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The Church is “a community composed of men”: thus says the first paragraph of Gaudium et spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, promulgated in 1965 by the Second Vatican Council. For “men,” in that document and elsewhere, we are meant to read “men and women”—so they say—but if you were watching the College of Cardinals assemble to elect Pope Leo XIV, you could be excused for thinking “a community composed of men” means just what it says. Every time the world’s focus turns back to Rome, as it did in April and May, the conspicuous maleness of the assembly we call “the Church” is a little more striking and a little harder to excuse.

The conflict has been plain for at least these sixty years: the Church is the People of God, but the hierarchy is only men. The Church insists that it does not have the authority to ordain women, and also insists that its withholding of the sacrament of Holy Orders should not be interpreted as a contradiction of women’s dignity. If the pope and bishops truly believed that, they would have made diversifying the ranks of Church leadership a top priority after the Second Vatican Council. Every position of authority that does not directly require the ability to celebrate Mass should be open to lay men and women, the better to take advantage of the diversity of gifts among the People of God. By now, women in leadership should not be a novelty in Vatican City. Unfortunately, the men who oversaw the implementation of the Council’s reforms did not make elevating women a priority, because most of them were—and here I will use a technical term—kind of weird about women. 

Sr. Mary Luke Tobin was one of a small number of women who were invited to participate as auditors in the third and fourth sessions of Vatican II. She and two others were able to contribute to the working group that drafted Gaudium et spes, even if they couldn’t do anything about its exclusionary language. Tobin wrote in her memoir, Hope Is an Open Door, about a ceremony she attended marking the conclusion of the Council, at which “certificates of honor” were presented “to distinguished persons in various categories” that contribute to the Church: philosophers, musicians, and so on. “Finally, four women walked across the stage,” she says, “and the announcer proclaimed that ‘women should be honored for their contribution to the church.’” Tobin remembers objecting, “But women are not a category in the church…Men and women are the church, aren’t they?” It was a fair point in 1965, and alas, it’s a fair point now.

Pope Francis was on to something when he said, early in his pontificate, “The challenge today is this: to think about the specific place of women also in those places where the authority of the church is exercised for various areas of the church.” It’s not his most quotable sentence, but it states the problem clearly enough. Francis did take some steps toward correcting the imbalance: He made Sr. Nathalie Becquart undersecretary to the Synod of Bishops and gave her a voting role. He brought more women into the synod deliberations. 

His own remarks often betrayed a women-as-a-category mindset; he once described the women members of the International Theological Commission as “strawberries on the cake,” which was only slightly mitigated by the fact that he also said there should be more of them. He asked that same group to “make the Church less masculine,” which sounds good, except that in the same breath he told them he wanted them to reflect on “the Church as woman, the Church as a bride.” History has shown it’s very difficult to do that without being weird about women.

Now we have a new pope, an American-born pope, a man who studied under and alongside women at Catholic Theological Union. Sr. Becquart told Aleteia that she is hopeful Leo XIV will support women like herself in Church leadership: “In Latin America, he was in a diocese with few priests, so he had experience working with lay people and having women in positions of responsibility.” Leo hasn’t said much on the subject, but at his first Regina Caeli appearance, he managed to mention Mother’s Day without waxing poetic about women and flowers and berries. That’s a good sign. 

Still, all this is a handful of straws, and I have grown tired of grasping at straws. It is already several generations too late to talk about making progress for women in the Church. The task now is more like running to catch up, and the Vatican has always been disinclined to run.

During the papal transition, there were women journalists reporting from the piazza, women theologians and historians breaking everything down on television, heads of women’s religious congregations holding their own assembly in Rome—and, of course, women in parishes, schools, and diocesan offices keeping the whole Church running back home. The one place you could not find any women was in the conclave, deciding who would lead the Church forward. And those of us who think it’s well past time for leadership that isn’t weird about women have to live with the knowledge that personnel decisions are still being made by a room full of men with other priorities.

Ordination for women feels as unattainable as ever. But I have some modest hopes. I hope that Leo will refrain from talking about “the feminine genius.” I hope he will refer to women as fellow human beings, fellow members of the People of God, and not as accessories, ornaments, or idols. I want him to make good on his promises to continue along the path that Pope Francis laid out, but not to take up the project Francis gestured at when he said, “We have to work harder to develop a profound theology of the woman.” We have wasted too much time already building up theologies that justify injustice—ideologies that put women on a pedestal instead of giving us a seat at the table. Instead of an assembly of men trying to come up with a theology that explains women, I want to see the Church settle on one theology for everyone. Is it realistic to hope we might get there with Pope Leo?  His motto, after all, is in illo Uno unum—in the One, we are all one. Hope springs eternal.