrimonial cases are processed, in the formation teams of each seminary and for exercising ministries such as listening, spiritual direction, pastoral health care, care for the planet, defence of human rights, etc., for which, by our nature, women are equally or sometimes better prepared than men."

The next year, Francis promoted her, electing her as a member of the Vatican's Dicastery for Bishops, which works to identify future bishops. A small step, if far from the realisation of her dream.

As The New Yorker points out, the Women Church World exposé about nuns was partly inspired by remarks Francis had made previously to a group of sisters, telling them he was worried that they had been assigned to "a labour of servitude and not of service".

The question today for those who wish women to exercise their full talents in the church is whether Francis's successor will continue, cement or narrow his reforms. The likes of Chittister and Zervino will be watching carefully.

For now, any suggestion that there could be a scenario whereby - scandalously - someone other than a man could become pope, will need to turn to fictional Hollywood films such as 'Conclave' or dust off the myths of history.

* Julia Baird is an author, broadcaster, journalist and co-host of the ABC podcast 'Not Stupid'.

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