Pope Francis had a sense of humour. He consigned a whole chapter of his autobiography, Hope, to the benefits of a good laugh. One of his favourite jokes was told to him by Justin Welby, the Anglican former archbishop of Canterbury. “Do you know the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist?” it goes.
“No. What’s the difference?”
“With the terrorist, you can negotiate.”
Many women Catholics will appreciate the joke’s aptness. For it is liturgiology that gives precedence to male pronouns and directs congregations to pray “for us men and for our salvation” at masses that may only be conducted by men.
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Francis had great time for individual women. He fell for Amalia Damonte, a classmate in primary school. As a child, he wrote her a love letter suggesting they get married. His proposal was accompanied by a sweet drawing of their future marital home.
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At a Sunday lunch in his grandparents’ house when he was about 15, he confronted a wealthy uncle for dismissing Eva Peron as “a disreputable woman” because she had been an actress. “But she helps the poor,” retorted the teenage Jorge Mario Bergoglio. “What do you do for the poor?” The debate grew heated until, eventually, it was extinguished when Jorge grabbed a soda siphon from the table and sprayed it in his uncle’s face.
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Esther Ballestrino de Careaga was another important figure in his life. “I was very fond of her,” he said in his autobiography. After Argentina’s 1976 coup d’état, she became a founding member of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, formed to search for those disappeared under the brutal military dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla. Her pregnant 16-year-old daughter had been taken captive and only escaped being raped by falsely claiming she had leprosy.
Undoubtedly, Francis loved his mother, Regina. He recalled how, after his ordination on December 3rd, 1969, she had knelt before him and asked for his blessing. The gesture, he said, “much affected me”.
Despite his compassionate instincts on migration, the environment and pacifism, the pontiff shared a blind spot with the institution he led. He put women on a pedestal. There, they could do no harm.
“The church is woman. She is the bride of Jesus,” he declared more than once. Often, he said it in response to women’s demands to be allowed become priests.
“Womanhood speaks to us of fruitful welcome, nurturing and life-giving dedication. For this reason, a woman is more important than a man. But it is terrible when a woman wants to be a man,” he told students at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium last autumn. In protest, the college issued a press statement deploring Francis’s comments as “conservative”, “deterministic and reductive”. He responded that he had always extolled women’s “dignity”.
“To masculinise women is not human. Women, I always say, are more important than men.”
For many women, his words were patronising. Former president Mary McAleese was one. In December 2022, she accused him of “misogynistic drivel” after he rebuffed a suggestion that women were being “deprived” by being excluded from the priesthood. “The church is woman. The church is a spouse,” he had said in an interview with the Jesuit publication America. “Therefore, the dignity of women is mirrored in this way ... That the woman does not enter into the ministerial life is not a deprivation. No. Your place is that which is much more important and which we have yet to develop, the catechesis about women in the way of the Marian principle.”
In an email to the Pope, McAleese, who has an advanced degree in canon law from Rome’s Gregorian University, scorned: “It was reassuring and gratifying to observe the utter impenetrability of the reasons you offered, their ludicrous lack of logic or clarity, in short, the fact that you offered just more unlikely misogynistic drivel.”
It is fine rhetoric to commend women as the best thing since sliced bread, but it rings hollow in the ears of those having to cope with bans on contraception, abortion, IVF and surrogacy, being made to feel inferior by institutional discrimination, and being told they should be grateful for the odd morsel of acknowledgment that they exist.
In many ways, Francis was a good and unpretentious man who eschewed personal pomp when he could, opting to make his home in a Vatican guest house rather than the papal palace overlooking St Peter’s Square. His big concerns, unlike some of his predecessors, were about human suffering rather than the theology of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Contrary to Catholic teaching that it is a sin, he advocated the decriminalisation of same-gender sex and, in 2017, said the church needed to consider ordaining married men, though he later ruled it out. And, while not all survivors would say he did enough, he did more than any pope to atone for clerical sexual abuse of children. When he visited Ireland in 2018, he addressed the issue repeatedly.
Some commentators have hailed him as a reformer for women in the church because of a few measures he instituted, such as appointing a small number of them to vote in the synod general assembly. Yet, despite travelling to the Marian shrine at Knock and despite then taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s reminder to him in a welcome speech about the cruelties the church dispensed in Magdalene laundries, mother and baby homes and in fixing illegal adoptions, the pope steered clear of the subject of prejudice against women. Like the liturgists, he was not prepared to negotiate.
