John Shea: The Augustinian General Chapter 2025 was the 188th Ordinary General Chapter of the Order of Saint Augustine, held in Rome from September 1–18, 2025. The chapter of elected mendicants and hermits discussed vital concerns such as the formation of friars, pastoral activities, and social justice.
I asked the chapter to approve the following proposal:
This Ordinary General Chapter asks the whole church—through the ongoing process of actual synodality—to keep pursuing its important focus on the status of women in the church, with attention to three critical questions: 1) whether or not women are “fully in the likeness of Jesus” or suffer from an “ontological deficiency,” and 2) with all we know about women in the church and world of today, what stands in the way of their ordination to the priesthood and what supports decisions that keep deferring it, and 3) if neither God the Father nor the Holy Spirit are male, are women left imaging two-thirds of our Three-in One God. Or, to put this another way, if Jesus never let his maleness trump his humanness, why does our church continue to do that for him.
For thirty years I taught courses on human development and religious development together, first at Fordham University and then at Boston College. I know of no serious thinker who finds women less human than men. Can we not see that our gender differences are only within the human?
In 1991, I was invited to India to speak at a conference in Madras honoring the life and work of Father D. S. Amalorpavadass. The day after the conference, I offered a workshop on pastoral counseling skills. As I was describing these skills, a priest from a neighboring country said: “Can I ask you a practical question?” I said: “Of course.” He told me his most pressing pastoral problem was that mothers were killing their baby girls; the families were too poor to provide a dowry and it was too difficult to keep them. Later, reflecting on the horror of mothers killing their own daughters, I kept asking myself: “How can the church respond to this?” In time, and sadly, what came to me was: “How can the church talk about the dignity and worth of women when it too sees women as inferior to men, as not fully in the likeness of Jesus?”
Like so many cultures, our church was born and cradled in misogyny. St. Augustine and many other sainted bishops clearly embraced this, and it is still alive today. In the early church, St. Paul confronted St. Peter about allowing gentiles into the church, (and I am sure we are all very, very grateful that St. Peter agreed).
Unfortunately, as far as we know, no one confronted St. Peter about the status of women in the church. Over the centuries, Catholic misogyny remained, gathered strength, became entrenched and taken for granted, and then was even proposed as what Jesus himself intended. Somehow only men could fully image Jesus. Somehow only men could fully image God. The thought that mere women had the body and soul integrity to actually confect the Eucharist was completely unthinkable in the church. What has allowed us to get so comfortable with such utter hubris? And at what cost?
Whatever should have happened centuries ago needs to happen now. We can’t pretend we don’t see what we see and we can’t pretend we don’t know today what we do know. Challenging the deeply rooted misogyny in our church will be anything but easy. But we are at once suffering from yet continuously supporting an inherently disrespectful, utterly destructive and often quite deadly disease, a disease that profoundly corrodes the very life of faith, hope, and love that inspires us even as it stands as a horrible and justifying model for the confused world we are trying to serve. This misogyny is a wanton disease that continuously sabotages the unity and solidarity in every sector of church and culture, a disease that will never get better with time or without the necessary will and prescription.
If women are not fully human and fully in Jesus’ likeness, they can never be whole in our church. Our church can never be whole. The world can never benefit from this wholeness. Can you, the leaders of our church, respond positively to the ugly misogyny infecting our church? Can you, like Jesus, inform culture, not reflect it?
As part of your own ongoing synodal listening to each other, can you as bishops declare metanoia? Then, can you invite all of us into a process of lamentation that encourages us—collectively in synodality—to acknowledge our horrible past, imagine again how Jesus is with and for all of us, and finally to reclaim our lost unity, our lost integrity, our lost wholeness, our lost better angels? Following St. Augustine can, we proclaim clearly to all the young girls and adult women in the church: “There is no one in the human race to whom we do not owe love?”
Leaders of the church—Like so many courageous bishops at Vatican II many years ago—will you lead the charge to eradicate misogyny in our church and world?
Sincerely,
John J. Shea, O.S.A., M.P.S., Ph.D., MSW (Fordham University, 1981-2002; Boston College, 2003-2012)
It is my belief John, that even if it were allowed, it is not the right time for the ordination of women in the Catholic church. Women should be ordained when the priesthood is flourishing. The “Glass Cliff” phenomenon where women are called in to clean up problems is epidemic. Examples of professions that have used women to save the organizations from collapse are numerous. Who takes the fail and fall over the “glass cliff” but WOMEN!
Thank you John for your long standing and persistent advocacy for women’s dignity and equality in the Catholic Church, even as it falls on closed ears year after year.
As a Catholic woman I address many of these points from my own long experience of discrimination in my just published memoir, A Divine Calling, One Woman’s Life-Long Battle for Equality in the Catholic Church. That the forthcoming book launch is oversubscribed (sorry late comers) is a reflection of the interest in the issue.
When Cardinal Grech was in Dublin last week I made sure to give him a copy. Tolle, lege.
Clericalist catholics affect to consider women priests, whom they call “priestesses”, freakish and weird. But seeing Anglican and Lutheran women priests in action, I am finding the weirdness elsewhere: in the Parsifalian bands of robed virginal men that paraded at the papal funeral for example. Clericalist dread of difference, as seen in Fr Kilcoyne’s comments reported by Brendan Hoban, was perhaps subtly instilled into us in the seminary. To open to the other is often uncomfortable — it’s not always a joyful spiritual tourism — but it is certainly what the Gospel recommends and it is something that contributes to creating a human society. The Church also proclaims this virtue, urging interreligious encounter (in Nostra Aetate and in John Paul II’s Fides et ratio) as a duty of Catholics, urging “todos, todos, todos” and welcoming LGBTQ+ pilgrimages to Rome, and reaching out to the depths of society and to the global periphery — but women priests? Oh no! There was baulk and there we draw the line. We can bear and tolerate all other differences, but not that between male and female. We dragoon Jesus into our circle of homosocial prejudice. After all he only empowered males, right?