Vatican Grants Women a Voice—Finally

In a historic move, the Vatican grants voting rights to laywomen at the upcoming Synod of Bishops. Read what our partners have to say about this historic move.

Are Catholic women now fully included in the body of the church?

Image courtesy of Women’s Ordination Conference, one of the founders of the “Votes for Catholic Women” campaign.

Catholic women are finally getting a voice in Rome. On Wednesday, the Vatican announced major reforms to the upcoming Synod of the Bishops, including the addition of a voting bloc composed of 70 non-bishop members. Pope Francis will appoint these 70 members, who will be equally split between men and women—and each will be granted a vote.

Francis promised to include young people among these non-bishop members. Five women religious will also join five male priests as voting representatives for religious orders.

“Granting women and laypeople voting rights in the bishops’ synod is long overdue,” said Call To Action Executive Director Donna Tarney. “We’re grateful to Pope Francis for taking this significant step forward in validating the full dignity of women as leaders and decision-makers. All people—lay and clergy, women and men, trans and non-binary—need to have a seat at the table for our church to truly be a just church. We can no longer be a church of hierarchy, exclusion, and sexism. We are the church.”

While our partner Women's Ordination Conference praised Francis for approving these significant and historic changes, WOC Executive Director Kate McElwee acknowledged that these significant reforms are the result of decades of organizing and campaigning.

McElwee said Wednesday in a statement:

The Women’s Ordination Conference celebrates this development in the church’s history toward greater co-responsibility and equity between women and men at the synod. This is a significant crack in the stained glass ceiling, and the result of sustained advocacy, activism and the witness of the collaborative ‘Votes for Catholic Women’ campaign, of which the Women’s Ordination Conference played a founding role. 

In 2018, WOC led the call for voting rights for women at synods by demonstrating peacefully outside of St. Peter’s Square only to be manhandled and harassed by Vatican police. For years Vatican representatives and bishops resisted, moving the goalpost with every synod as to why women were not allowed to vote. The unspoken reason was always sexism.   

McElwee added that including women as full members of the voting body moves the goalpost to the point of no return when it comes to gender parity and equity in the institutional Catholic Church. “This is an important step on the path toward gender parity, and we will continue our persistent efforts to work for lasting structural changes in the church,” McElwee said. “There is no turning back.”

FutureChurch Co-Director Deborah Rose-Milavec said Wednesday in response to this unprecedented decision:

This momentous change will redefine how authority works in the Church, moving beyond the solitary reliance on the episcopacy to include the deliberative voices of Catholic women and all the baptized. The inclusion of laywomen and laymen as deliberators and voters in this critically important decision-making body holds the promise for urgent and necessary changes in the way the Church engages those members who have been excluded and the world.

According to Cardinal Mario Grech, who oversees the Synod of Bishops, about 21 percent of the voting body will be laypeople, with roughly half of that composed of women.