Pope Francis’ trip through Belgium reached new lows on Saturday when Catholic university women demanded to his face a “paradigm change” on women’s issues in the church and then expressed deep disappointment when Francis dug in.
The Catholic Louvain University, the Francophone campus of Belgium’s storied Catholic university, issued a scathing statement after Francis visited and repeated his view that women are the “fertile” nurturers of the church, inducing grimaces in his audience.
“UCLouvain expresses its incomprehension and disapproval of the position expressed by Pope Francis regarding the role of women in the church and society,” the statement said, calling the pope’s views “deterministic and reductive”.
Francis’ trip to Belgium, ostensibly to celebrate the university’s 600th anniversary, was always going to be difficult, given Belgium’s wretched legacy of clerical sexual abuse and secular trends which have emptied churches in the once staunchly Catholic country.
Francis got an earful on Friday about the abuse crisis starting with King Philippe and Prime Minister Alexander Croos, and continuing on down to the victims themselves.
During the university encounter, the students made an impassioned plea to Francis for the church to change its view of women to better appreciate their gifts.
It is an issue Francis knows well: He has made some changes during his 11-year pontificate, allowing women to serve as acolytes, appointing several women to high-ranking positions in the Vatican, and saying women must have greater decision-making roles in the church.
However, he has ruled out ordaining women as priests and has refused so far to budge on demands that the church allow women to serve as deacons, a ministry that performs many of the same tasks as priests.
In a letter read aloud on stage with the pope listening attentively, the students noted that Francis’ landmark 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Si (Praised Be) made virtually no mention of women, cited no woman theologians and “exalts their maternal role and forbids them access to ordained ministries”.
“Women have been made invisible. Invisible in their lives, women have also been invisible in their intellectual contributions,” the students said.
“What, then, is the place of women in the church?” they asked. “We need a paradigm shift, which can and must draw on the treasures of spirituality as much as on the development of the various disciplines of science.”
Francis said he liked what they said, but repeated his frequent refrain that “the church is woman”, only exists because the Virgin Mary agreed to be the mother of Jesus and that men and women were complementary.
“Woman is fertile welcome. Care. Vital devotion,” Francis said.
“Let us be more attentive to the many daily expressions of this love, from friendship to the workplace, from studies to the exercise of responsibility in the church and society, from marriage to motherhood, from virginity to the service of others and the building up of the kingdom of God.”
The university said such terminology had no place in a university or society today.
“UC Louvain can only express its disagreement with this deterministic and reductive position,” the statement said.
“It reaffirms its desire for everyone to flourish within it and in society, whatever their origins, gender or sexual orientation. It calls on the church to follow the same path, without any form of discrimination.”
