Cardinal Hollerich, in favour of women’s ordination: “It is not just a demand of some left-wing women’s associations”
Cardinal Hollerich, in favour of women’s ordination: “It is not just a demand of some left-wing women’s associations”
Link to article: https://www.religiondigital.org/vaticano/hollerich-favor-ordenacion-femenina-no_1_1446916.html
“I cannot imagine how a Church can continue to exist in the long term if half of God’s people suffer from not having access to ordained ministry,” says the general rapporteur of the Synod on Synodality.
“I cannot imagine how a Church can continue to exist in the long term if half of God’s people suffer from not having access to ordained ministry.”
This was the statement made by Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, Archbishop of Luxembourg, at a symposium on “Synodality and Preaching the Gospel: Two Fundamental Elements of Pope Francis’ Church Reform,” held last Thursday in Bonn, Germany.
As a bishop, I have also learned that this is not just a demand from some left-wing women’s associations ,” added the former general rapporteur at the Synod on Synodality held in two sessions in 2023/2024.
“When I speak with women in parishes, 90% share this opinion,” he added, indicating that bishops must also take it into account and that he himself has changed his position on the matter.
However, Hollerich urged patience , arguing that, for women from other cultures, the debate over ordination by European women is often perceived as an “artificial problem,” according to the Katholisch website .
“This is a reality we must acknowledge.”
In any case, he emphasized the steps already taken in this regard, for example, following the reform of the Curia implemented by Pope Francis with his apostolic constitution Praedicate Evangelium, which allows women to occupy leadership positions in the Vatican Curia, something that, according to the Luxembourg cardinal, will continue under the pontificate of Leo XIV.
Hasn’t the Church existed for 2000 years? Maybe that is not long term to his Eminence.
Thanks for sharing this, we were so badly in need of some enlightened,episcopal common sense.
The Cardinal is pointing to phenomena that are staring us in the face. We are pursuing elusive talk about nuptiality when we have before our eyes not only churches without ministers but vast armies of women who are slighted by our cocksure theological claims which we refuse to discuss. It is a nice idea, even a sublime idea, that the Church is the Bride of Christ (from Ephesians and the end of the Apocalypse) but to object to women ministers on the basis that a woman cannot be a groom is an iffy leap to another register. How many priests ever imagine themselves to be the groom to their congregations? Conversely, a woman who feeds her congregation with the Word of God and with the Eucharist is fulfilling Christ’s love for his church, which is the whole point of the spousal imagery. To say that only a man can image this love is to restrict it needlessly. Moving from the world of poetic imagination to the world of canon law creates strange constrictions. The psychology and sociology of all-male clubs is now intensely scrutinized, and in Western society many exclusively male bastions, such as Oxford colleges, athletic associations, learned societies, even boys’ choirs, have done the unthinkable and opened the door to women. Pope Francis’s funeral was a stunning spectacle of all-maleness in action. The disappearance of the other sex did not go unnoticed. To rejoice in this Parsifalian display would be seen as misogynistic. Before invoking arcane theological notions (which will look after themselves), we need to do a phenomenology of the facts before us, to read the signs of the times, taking the lead from Cardinal Hollerich’s common sense.