As Pope Francis’ legacy is debated in the coming weeks, months and years, one key area for examination will be his advancements of women in the Vatican, whether his changes were sufficient and whether they will last.
Undoubtedly, Francis appointed more women to positions of authority, most notably in 2025, when he appointed both the first female prefect (the top position) of a Vatican dicastery and the first female president of the Vatican City State’s government. Still, the progress was slow, at times marked by embarrassing gaffes, particularly early in his pontificate; and to some observers, it stood in tension with his opposition to ordaining women to the priesthood or diaconate—though Francis himself did not see these as contradictory.
In fact, Francis’ reforms with respect to the roles of women in the church are best understood through his monumental reform of the Roman Curia’s constitution in 2022—the first reform of its kind since 1988—when he officially separated the power of governance in the Vatican from the power conferred on a man by holy orders;—that is, sacramental power. His distinction between these two kinds of authority in the church is the key to understanding his promotion of women to roles previously held only by cardinals and bishops without making women cardinals and bishops.
Women in the Vatican
The Vatican Francis leaves behind looks very different from the one he was elected to lead in 2013. In addition to appointing the first woman prefect of a dicastery and president of the city-state’s government, Francis appointed the first woman secretary (the number-two role in a dicastery) and several women undersecretaries, both religious and lay. He said frequently that he believed women were better managers than men, particularly in the areas of government and the economy.
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A review of the numbers shows an increase in the proportion of women working in the Vatican under Francis—from 17 percent of Vatican employees in 2010 to 24 percent in 2019—and an acceleration in the appointments of women to medium-high positions like undersecretary—from three in 2009 to eight in 2019.
Still, women remain a minority of employees in the Vatican, and even more so in its leadership. The vast majority (more than 80 percent) of undersecretary and equivalent roles are held by men, primarily clerics, and women’s representation shrinks further at the level of secretary and prefect.
Gender parity in leadership is not a goal for most in the Vatican, nor is there consensus there on what inclusion of women in decision-making should look like. Francis was well aware of this. He spoke about how he had encountered resistance and had to “fight” to appoint the first woman deputy director of the Holy See Press Office—a relatively low-ranking role compared with those to which he would eventually appoint women.
Feminist critics argue that the women Francis did appoint were “chosen for their unquestioning obedience,” according to Lucetta Scaraffia, the former editor of Women Church World, a monthly women’s magazine published by the Vatican newspaper. Scaraffia resigned in protest in 2019 after revealing the sexual and labor abuse of women religious working in Rome.
While the women Francis appointed have been “obedient” in terms of not openly challenging doctrine, they were at times critical of both the pope and the institution. María Lía Zervino, for example, wrote an open letter to Pope Francis calling for women in decision-making roles to be “common” in the church and for “proportional representation of the clergy, consecrated men and women, and lay men and women” at synods. The next year, Ms. Zervino was one of the first women appointed to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Bishops, giving her a say in what candidates for bishops’ seats are recommended to the pope.
While Ms. Zervino’s dream of proportional representation for clergy, consecrated people and lay people at synods was never actualized, Francis did take a major step opening his Synod on Synodality to women and lay people as full, voting members, making up about 25 percent of the synod body. Up until 2015, only bishops and the heads of male religious orders, who were all priests, had been permitted to vote at synods, while women could participate only as auditors. That year, a non-ordained religious brother was accidentally allowed to vote, shifting the voting requirement from one of ordination to one of sex. The vote would not be opened to women until the 2023 Synod on Synodality, when women were allowed to participate as full members of the synod for the first time. They were likewise invited to vote in 2024; however, there has been some pushback to this, and it remains to be seen whether women will participate as full members in future synods.
Women in Ministry
Despite his strong and often-stated opposition to ordaining women to the priesthood or the diaconate, Pope Francis did officially open several lay ministry roles to women, though women had served in many of them unofficially for years.
In 2021, Francis allowed women to be officially installed as lectors and acolytes for the first time, although they often held that role without an official installation; that same year, he created the official lay ministry of catechist, a role primarily held by women. This decision followed the Synod on Amazonia, which, in part, sought a solution to the shortage of priests in the rainforest region, where many Catholic communities were led by women catechists.
Viviana Greatti, a catechist in Chaco Province, Argentina, told me that the move to officially install catechists had resulted in greater collaboration in her diocese. Whereas catechists previously had been left to fend for themselves in terms of creating materials and coming up with curricula, the codification of the ministry gave catechists in her area institutional support, enabling them to meet regularly to share resources and ideas.
Francis’ openness to women in ministry, however, did not extend to ordained roles, though he allowed debate about this topic in official church spaces in a way that previous popes had not. Francis often encouraged participants in synods to speak with parrhesia, or courage, and that no subject was taboo. As a result, he heard at least one intervention advocating women’s ordination to the priesthood at the Synod on Synodality—something that would have been unimaginable under St. John Paul II, who in 1994 issued a document saying women’s ordination to the priesthood was not up for debate.
In his interviews, Francis himself was a strong opponent of women’s ordination, often warning that ordaining women would not end clericalism—the problem of clerics being seen as superior to other Catholics, which Francis pointed to as the root cause of the sexual abuse crisis—but would instead “clericalize” women. Asked to justify the ban on women priests, Francis often invoked Swiss the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar’s concept of the “Marian” and “Petrine” ministries in the church, arguing that women, like Mary, are meant to serve the church in a motherly role, whereas men, like Peter, are given the duty of ordained institutional leadership. Francis was aware that some found this view of gender in the church to be overly simplistic, and he invited a nun, Linda Pocher, F.M.A., who ultimately co-authored a book arguing against the Marian and Petrine principle, to organize a series of four presentations on women in the church for him and his Council of Cardinal Advisors. (After the series of presentations, Francis continued referring to the Balthasarian idea in the same way.)
While Francis stated clearly that he would not ordain a woman to the diaconate, he endorsed the Synod on Synodality’s final document, which said that the debate should continue. He oversaw two separate commissions on women deacons, both of which were confidential. The first, which researched the history of women deacons in the church, was “inconclusive,” Francis said, although its results were never shared. The second dealt more with the question of the ministry of deacons since the Second Vatican Council—when the permanent diaconate was established, allowing married men and men who were not on the road to priesthood to become deacons—and whether a woman could hold that role. That commission was revived following calls from the Synod on Synodality for further study, but many saw the commissions as a way for Francis to postpone having to make a decision on the female diaconate.
In an email to the author, Kate McElwee, executive director of the Women’s Ordination Conference, said, “With innumerable opportunities to offer a pastoral response to women longing to answer their vocation to ordained ministry, Pope Francis—time and time again—reverted to out-dated metaphors, the Petrine principle, or worse, a simple and sincere no.”
She continued, “This tension between the pastor, modeling Gospel values, and the pontiff, who demonstrated an unwillingness to be transformed by the testimonies of women longing to serve their church, was difficult for women to reconcile.”
Francis’ Views on Women
While Francis opened doors to women in church leadership that had previously been closed, he faced criticism for the way he spoke about women, often relying on what critics saw as outdated ideas of gender complementarity and a vague, undefined idea of a “female mystique.”
Two months into his pontificate, he infamously told a group of religious sisters that their vows of chastity should not make them spiritual “spinsters” or “old maids.” The next year, he said that the women who were members of the International Theological Commission were like “the strawberries on the cake,” an expression he seemed to use to mean that women should not merely be decorative additions, but it was interpreted as meaning that they were. He was often criticized for speaking about women’s roles primarily as wives and mothers.
Francis also raised eyebrows when he used what some saw as sexist expressions. For example, in his first major interview, published by America and other Jesuit publications in the fall of 2013, the newly-elected pope warned that a stronger presence of women in church leadership should not simply be “machismo in a skirt.” He is reported to have called gossip a “woman’s thing” in a closed-door meeting with priests and said that the world needs “politicians with pants,” a phrase he used to mean courage, to legislate against abortion.
Francis’ occasional gaffes on gender made some wonder about his true views on women and to what extent they were influenced by the machismo culture of his native country. Argentine journalist Elisabetta Piqué, a longtime friend of Francis and the wife of America’s Vatican correspondent, Gerard O’Connell, said that the late pope held women in “high respect” and that his was not a “machista vision.”
“He always respected my profession of being a war correspondent, and he always supported me going to wars even when I had two little children, while members of my family—my brothers—would criticize me for doing so,” Ms. Piqué wrote to America. “[Francis] would give me this support by phoning me periodically on those occasions [while I was in war zones], as I wrote in my book on Ukraine.”
“In the church, you can’t change things from one day to another, but you need years,” Ms. Piqué added.
Francis made significant progress on the advancement of women in the Vatican during his pontificate. His fundamental separation of governance from sacramental authority, while codified in his revised constitution for the Roman Curia, continues to be worked out in canon law, where the two types of authority remain intertwined. (This gap between the Curia’s governing document and current church law has resulted in the awkward situation of a male “pro-prefect” being appointed alongside the first female prefect, an unusual title observers believe the pro-prefect was given in order to take care of decisions that canonically need to be approved by a cleric.)
How women’s progress in the Vatican will continue depends on several factors—Francis’ successor’s willingness to push forward despite resistance, the women appointees’ willingness to continue in what are often unforgiving roles, and the slowly eroding (to borrow the words of Synod undersecretary Sister Nathalie Becquart) “patriarchal mindset” of the Vatican. Ultimately, only the long view of history will show whether the Francis papacy represented a shattering of the church’s “stained-glass ceiling” or only a few broken panes.
