Pope Francis washes and kisses the feet of 12 women inmates of the Rebibbia prison on the outskirts of Rome on Holy Thursday, March 28, 2024, a ritual meant to emphasize his vocation of service and humility.
By Christopher Lamb
Pope Francis on Thursday has washed the feet of 12 women at a prison in Rome during a ceremony emphasizing humility. It is the first time the pope has washed the feet of women only during the special annual service.
The 87-year-old pontiff, who has been experiencing health and mobility difficulties recently, led the ceremony at Rebibbia prison in Rome,washing the feet of each of the women from his wheelchair, many of whom were in tears as he did so.
The foot-washing ritual takes place on the Thursday before Easter and seeks to imitate Jesus Christ’s washing of his disciples’ feet the night before he died.
Since his election, the pope has taken this ceremony out of Vatican territory and celebrated by washing the feet of prisoners, refugees and the disabled.
Over the years, Francis has washed the feet of women and Muslims. However, Michael Walsh, a prominent church historian and author, and Fr Anthony Ruff, a liturgical expert, both told CNN they believe this is the first time a pope has washed the feet of women exclusively during the ceremony.
Nadia Fontana, the director of the female prison in Rome where the event took place, said it was the first time a pope had entered their facility, which she said held 360 prisoners and one child.
In the early years of his pontificate, the pope changed church rules to officially include women in the ceremony, a move that met resistance in the Vatican.
His predecessor, Benedict XVI, only washed the feet of men, and later switched to washing only the feet of priests.
Pope Francis unexpectedly skipped delivering his homily during the Palm Sunday Mass service at the Vatican last week, although he was able to preside over the service and was later driven around in the popemobile.
The service marked the beginning of Holy Week, the most sacred week in the church’s calendar as Christians around the world prepare to celebrate Easter, and his decision to skip the homily, or reflection, was a surprise.
The pontiff has in recent weeks had aides read out several of his speeches after suffering from a bout of ill health. On February 28, he was admitted to hospital for tests. Over the winter months, Francis has battled with bouts of bronchitis, cold and flu.
— The PRRI poll found that the vast majority of those who are unaffiliated are content to stay that way. Just 9% of respondents say they’re looking for a religion that would be right for them.
Symbols of the three monotheistic religions
By Jason DeRose
People in the U.S. are leaving and switching faith traditions in large numbers. The idea of “religious churning” is very common in America, according to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).
It finds that around one-quarter (26%) of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated, a number that has risen over the last decade and is now the largest single religious group in the U.S. That’s similar to what other surveys and polls have also found, including Pew Research.
PRRI found that the number of those who describe themselves as “nothing in particular” has held steady since 2013, but those who identify as atheists have doubled (from 2% to 4%) and those who say they’re agnostic has more than doubled (from 2% to 5%).
This study looks at which faith traditions those unaffiliated people are coming from.
“Thirty-five percent were former Catholics, 35% were former mainline Protestants, only about 16% were former evangelicals,” says Melissa Deckman, PRRI’s chief executive officer. “And really not many of those Americans are, in fact, looking for an organized religion that would be right for them. We just found it was 9%.”
That these people are not looking for a religion has, Deckman says, implications for how and even whether houses of worship should try to attract new people.
Among other findings: The Catholic Church is losing more members than it’s gaining, though the numbers are slightly better for retention among Hispanic Catholics.
There is much lower religious churn among Black Protestants and among Jews who seem overall happy in their faith traditions and tend to stay there.
As for why people leave their religions, PRRI found that about two-thirds (67%) of people who leave a faith tradition say they did so because they simply stopped believing in that religion’s teachings.
And nearly half (47%) of respondents who left cited negative teaching about the treatment of LGBTQ people.
Those numbers were especially high with one group in particular.
“Religion’s negative teaching about LGBTQ people are driving younger Americans to leave church,” Deckman says. “We found that about 60% of Americans who are under the age of 30 who have left religion say they left because of their religious traditions teaching, which is a much higher rate than for older Americans.”
Hispanic Americans are also more likely to say they’ve left a religion over LGBTQ issues. Other reasons cited for leaving: clergy sexual abuse and over-involvement in politics.
The new PRRI report is based on a survey of more than 5,600 adults late last year.
About one-third of religiously unaffiliated Americans say they no longer identify with their childhood religion because the religion was bad for their mental health. That response was strongest among LGBTQ respondents.
The survey also asked about the prevalence of the so-called “prosperity Gospel.” It found that 31% of respondents agreed with the statement “God always rewards those who have good faith with good health, financial success, and fulfilling personal relationships.”
Black Americans tend to agree more with these theological beliefs than other racial or ethnic groups. And Republicans are more likely than independents and Democrats to hold such beliefs.
Pope Francis is facing growing dissent among members of the Catholic Church over recent decisions that opponents portray as contrary to traditional church doctrine.
The most controversial has been the publication of a document in December by a Vatican bishop, with the pope’s approval, mooting the “possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples.” While the document stressed that it did not change the church’s stance on homosexuality, it brought a joint letter from Catholic clergy and scholars calling on others to disregard it.
Previously in his 11-year tenure as the head of the church, the pontiff has raised eyebrows by suggesting that even atheists could go to heaven and saying that he did not judge homosexuals, as well as taking a softer stance on abortion and remarriage.
Experts who spoke to Newsweek cast these tensions as an ideological clash between those in the church who wish to reform its message and those who want to conserve its traditional teachings, which reflects a broader culture war between liberal and conservative ideals.
Pope Francis has provoked controversy and growing dissent over some of his stances on church doctrine, including allowing same-sex couples to be blessed.
They said that rather than departing from the core principles of the faith, Francis was attempting to reach out to those who might not conform to a traditional view of family life to give them greater spiritual guidance without seeking to alter church doctrine.
While the dissent is expected to continue, Francis is unlikely to face calls for his removal, the experts said, and a split within the church is highly unlikely, owing to its historical structure.
“When Pope Francis first became pope, I’d say very early on he really distinguished himself from his immediate predecessors Benedict and John Paul II,” Michele Dillon, a sociologist and dean of the University of New Hampshire’s College of Liberal Arts who specializes in the Catholic Church, told Newsweek.
“He said that, really, the church needs to go and walk with people where…they’re at, and that the church needs to be pastoral,” she said.
Dillon said this approach was designed to “recognize the complexity of everybody’s lived reality” in the modern world, allowing the clergy to continue “working with them to keep them close to God, close to the church.”
In the open letter opposing the possibility of same-sex blessings, which was published in February, over a hundred Catholic thought leaders called on Francis to “urgently withdraw this unfortunate document, which is in contradiction with both Scripture and the universal and uninterrupted tradition of the Church.” They argued that this would be tantamount to condoning “objectively sinful” relationships.
The pope in turn accused the naysayers of “hypocrisy,” arguing that they were willing to let him bless someone who exploits people despite it also being considered a sin.
He also recently provoked criticism for suggesting Ukraine should be willing to negotiate a peace settlement with Russia, but Dillon said this was a political controversy rather than a religious one.
She interpreted Francis’ sentiments on the invasion as arising from “his commitment to [the] sanctity of life, basically that war is not a good thing and, being realistic, to what extent can the valiant efforts of the Ukrainians…actually defeat Russia.”
In particular, Dillon said, the sentiments came from an understanding of “how much the Ukrainians have suffered and continue to suffer.”
The other controversies surrounding Francis primarily concern the church’s teachings and could be viewed as an attempt to keep the church relevant in a changing world. While the number of Catholics worldwide has more than tripled in the past century, the proportion of Catholics compared with the total global population has decreased slightly in that time.
In August last year, the pontiff called out the “backwardness” of some Catholic conservatives in the United States, arguing that they had replaced faith with political ideology.
His opponents appear to accuse him of the same. Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas—a firebrand who has frequently railed against what he has described as “woke” values and has been critical of the pope—was among the loudest voices to oppose the idea of same-sex blessings.
He has previously said that “we must be first-century Christians in the 21st century” and that “corruption” had a “devastating stranglehold” on the church.
Strickland was removed from his diocese in November following an investigation earlier in the year. The Vatican has not disclosed why it chose to remove him. Strickland said he had “threatened some of the powers that be with the truth of the gospel.”
Darrell Bock, a senior research professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary, told Newsweek that Francis “represents a lean of the Catholic Church that tends to be more liberal and less traditional, and so some of the pushback is coming from the more traditional-oriented Catholics.”
Dillon said that the pope wanted to “find a way forward that can be inclusive rather than condemnatory.”
However, there is “a narrow segment—but it’s a loud segment—of very strongly conservative Catholics, including in the U.S….who really demand this [other] approach, even though the development of doctrine is something that is so essential to the Catholic Church,” she said.
Pope Francis appears alongside his cardinals to preside over the funeral of German cardinal Paul Josef Cordes on Monday in Vatican City.
Dillon described Catholic doctrine as a “living tradition” and said that Francis was seeking a discussion on how to interpret the religion’s teachings “in light of the realities of the time.” But others have argued that he has shown an intolerance for disagreement.
“So far, no doctrine has been changed,” she said. “He’s not talking about the core principles of the Catholic faith. He’s not talking about anything to do with the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus.”
Dillon argued that if Pope John Paul II—considered a more conservative pontiff—had been subjected to a similar form of public dissent by liberal bishops, “that would be seen as being heretical by the very same bishops who now seem to be calling out Pope Francis and exaggerating what it is he is doing.”
While Bock casts Francis’ softening of the church’s rhetoric on key issues as a bid to maintain relevance, Dillon argues it is more to appeal to Catholics who may have been overlooked by the church in the past.
“What you’re seeing is an attempt to be more modern, more sensitive to the position of the church that’s been marginalized in a modern world. I think that’s the main thing that we’re seeing,” Bock said. “He is less bound by tradition as historically the Catholic Church has been and is willing to think through handling things differently than the way they’ve been handled, and I think that’s part of what you’re seeing.”
Dillon said, “It’s not trying to be relevant because he’s looking for votes at an election, so it’s not the relevance of a cynic.”
She added that a lot of sociological work in the 1990s investigated why gay individuals wanted to remain Catholic despite being stigmatized by the church and found that they saw its theology and rituals as a “very important part of their identity.”
“Despite the challenges that a lot of people have living out the letter of church teaching in terms of some of these issues, there’s still, nonetheless, a hunger for the spirituality and the theology…that the Catholic Church, over centuries, offers them,” Dillon said. “I think the challenge is for church leaders to try to harness people’s longing.”
But if the dissent over Francis’ leadership continues to grow, those more conservative voices might start calling for him to be replaced.
Pope Francis gestures to pilgrims as he arrives in St. Peter’s Square for his weekly audience on Wednesday in Vatican City. The pontiff has rebuffed the idea of stepping down.
“I am not sure how much power exists to try and challenge a pope within the structure of the Catholic Church,” Bock said. “I think the pressure that comes is just the pressure that will come from the internal debates among the leaders in the Catholic Church, and there are very much two sides. His election reflects that.”
Dillon said that removing a pope was ultimately precluded for theological reasons. “Catholics believe in the Holy Spirit,” she said. “From this perspective, there is a reason why he is chosen to be pope.”
Even though internal politics was likely at play in his election, the conclave of cardinals that select a new Catholic leader is supposed to be guided by divine inspiration in their choice. “They don’t have the authority to override what might be seen as the work of the Holy Spirit,” Dillon said.
But if the dissent became pronounced enough, Francis’ position might be seen as untenable. Questions have already been raised about his health and the possibility of his abdicating on such grounds, as his predecessor did.
But in recently published excerpts of his autobiography, the pontiff said that he did not see “any conditions for renunciation” and disregarded criticism of his leadership. Bock said Francis would likely see stepping down “as an abandonment of what [he’s] trying to achieve.”
Much of the conservative dissent against the pope’s decisions appears to come from the U.S. Many of those who signed the open letter were American. While there has not been a significant split in the Catholic Church in hundreds of years, could there be another on the way?
“The Catholic Church, precisely, is not a schismatic church,” Dillon said, adding that it has always had diversity. “To me, the talk of schisms is really attention-grabbing, and, in my assessment, it’s very un-Catholic to even have that thought.”
Bock agreed, saying, “The Catholic Church is structured in a very traditional and historical way, and I just don’t see it getting to the point of an absolute break of any kind. What you’ll get is just that sound of protesting voices in the internal dialogue within the church. This has been going on for a long time.”
Sexuality among religious Latinos has long been a complex subject. While the place of same-sex marriage among major traditional religions has been contested over decades, a new survey shows that a number of religious Latino groups in the U.S., including Hispanic Catholics, support same-sex marriage and believe it should be allowed.
The study was conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, throughout 2023. With more than 22,000 adults interviewed, the institute seeks to form a detailed profile of the demographic, religious and political characteristics of LGBTQ Americans.
The analysis measures Americans’ attitudes on LGTQ rights across all 50 states on three key politics: nondiscrimination protections, religiously based services refusals and same-sex marriage.
The study comes at a contrasting time for Latino religious followers.
On one hand, Latino evangelical support for Christian nationalism is on the rise, with about 55% of Hispanic Protestants saying they supported or sympathized with the movement in 2023, a 12% increase compared to the year prior, NBC News reports.
“I believe that God is going to do something very great with the Latino people in the United States,” Pastor Dionny Baez told his protestant congregation in Miami.
On the other hand, the share of Latinos who are religiously unaffiliated (describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular”) now stands at 30%, up from 18% in 2013.
Pope Francis formally approved letting Catholic priests bless same-sex couples back in December.
But when it comes to sexuality, the Hispanic profile in relation to religion and sexuality becomes more nuanced, according to PRRI.
In the U.S., roughly one in ten Americans identified as part of the LGBTQ community. Of this number, one in five are Hispanic (20%) the second largest race in the country to identify as part of this community.
Despite these numbers, support for LGBTQ people varied widely depending on the religion.
The lowest levels of support for nondiscrimination protections are from Hispanic Protestants (61%), followed by white evangelical Protestants and Muslims (56%).
Hispanic Catholics generally support such laws, but they saw one of the most dramatic declines between 2022 and 2023, decreasing 8 points (from 83% to 75%).
When it comes to same-sex marriage, a similar pattern emerges. While strong majorities of Christian nationalism Rejecters and Skeptics are in favor of allowing gay and lesbian couples the right to marry legally, most of those who are sympathizers and adherents of the movement oppose it.
89% of Hispanic Christian nationalism Rejecters favor same-sex marriage, followed by 70% of Hispanic Christian nationalism Skeptics who think similarly.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, 55% of Hispanic Christian nationalism sympathizers oppose allowing same-sex marriage, compared to 75% of adherents who think the same.
Catholics have long opposed same-sex marriage, but lately there have been factions seeking to present a more open stance. One of them is spearheaded by none other than Pope Francis, who back in December formally approved letting Catholic priests bless same-sex couples under certain circumstances.
While the Pope stressed that blessings in question must not be tied to any specific Catholic celebration or religious service and should not be conferred at the same time as a civil union ceremony, he also requested for such blessings to not be denied, insisting that people seeking a relationship with God and looking for his mercy shouldn’t be hold up to an impossible standard to receive it.
“There is no intention to legitimize anything, but rather to open one’s life to God, to ask for his help to live better, and also to invoke the Holy Spirit so that the values of the Gospel may be lived with greater faithfulness,” he said.
Participants at the conference titled “Women Leaders: Towards a Brighter Future,” to mark International Women’s Day 2024, listen to a speech by Cristiane Murray, deputy director, Holy See press office, at the Vatican, March 6, 2024.
Women meeting in Rome this week to promote female leadership in the Catholic Church are challenging the hierarchy’s resistance to change and its theological emphasis on ‘natural’ gender divisions.
In the week leading up to International Women’s Day, Catholic women gathered near the Vatican and online to promote female leadership in the Catholic Church, demanding equality and visibility while urging the institution to set its fears about change aside.
“It’s so important that the Catholic Church be engaged in this issue, not just internally, but also externally given the contribution they make in the education sphere and the health care sphere,” Chiara Porro, Australia’s ambassador to the Holy See, told Religion News Service on Wednesday (March 6).
Acknowledging that in her four years in Rome the Vatican has taken significant steps forward, with high-ranking Vatican positions being filled by women, Porro represents a country that “has a very strong agenda in empowering women and women in leadership,” she said, “including in our own foreign service, which like the Catholic Church has been very male dominated for a very long time.”
She said her female colleagues — the number of women ambassadors to the Vatican has risen to 40 — talk about the issue of women’s influence often. “It’s an incredible group, an informal group, and we come from many different areas of the world. We support each other, we share ideas, we network,” she said.
Pope Francis has supported the trend, she said, meeting with the female ambassadors last year on International Women’s Day.
Chiara Porro.
Porro works closely with the International Union of Superiors General, the leaders of the world’s religious orders, to put a spotlight on the work nuns do, especially in the poorest places in the world. But their focus goes beyond Catholicism. This week, the embassies of Australia, France and the Netherlands, all woman-led, sponsored “Women Sowing Seeds of Peace and Cultivating Encounter,” a conference of Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu female faith leaders.
“When we talk about interfaith dialogue, when we talk about religious leaders coming together, we find that a lot of the religions around the world are led by men, so it’s really important to bring female faith leaders together,” Porro said.
On Thursday, women theologians, experts and leaders met for a one-day discussion on female leadership, asking the tough questions facing the Catholic Church on the issue. In her presentation, ordained missionary and theologian Maeve Louise Heaney questioned Catholic theology that attempts to “essentialize” women. “They speak of complementarity and name the contribution of women as essentially different to that of men,” she explained, “pitching love, spirituality and nurturing against authority, leadership and intellect.”
Heaney challenged Catholics to reconsider their idea of God and the Holy Spirit as neither male nor female, quoting her “yoga-loving” niece who prays to “the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And the Mother, the Daughter and the Holy Spirit.”
A 2022 survey of 17,200 women in 104 countries by the international forum Catholic Women Speak found that two-thirds of women in the church support “radical reform,” with 29% saying they will consider leaving the church if women aren’t given more prominence.
In her interview with RNS, Heaney recognized that the church, “like any big ship, moves slowly,” adding, “We don’t have a time frame.” She took encouragement, she said, from Francis’ Synod on Synodality, born from a massive consultation of Catholics on hot-button issues including female empowerment and LGBTQ inclusion, which will hold its second session at the Vatican in October.
Pope Francis poses for a picture with participants of the Synod of Bishops’ 16th General Assembly in the Paul VI Hall at the Vatican, Oct. 23, 2023.
She also supports the discussions underway at the Vatican about allowing women to be ordained as deacons, who can preach at Mass but cannot perform some other priestly functions, such as consecrate Communion or hear confessions.
“I think the people have a right to hear women preaching,” Heaney said. “There are spaces in which the best person to speak on a theme would be a woman. And I think a theological, doctrinal and canon law structure could open spaces for that to happen.”
According to Heaney, there are no theological barriers to ordaining women as deacons, nor would women deacons present any difficulty in terms of the church’s organization. What stands in the way, she said, is the fear that allowing women deacons would bring women closer to the altar, the priests’ dominion.
“Fear is a bad adviser,” she said. “What if we gave the church that? What if we allowed spaces for women to preach? Under the authority of the bishop, in collaboration with the parish priest, with the proper formation like all the rest of the ministry. You might find that the issue of priesthood changes in color if we have different kinds of leadership.”
While theologians push the envelope on female leadership, women who have climbed up the Vatican administration have learned to have patience about penetrating the male-dominated bureaucracy.
“It’s a long process that has to be continued,” said Sister Nathalie Becquart, the first female secretary of the Vatican’s Synod office and a leading figure in the pope’s synodal process. “They will need more time,” Becquart said, while teasing that the Vatican might soon announce a new development on this front.
On Thursday, the Catholic charity network Caritas published “Equality, Encounter, Renewal,” a pamphlet urging its 162 affiliated Catholic charities to create spaces for dialogue about women’s leadership. In an introduction, Sister Alessandra Smerilli, the secretary of the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, laments that the “systematic social and cultural exclusion of women can also be seen when looking at the face of leadership in the world today.”
Francis, meanwhile, continues to use language that reinforces the role of women as mothers and caregivers. Speaking to organizers of the conference “Women in the Church: Builders of humanity,” taking place in Rome this week to recognize the contributions of 10 female saints, the pope said “the church is female” and women have a “unique capacity for compassion” that allows them “to bring love where love is lacking, and humanity where human beings are searching to find their true identity.”
But some women in Rome this week said that Catholic theology can often emphasize too much women’s natural inclinations, which it sees as reflecting the relationship that Christ has with his church. The women asked how this view affects the roles men and women occupy in the church.
Heaney said: “It is not easy to broaden our understanding of the One who brought us to life, as no one image will work. But we owe it to the future generations.”
