Click below to hear the episode:

 

The Jubilee for Women Priests, an event hosted by Women’s Ordination Worldwide in Rome last week, was strategically timed to coincide with the Vatican’s Jubilee for Priests. With panels, a citywide poster exhibit, a cocktail hour with drinks named for some of Pope Francis’ less fortunate statements about women’s place in the church, and attendees’ prayerful presence in St. Peter’s Square for the closing Mass, the event brought together feminist thinkers to consider the complex (hopeless?) situation Catholic women find themselves in under Francis’s pontificate, that while no substantive change seems forthcoming, at least there’s more openness to discussion.

In today’s episode, we hear from Father Tony Flannery, a Redemptorist priest who’s been forbidden to serve in priestly ministry until he recants his support for women’s ordination.

Among his comments:

• “Unless the church fully embraces the full equality of women, it will cease to exist as anything important in the world.”
• “In Ireland, the priesthood as we know it is particularly dead.”
• “The collapse of the system has to get much more advanced…for the new model of ministry based on equality” to come about.

At the round table discussion in which he participated, he says one theologian expressed the wish “that Francis wouldn’t say anything about women anymore, that this is really a blind spot with him.”

Also featured in today’s episode is Women’s Ordination Worldwide spokeswoman Miriam Duignan and National Catholic Reporter columnist Jamie Manson. Both agree that the issue of women’s ordination is crucial to the future of Catholicism.

Here is a link to NCR’s coverage of the Jubilee for Women Priests:

http://ncronline.org/news/people/womens-ordination-worldwide-meets-marches-rome

And a link to Jamie Manson’s Grace on the Margins column, “It’s Time to be Honest about Pope Francis and Women”: http://ncronline.org/blogs/grace-margins/its-time-be-honest-about-pope-francis-and-women

Plus, some pictures from the Jubilee for Women Priests:

 

A pop-up phone booth  

Strawberries on the Cake — a special cocktail named for Pope Francis’ reference to women theologians