Early in his papacy, Pope Francis was asked about a possible loophole in canon law that would allow women to be appointed to the College of Cardinals as laypeople. In his reply, Francis sidestepped the legal issues. Instead, he said, “Women in the Church must be valued, not ‘clericalized.’ Whoever thinks of women as cardinals suffers a bit from clericalism.”
His reasoning was surprising. In his long-running critique of clericalism, Francis typically focused on clergy who put themselves above the laity and insisted on their own authority. “Clericalism forgets that the visibility and the sacramentality of the Church belong to all the faithful people of God, not only to the few chosen and enlightened.”
In his answer about women as lay cardinals, Francis approached clericalism from another angle, criticizing the implicit idea that women’s influence over Church affairs must come from occupying clerical or near-clerical positions. Throughout his papacy, Francis appointed women to influential posts but not to any proper to the clergy. He wanted to ensure women were able to bring their talents to bear for the good of the Church worldwide but also to avoid reinforcing the clericalist assumption that they needed to be clergy to be powerful.
Pope Leo has continued this pattern. He has appointed women to prominent positions, including selecting Maria Montserrat Alvarado of EWTN to run the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication. However, the Vatican also recently denied a request by the German church to allow laypeople to preach at Mass. A laywoman can direct the Church’s communications worldwide (and a layperson with internet access can fill every waking hour with religious commentary by other laypeople) but no layperson can preach, even in their own parish.
Empowering the laity to live out every aspect of the universal call to holiness—including giving power within the Church to women—is self-evidently good and just. This authority never should have been restricted to ordained clergy in the first place. But giving laypeople functions that belong properly to the clergy in the name of empowering them blurs the line between clergy and laity, making the role of the clergy more about the kinds of power they wield than the actual nature of their vocation.
The approach Francis and Leo have taken maintains a kind of dynamic tension, as when a physical exercise pits two different muscles against each other to strengthen both. The popes have understood empowering the laity and affirming the proper role of the clergy as complementary tasks. The more we see laypeople taking full responsibility for living out the Gospel and the universal call to holiness, the more clearly we understand the actual role of priests and sacramental ministry in the life of the Church.
Of course, the differences between the roles of laity and clergy are well-explored in centuries of theological dialogue and carefully laid out in the Catechism. The universal call to holiness, similarly, was not an innovation of Vatican II. But it was only through the various reforms of the Council that many Catholics became properly acquainted with the principle. Francis and Leo are innovators not for rejecting clericalism or seeking to empower the laity, but for the means through which they are trying to teach these lessons to the global Church. They recognize that it is not enough for Vatican documents, seminary faculty, or even sermons to extol the proper theology: that theology needs to permeate down into the everyday understanding and lives of ordinary laypeople.
A sermon or papal message should not be received as an entertaining novelty or a moral or theological lecture, but as an appeal to the conscience—a contribution to the ongoing formation of the conscience. But, in the present climate especially, it is far too easy for us to treat a heartfelt appeal to our consciences as a direct challenge to our politics. Consider how readily J. D. Vance has dismissed Pope Leo’s comments on the war with Iran or the humane treatment of migrants as inappropriate interventions in American politics. Vance is an especially notable recent example, but he is far from the only one. Our response to a message rooted in the Gospel can say far more about the state of our own souls than it does about the message or the messenger.
I grew up seeing Catholics dismiss as inappropriately political all kinds of statements by popes and bishops. When such a statement contradicted the listener’s political biases, it was considered inappropriate, while the bishops the parishioner already agreed with were always “preaching the Gospel.” The words of the message itself, or whether a message had been issued or merely hinted at, hardly mattered: the mere possibility of a challenge to the hearer’s conscience triggered a defensive reflex. There is, of course, a long history of clerical interventions that genuinely did cross the line. The resistance to inappropriate messaging from priests is part of the legacy of clericalism. But given recent popes’ conscientious efforts to avoid crossing those lines, perhaps we also ought to reconsider our reactions.
Synodality proposes to address both clericalism and the resistance it generated. Historically, synods were regional assemblies of bishops that had a legislative function, but the use of the term by Francis and Leo is distinct. They refer not just to a type of gathering but to the mode of dialogue and engagement found in the numerous synods held in the Vatican since they were instituted by Pope Paul VI to continue the dialogues of Vatican II. These synods give modern synodality its name and meaning, but the synodal mode of engagement is understood to be central to the Church from the beginning. This is why Pope Leo could refer to the Blessed Virgin as a “synodal woman” for her capacity to reflect on and engage in the work of the Holy Spirit.
In synodal dialogue, participants enter as fundamental equals, and although the process ends in a document, it is not intended as an authoritative teaching document, but as a sign of what the participants could agree on. It is not a blunt instrument to be used to enforce agreement among ordinary Catholics; rather, these documents serve as a sign of what is possible when people with different perspectives try to build common ground. They serve as both an invitation to and a foundation for further dialogue.
This is what it means, ultimately, for “synodality” to refer to a way of being the Church. It does not rely on leveraging ecclesial authority or discipline. It recognizes the proper autonomy of the participants’ consciences and tries to build toward an agreement based on shared understanding rather than any implicit or explicit threat of excommunication. No didactic method is perfect, of course, but synodality—as a way of deepening participants’ understanding of the Church’s teachings and the needs of ordinary Catholics—seems to be uniquely suited to counteracting the legacy of overbearing, authoritarian clericalism and the servile attitude among laypeople that invites and enables clericalism.
There are corners of the world that probably do not need lessons against clericalism. Francis was reportedly fascinated by the experiences of Korean Catholic communities that sustained themselves for centuries without priests. Communities in the Amazon similarly lacked for clergy to the point that the Vatican, in the context of a synod, considered ordaining local already-married men. Even here, though, ordaining married men was intended not to change the nature of the clergy, but simply to give tribes more consistent access to the sacraments.
To be sure, ongoing discussion about whether women can be ordained to some version of the diaconate bears examination under this paradigm. Although Francis swiftly dismissed the idea of appointing a woman to the College of Cardinals, he and Leo have both facilitated studies to determine whether women historically held any kind of ordained office and whether the historical examples justify a revival of those offices.
Of course, most of us cannot expect to have any impact on the outcome of this process, but we can prepare ourselves to receive the answer without having our judgment clouded by clericalism. Whether it would be a powerful statement in favor of women’s equality is ultimately—if perhaps unfortunately—irrelevant. Similarly, any embarrassment to those in the Church that have insisted on either the necessity or the impossibility of the ordination of women must be left out of consideration. The only thing to be considered is the historical and theological truth, and we should all try to receive the answer in that spirit.
The sacramental functions of the priesthood, ultimately, seem to be the only things that Francis and Leo’s approach holds as sacrosanct. All kinds of administrative and executive authority can be safely handed over to laypeople, except when it comes to the administration of the sacraments.
But at this point we encounter a perplexing idea: if the function of the original deacons of the Bible was to oversee the distribution of food to the poor and allow the Apostles more time and freedom to preach the Gospel, then the model of bishop as executive seems to be wholly in error. Rather than distributing administrative work in order to focus on preaching the Gospel, the successors of the Apostles seem to have accrued all kinds of paperwork—and power—for themselves. These elements of administration appear to be historically contingent accumulations of power rather than inherent to the office of bishop.
Medieval theologians saw distinct civil and religious authority as being embodied by the “two swords” that the Apostles had with them in the Garden of Gethsemane. With this image, theologians sought to explain and justify the separate authorities held by the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. To my knowledge, there was no agreement—or even particular interest—in whether it was the civil or religious sword that Peter used to mutilate the high priest’s servant, but the modern papal approach to clericalism seems acutely aware of the many wounds that the leaders of the Church have inflicted through the misuse of both kinds of authority. In the hopes of understanding how to properly wield the kind of authority that truly belongs to the ordained, modern popes have let go of more worldly forms of power, even when it means handing over significant power within Church structures to laymen and laywomen.
Francis and Leo have been undertaking measures to move the Church into an age with clerics but without clericalism, with laity taking on more of the challenges of parish and diocesan administration. This, in turn, allows priests and bishops to strengthen their focus on testifying to the Gospel. This may seem like incremental change, but its end result could be quite radical. What would a Church truly free of clericalism look like? What could laypeople do once administration of the Church is no longer monopolized? And what could bishops do once their purple capes are freed from endless red tape?
In the first weeks of his papacy, Leo gave us a hint of what he hopes to see from his fellow clergy. In a sermon to the College of Cardinals, Leo closed by recalling the words of Ignatius of Antioch on his way to martyrdom: “Then I will truly be a disciple of Jesus Christ, when the world no longer sees my body.” To Leo, these words go beyond the physical martyrdom Ignatius endured: they indicate an “indispensable commitment for all those in the Church who exercise a ministry of authority. It is to move aside so that Christ may remain, to make oneself small so that He may be known and glorified, to spend oneself to the utmost so that all may have the opportunity to know and love Him.”
Some Vatican visitors have amused the world (and my fellow Chicagoans in particular) by pulling Robert Prevost back to the surface with Chicago baseball memorabilia. To Leo, making himself small doesn’t mean hiding his personality to more effectively play-act as a spiritual leader: it means putting aside his ego and desire for power so that Christ may become visible in the world through him. For Pope Leo, a priest is a sign not of Christ’s kingship in any worldly sense, but simply of Christ’s continued presence in the world—a reminder of the City of God, not an official in the City of Man.
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