Pope Francis, the 86-year-old head of the worldwide Catholic Church, met with the Maryland-based LGBTQ+ Catholic organization New Ways Ministry at his Vatican residence on October 17. While the organization said that the 50-minute meeting “reflects the steady acceptance of Catholic officials to LGBTQ+ issues and ministry,” the pope still has a mixed record on LGBTQ+ issues.
The pope reportedly invited the group to his residence two years after the group’s co-founder, Sister Jeannine Gramick, sent a letter introducing herself and her group to the religious leader. The letter began a friendly exchange of correspondence between the two, leading the pope to call her a “valiant woman” and to congratulate her on her 50 years of LGBTQ+ ministry, New Ways Ministry wrote in a statement.
“The meeting was very emotional for me,” Gramick said. “From the day he was elected, I have loved and admired Pope Francis because of his humility, his love for the poor, and for those shunned by society. He is the human face of Jesus in our era.”
New Ways Ministry’s Executive Director Francis DeBernardo said, “This meeting was an affirmation not only of Sister Jeannine and New Ways Ministry but of the thousands upon thousands of LGBTQ+ people, parishes, schools, pastoral ministers, and religious communities who have been tirelessly working for equality, and who often experienced the great disapproval and ostracization…. Meeting with Pope Francis is a great encouragement for Sister Jeannine and New Ways Ministry to continue our work in the Catholic Church.”
In 1984, Washington, D.C. Archbishop James Hickey encouraged the group’s founders to disassociate with the group, according to The Washington Blade. In 1999, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, issued an order forbidding the group’s cofounders from doing any pastoral work with queer people. Ratzinger would later become Pope Benedict XVI and serve from 2005 until his historic resignation in 2013 due to a “lack of strength of mind and body” in his old age.
In January, he called laws criminalizing homosexuality “unjust” and insisted that God loves all his children just as they are. He also called on Catholic bishops to welcome LGBTQ+ people into the Church. In 2020, he also said that nations should recognize civil unions for same-sex couples because they “have a right to a family.”
Though Pope Francis has been praised as a progressive face for the centuries-old church, his words have revealed his slow, gradual warming toward LGBTQ+ individuals, even though official church teachings remain steadfastly anti-LGBTQ+.
Supporters of Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC) demonstrate near the Vatican
By Clément MELKI
“Ordain women priests!” Not far from the Vatican, where hundreds of Catholics have gathered to debate the future of the Church, purple-clad activists make their voices heard against the “patriarchy”.
The place of women in the Catholic Church — led for 2,000 years by a man, which outlaws abortion and female priests and does not recognise divorce — is one of the hot topics at the general assembly of the Synod of Bishops taking place over four weeks.
Women campaigning for change have come to Rome to make their case, from Europe and the United States but also South Africa, Australia, Colombia and India.
They have different backgrounds and diverse goals — not all want female priests, with some aiming first for women to become deacons, who can celebrate baptisms, marriages and funerals, although not masses.
But they are united in their frustration at seeing women excluded from key roles in what many view as a “patriarchal and macho” Church.
“The majority of people who support parish life and transmit the faith in families are women, mothers,” said Carmen Chaumet from French campaign group “Comite de la Jupe”, or the Committee of the Skirt.
“It is paradoxical and unfair not to give them their legitimate place.”
“If you go to the Vatican, to a mass, you see hundreds of men priests dressed the same way, and no women,” added Teresa Casillas, a member of Spanish association “Revuelta de Mujeres en la Iglesia”, “The Women’s Revolt in the Church”.
“I feel that men are the owners of God.”
– ‘Voting rights’ –
The Synod assembly, which runs until October 29, nevertheless marks a historic turning point in the Church, with nuns and laywomen allowed to take part for the first time.
Some 54 women — around 15 percent of the total of 365 assembly members — will be able to vote on proposals that will be sent to .
Vatican observers have called it a revolution. “A first step,” say campaigners.
Adeline Fermanian, co-president of the Committee of Skirt, said the pope had given “openings” on the question of ordaining women.
“He recognised that the questions has not been examined sufficiently on a theological level,” she said.
Since his election in 2013, Francis has sought to forge a more open Church, more welcoming to LGBTQ faithful and divorcees, and encouraging inter-faith dialogue.
He has increased the number of women appointed to the Curia, the central government of the Holy See, with some in senior positions.
But some campaigners see the changes as “cosmetic” reforms which hide a biased perception of women.
Cathy Corbitt, an Australian member of the executive board of umbrella group Catholic Women’s Council (CWC), said the inclusion of female voting members in the Synod was a sign of progress.
But she said the wider view of women in the Church was “very frustrating”, much of it taking inspiration from the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus.
“The pope still seems to have this blind spot towards women… He seems to regard women in terms of a role, and it’s usually in terms of a mother,” she said.
– Resistance –
The Synod process is slow — the current meeting in Rome followed a two-year global consultation, and a second general assembly is planned for next year.
Regina Franken-Wendelsorf, a German member of CWC executive board, said women were hoping for concrete action.
“All arguments and requests are on the table. It’s now the Vatican and the Church who have to act!” she said.
While the Church debates, “there are collateral victims, frustration, Catholics who leave because they no longer feel welcomed”, added French campaigner Chaumet.
But just as Pope Francis faces resistance in his reform agenda, there is significant resistance to the women’s push for change.
“Some American bishops are afraid to follow the path of the Anglican Church,” which authorised the ordination of women in 1992, notes one Synod participant, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Another senior Church member, who also asked not to be named, noted that pressure for reform was not equal from all regions of the Church.
“We must not forget that the Church is global,” he recalled. “There are expectations (among women) in Europe, but in Asia and Africa, much less.”
— Survivor names priests who abused him decades ago
Derek McCarthy of Pennsylvania stands outside the Irish boarding school where he says he was sexually abused repeatedly as a student in the 1970s.
Derek McCarthy wants public to know that Spiritan priest with ties to two US cities was one of four men who sexually molested him at Irish boarding school
Some in the US cities of Pittsburgh and New Orleans knew Naos McCool as a Roman Catholic priest who worked with college students and first responders, and also officiated his share of weddings.
But Derek McCarthy wants the public to know that McCool, a Spiritan priest, was one of four men who sexually molested him while attending an Irish boarding school – decades before he secured a six-figure settlement from the cleric’s religious order.
McCarthy has spoken openly about his abuse at Rockwell College in Tipperary before, making news headlines across Ireland. But a recent interview with the Guardian marked the first time he has publicly named his abusers, including McCool, who is still living and held relatively prominent roles at some American institutions.
“What if I’m not the only person [who endured this]?” said McCarthy, who now resides in Northampton, Pennsylvania.
McCarthy, 58, also said he wanted to visibly demand an in-person apology from McCool – who is reported to be in an Irish nursing home – and his other still-living abuser, a Spiritan priest named Martin McDonagh.
“After all these years, see me face-to-face,” McCarthy said. “So I can look at you and ask you, ‘Why?’ That’s all I want to know – why.”
McCarthy’s remarks are the first linking figures such as McCool and McDonagh to the Catholic church’s long unfolding clerical molestation scandal.
As McCarthy told it in a written complaint submitted to attorneys for the Spiritans, he was sexually abused dozens of times by McCool, McDonagh, the late Spiritan priest Michael Comerford and school chiropodist Dr Jeremiah Lambe while he attended Rockwell as a child in the 1970s.
McCarthy’s complaint recounted how he had already been abused by some of the other men when he went to McCool to report them. McCarthy was about 14 at the time and believed McCool – his dean of studies – would protect him.
But, after McCool initially projected a sense of concern, he ordered McCarthy to his office after the boy was late to class one day. There, McCool exposed himself to McCarthy and carried out a sex act.
McCarthy recalls that on dozens of occasions over the next year or, McCool would beat him with a wooden stick and sexually assault him. The abuse unfolded when the school library was unattended or in McCool’s private dormitory room.
It all became so overwhelming that McCarthy once threw himself in front of a car near his family’s home in hopes that he wouldn’t have to go back to school.
Of McCool, McCarthy said: “He is one of the most violent people I’ve ever met in my life.”
‘State of decline’
One detail stands prominently out in McCarthy’s recollection of his abuse. He said he would sometimes see McCool wearing a New Orleans police department jacket.
A 1978 newspaper article contains a clue as to why McCool would have had such a jacket. The article explains that McCool at the time had been spending more than a month for each of the previous five summers assisting a priest stationed at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church & International Shrine of St Jude, which sits on the edge of New Orleans’s French Quarter.
The article notes that the priest with whom McCool collaborated was “the Catholic chaplain for New Orleans police” and firefighters. And it quoted McCool as he described one of the most chilling moments of his duties alongside New Orleans police: discovering a person who had died by suicide.
“He was a handsome 18-year-old boy who took the easy but wrong way out,” McCool reportedly said.
A newspaper article as well as a photo of Naos McCool, a Spiritan priest from Ireland, in black and in the clerical collar, in 1978. To the left (McCool’s right) is the New Orleans district attorney at the time, Harry Connick Sr, a renowned local Catholic of Irish descent.
A survey of local newspaper clippings shows McCool maintained his association with Our Lady of Guadalupe and St Judge through 2011. He was listed as an officiant in about a half-dozen weddings in the New Orleans area.
Additionally, McCool worked as the assistant dean for students in the school of education at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh from 2001 to 2015. He was also the chaplain of the university’s football team and had a scholarship endowment named after him.
A statement from university officials said McCool also worked as the school chaplain at Vincentian Academy, a Catholic high school in suburban Pittsburgh that closed in 2020.
A Duquesne spokesperson said in a statement that McCool’s affiliation with the university ended after he suffered “a serious stroke”. As McCarthy understands it, McCool – like McDonagh – has since been living at a nursing home in Dublin.
The Duquesne spokesperson said McCool “presently is in a state of decline that makes it impossible to engage with him meaningfully”.
Meanwhile, as is common with people who survive such a traumatizing ordeal, McCarthy remained silent about his abuse for years. The Chicago-born Irishman moved back to the US when he turned 18, joined the American air force and lived as best he could.
He decided to pursue legal action against the Spiritans after a 2018 visit to Ireland with his wife, Mel, stirred the excruciating memories of his abuse. The process that ensued was grueling, requiring him to relive and retell his molestation.
It culminated with an hours-long mediation at Dublin’s Four Courts in late July. McCarthy agreed to settle for €100,000 ($105,400) in damages and about €16,000 ($16,862) more to cover legal costs, said documents provided by his lead attorney, Jef McAllister.
McAllister, Time magazine’s former London bureau chief, said his side agreed on that figure after his colleague estimated that McCarthy could get about €190,000 ($200,000) by going to trial, which might have dragged the case out another two years or more.
McCarthy – who has also survived a stroke and a bout with cancer – said the amount he accepted afforded him a measure of relief. He invested it into home improvements as well as his retirement.
“It was vindication, you know?” said McCarthy, one of more than 400 survivors who have come forward with abuse allegations against a total of about 80 Spiritan priests, according to the Irish Independent newspaper.
Despite having settled the civil side of his case, McCarthy said he is cooperating with investigators at Ireland’s Garda law enforcement agency.
Yet what gratified McCarthy holds as most important about how his decision to speak out about the settlement in Ireland is that it brought him in communication with others who were abused at Spiritan schools.
He hopes identifying McDonagh and McCool in the US media has a similar effect, especially in the case of the latter, given the roles he held in two major American cities.
“It’s important that it comes out,” said McCarthy, whose home is a drive of only a few hours from Duquesne. “I will do anything in my power to help any victim of this because it’s a crime – and [often], it’s a hidden crime.”
McCool did not respond to an email or a private message on social media seeking comment. The Spiritan order’s US province in Pittsburgh did not respond to requests for comment about McCarthy either – but it also did not contest his account.
Neither police nor church officials in New Orleans commented.
Duquesne’s spokesperson said the university “presently has no knowledge of … McCool engaging in similar conduct during his time” at the institution. But the spokesperson noted that Duquense has “strong policies and procedures for dealing with allegations of sexual abuse” which can be reported to the university’s Title IX office, which investigates complaints of that nature.
“The charges made in Ireland are quite disturbing, and the university has great sympathy for those who have been harmed by people who should be trusted,” Duquesne’s statement said. “The reporting of such conduct is of great importance … and the university is grateful to those who do make reports.”
Pope Francis shares a laugh with some of the women members of the assembly of the Synod of Bishops, including Spanish theologian Cristina Inogés Sanz, left, at the assembly’s session Oct. 6, 2023, in the Paul VI Audience Hall at the Vatican.
Last week at the Synod on Synodality, delegates deliberated on contentious issues in the Catholic Church, including the inclusion of L.G.B.T. people, the global migration crisis, women’s roles in the church’s mission, and the plights of the world’s most impoverished people. The question of women’s ordination to the diaconate also gained prominence as participants explored the issue of women’s authority within the church. At the start of the Synod’s third week, a synod organizer told Colleen, “This is where this gets interesting.”
On this week’s episode of “Inside the Vatican,” host Colleen Dulle and veteran Vatican correspondent Gerard O’Connell sit down in Rome for their first face-to-face podcast in four years to cover what’s being said, and how participants are mitigating the pitfalls of polarization as they converse.
Colleen and Gerry discuss how the confidentiality expected of synod participants has helped to facilitate respectful conversation around hot-button issues at the synod. The discussion on L.G.B.T. people focused on a “question of truth versus love,” explained Colleen, which allowed for “dynamic discussion.” Gerry explains that, beyond any particular issue, the key theme of the discussion on communion was inclusion, which allowed the conversation to range from the discussions around sexual identity and relationships to inclusion of migrants within the church.
After concluding their discussion on communion, synod participants initiated their discussion around the theme of “co-responsibility in mission,” or as Colleen put it, “How can we better share gifts and tasks in the service of the Gospel?” This opened up dialogue on the role of women in the church, and although conversations are ongoing, there was consensus that “there must be greater recognition of the ministry, the role that women can play in the church,” said Gerry.
In the second half of the show, Colleen and Gerry discuss the Vatican’s response to the ongoing situation in Israel and Gaza. “The Vatican is walking a delicate diplomatic line here,” said Colleen, explaining that Holy See diplomacy would not want to come down on any particular side. The Vatican has always maintained its advocacy for a two-state solution and special status for Jerusalem, a sacred city for the Abrahamic faiths: Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Pope Francis has appealed to Hamas to release Israeli hostages and urged for humanitarian corridors to be made in Gaza to bring in emergency relief aid and help refugees escape. He has also called for a day of prayer, fasting, and abstinence for peace on October 17, the day this podcast airs.
Professor Mary McAleese has criticised the Church for failing to reform its “out-dated internal structure of governance, teachings and laws” in which, she said, “inequality is embedded”.
This, she said “routinely restricted” the human rights of members especially the fundamental intellectual freedoms of expression, opinion, conscience and religion including freedom to change religion.
In a keynote address for the Spirit Unbounded assembly, the former president of Ireland said this failure to reform had impeded Christ’s mission as a consequence.
In her address on the theme, “Being Denied the Discipleship of Equals”, delivered in Rome and broadcast to network of reform groups around the world taking part in the Spirit Unbounded assembly, Professor McAleese said members believe the Catholic Church should be and could be an exemplar of equality and respect for human rights, but it is not.
“Instead, the biggest Christian Church in the world, the biggest NGO in the world, the only faith system to have representative status at the United Nations, a key influencer of laws, attitudes and cultures on five continents, is languishing in a deepening credibility crisis precisely because it has failed to reform.”
She said Pope Francis’ initiation of the synodal journey was prompted by the rapidly escalating disillusionment among the faithful over the persistence of “stark internal inequality and lack of respect for the human rights of Church members within the Church”.
“We wish the Synod of Bishops well as it takes place here in Rome this month and again next year, but its structure, notwithstanding modest lay and female participation, is still modelled on a discipleship of unequals, with evident unease as to how to deal with what has been a powerful show of lay strength in the synodal journey so far, especially its determined push towards a discipleship of equals where what affects all is discussed and decided by all.”
She said lay people had been “emboldened by the courage” of the German Catholic Church’s “egalitarian” synodal process, and “inspired” by the openness, equality and freedom of speech of the Root and Branch lay-led synod in 2021. She questioned whether the Synod of Bishops taking place in the Vatican would “stay faithful” to the discernment of the People of God.
The former head of state, who is a Canon Lawyer, criticised Pope Francis for trying to steer synodal discussions away from controversy. This had been unsuccessful because “the laity resolutely insisted on their right to debate contentious issues even those on which the magisterium has fixed contradictory views often backed by claims of infallibility”.
On the Pope’s recent response to the Dubia put to him by five cardinals, she said Francis had “reversed a very hardline message published with his approval” by the then Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith in 2021 which banned Church blessings for married gay Catholics and claimed such Church members were incapable of receiving or expressing God’s grace.
“The ban and its dreadful unchristian language provoked widespread outrage among the People of God, lay, clerical and episcopal.”
Pope Francis can certainly claim credit for that notable development, but lay pressure can claim even greater credit she said.
That same pressure and “simmering outrage”, Professor McAleese said, was visible too in response to the Pope’s decision to permit the participation of a token number of women and lay synod members for the first time and to give them voting rights.
“There has been resounding demand from the global synodal process for equality for women in the Church. Had the Synod of Bishops opened this month with no concession to that now mainstream, majority voice it might just as well have closed up shop on day one.”
The retired professor of law and university chancellor said the inclusion of a small cohort of women in the synod merely highlighted the extent of the continuing gender imbalance at the core of Church governance. “It also highlights the resistance to equality in all its fullness. Equality is a right not a favour. The women attending the Synod on Synodality are there as a favour not as a right.”
And she warned that the ongoing failure to include women especially in the diaconate and priesthood was “shrinking access to the sacraments and to vibrant parish life for all the faithful”.
On dissent among the faithful towards the Church’s magisterial teachings, the 72-year-old who spends time every year with the Poor Clare nuns, said it was clear that the synodal discernment of the People of God includes serious levels of good faith dissent from magisterial teaching on gender equality, female ordination to priesthood and deaconate, inclusion of LGBTIQ+ catholics, church teaching on human sexuality, co-responsibility with the laity, compulsory celibacy, transparency and accountability of governance, credible safeguarding of children, and eucharistic access for divorced and remarried Catholics.
She criticised the synod gathering in Rome saying, “Veiled discussions behind closed doors which are subject to confidentiality and publishing restrictions are disappointingly old school and smack of reluctance to trust even the Holy Spirit.”
The Spirit Unbounded Assembly, she said, was there to showcase what a discipleship of equals looked like and a way of being Church when we meet prayerfully, in Christ, as equals, with complete freedom of speech and opinion, openness to the Holy Spirit and open doors out to the world, looks like.
“Our ambition is for a Church where magisterial teaching is proposed not imposed, where teaching is arrived at through a process where what affects all is discussed by and decided by all, where Church members are volunteers not conscripts, where all are equal regardless of gender or lay or clerical status, where governance roles are open to all, where Canon Law acknowledges our God-given human rights as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) to which the Holy See is a State Party.”
These rights include freedom of speech, belief, conscience, opinion and religion including the right change religion. “None of that is how things are in Church teaching and Canon Law,” she said.
As she has done in the past, Mary McAleese revisited her criticisms of infant baptism in the Church. Noting that for 84 per cent of Church members baptism occurred, “when we were non-sentient infants”, she said that she has no issue with Infant baptism itself when it is seen as “God’s gratuitous gift of membership of the body of Christ, a miraculous source of grace which we are at liberty to draw down or not”.
However, she argued that Canon Law attaches to baptism “a crude list of man-made rules which turn our christening into a lazy form of life-long conscription and subservience which Christ never intended. It infantilises faith, robs us of choice and presumes an automated rather than a real personal commitment”.
She added, “The language of these canons is the typical language of elitist, hierarchical, top-down control. It is not a language which honours in any way our fundamental intellectual freedoms. Quite the opposite.”
The idea that non-sentient infants can make promises or have promises made on their behalf is risible and very troubling to those literate in human rights law, she stated.
“The very idea that a childhood ceremony which we could not comprehend nor take an active part in, irrevocably binds us for life to a faith system and obedience to teachings which comprehensively impact our lives but into which we have no input, is risible.”
The mother and grandmother who served two terms as president of Ireland underlined how currently Canon Law makes no provision for the infant baptised to validate their Church membership when mature enough to do so. “The sacrament of Confirmation could do so, but it does not – instead it maintains the fiction of baptismal promises by asking us to renew them,” she said.
“Canon Law offers us no exit strategy, brooks no dissenters, but rather provides serious penalties for those who leave or who oppose Church teachings. That this contradicts our God given human freedoms especially the freedom to make up our own minds is clear to an educated People of God and indeed many today exercise their human right to leave or stay while protesting and critiquing magisterial teaching.”
Unless you are one of the few who entered the Church as an adult catechumen, she said there never were baptismal promises made by infants.
“They are a fiction. And that is the ‘appalling vista’ too many in the Magisterium simply cannot face because it means that its authority over Church members as currently understood and exercised, is legally and morally questionable. It belongs to an old disintegrating empire of generals and conscripts and it stands in the way of being Church that is a discipleship of equals and volunteers, members by choice not compulsion. There is not even the merest hint that this reality is up for discussion at the Synod of Bishops.”
Criticising Pope Francis for operating out of a “compulsion model”, she took issue with his recent words on the church teaching which excludes women from ordination, written in response to the Dubia raised by five cardinals.
“I am here to say Holy Father, many of us have studied it deeply and prayerfully and are here to publicly contradict it for we have concluded that it is unscholarly sexist humbug masquerading as threadbare theology.”
She added that many catholic women are “tired of being spoken for”.
“We resent the recent pretentious words of the head of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life which is charged with responsibility for women in the Church that ‘the activities of women are exquisitely lay by their nature’. No, they are not; they are lay by misogynistic magisterial decree.
“It beggars belief that this same Dicastery until it was publicly challenged, up to very recently, published on its website as recommended texts, the words of Tertullian which in 230AD, addressed women as, ‘the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that [forbidden] tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert – that is, death – even the Son of God had to die’.”
Regretting that there is no mention of a “discipleship of equals” in the working document for the Synod of Bishops, she said any positive references to the human rights of Church members was also absent. “Instead, you will find scathing dismissals of human rights.”
Recalling Pope Francis’ words on his way back from the World Youth Day in Lisbon last August, when challenged by journalists about the exclusion of women and the demonising of LGBTIQ+ Catholics by the Magisterium, the Pope said, “The Church is open to everyone but there are laws that regulate life inside the Church.
McAleese told the international assembly of reform groups, “We dare to suggest that the laws that regulate life inside the Church do not all bear scrutiny, are often oppressive and are not consonant with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. They are at odds with a God of love and a discipleship of equals.”
She said the synodal process offers a real opportunity to recalibrate the shape of internal laws, structures and relationships, to drive towards a Christ-centred discipleship of equals but only if the magisterium listens humbly and recognises that a new leaven is at work among the People of God.
“It is now apparent that the People of God are no longer bending the knee to the Magisterium. Beginning in the West they are now actively dismantling what is widely accepted is a dysfunctional magisterial culture and its long list of unchristian teachings. They are doing it from the bottom up, hollowing out misogynistic, homophobic, judgmental and legalistic hierarchical authority by challenging, ignoring or bypassing it.”
Reform, she said, will require a new legal infrastructure which unequivocally accepts the principle of equality of all Church members and accepts their inalienable and indivisible human rights.
Church personnel will need training in internalising the principles of equality and intellectual freedoms at all and especially the highest levels of Church leadership. Church governance structures will have to change and will have to be based on equality.
“To be credible it will require agreed plans, programs, measured outcomes for the delivery of equality, inclusive decision-making and accountability mechanisms and strict gender quotas to redress historical imbalances. There is no other way to harness the energies and talents of all Church members, or to truly honour Christ’s mission and open the horizon of hope the Synod is praying for.”
