Commentary 25/03/28 The Christ-like friend who has accompanied women

[성기화 요셉]

Pope Francis is indeed a torchbearer in his unapologetic call to ‘de-masculinize the Church’

People watch giant screens showing Pope Francis appearing on a balcony of the Gemelli hospital on the day he was discharged following a five-week hospitalization for pneumonia, in St Peter's Square at the Vatican on March 23. (Photo: AFP)

By Jean D’Cunha

Published: March 28, 2025 03:58 AM GMT

Updated: March 28, 2025 04:20 AM GMT

As an Indian Christian woman with multiple roles, Pope Francis, ever the reformer, has touched a chord and captured my imagination — true for many Asian and other Catholic women worldwide.

At 88, he is burdened by the weight of age, the frailty of body, and the gravity of illness. After more than five weeks in hospital, the pope returned to his residence and is recovering. His spirit has been astonishingly afire with the living force and breath of the Liberative Gospel of Christ — A Gospel for All, for the poor and marginalized and for women.

Pope Francis is indeed a torchbearer in his unapologetic call to “de-masculinize the Church,” and fulfill the moral imperative of equality and justice for all women, men, and human beings.

Stepping out of papal regalia, Vatican opulence and distance from the faithful, and pompous titular leadership, he has lived a leadership of stewardship and humble service, inclusivity, courage and integrity, faith and spirituality, accompanying women through their journeys of oppression to freedom.

Among these are women, young and old, rich and poor, ill and healthy, citizens and migrants, in villages, slums, and high-rises, of varied races/ethnicities, sexual orientations/gender identities.

He has touched survivors of violence — “the many women mistreated, abused, enslaved victims of bullying by those who think they can dispose of their bodies and their lives, forced to surrender to the greed of men,” and has called out clerical sexual abuse (CSA) of children and adults.

Pope Francis has strategically identified the vicious roots of violence — prejudicial ideas that treat people as objects of control, obscuring their human dignity, including by glamorizing hedonism, consumerism, worldly success, competition, and power to dominate the other.

We resonate with his global call to make violence against women everyone’s responsibility by giving voice to their voicelessness, and via education that centers the human person and its dignity. We deeply appreciate his strengthening of Canon Law on CSA, continuing gaps notwithstanding.

We hope that the Church will soon also define violence against women and all human beings as a crime, thus dispensing with its theological semantics of the sin (God) vs crime (State) duality. We hope that legal (civil) recourse and women’s economic empowerment as deterrent and protection strategies are equally prioritized.

On women’s labor exploitation, the pope pointed in one of his reflections to a woman who was offered a long workday for very poor wages, all under the table, with a take-it- or-leave- it employer attitude, as the takers for that job were numerous.

He unabashedly defined this form of labor exploitation (low wages, long work hours, lack of healthcare, leave, or social security) as a “civilized” form of trafficking by rapacious employers who leech the blood of women, men, and children forced by survival needs into these work conditions.

How strongly and rightly he named the trade of bodies for sexual exploitation and forced labor a crying shame and a grave violation of fundamental human rights.

We deeply appreciate his call for coordinated survivor-centric global action by governments and civil society that includes listening to trafficked survivors, amplifying their voices, protecting them, and countering economic and criminal mechanisms that rake in huge profits, unscrupulously cashing in on poverty, conflict, famine, and climate crises to traffic with impunity.

Pope Francis has inveighed against global indifference and abuse of poor migrant and refugee women, men, and children fleeing desperate circumstances. “Borders are for protection of people, not for the exclusion of people seeking protection,” he continuously emphasizes.

He has asserted the moral claim of migrants and refugees to be received, assisted, protected, integrated, or resettled by host communities in ways that uphold their human rights and dignity.

His support for LGBTQ+ people threatens the bastions of the institutional Church, roped in unyielding dogma. “If they [the LGBTQ+ community] accept the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them?” he asks. How daringly Christ-like he is in publicly acknowledging that same-sex orientation is not a crime, and for supporting and approving blessings for same-sex civil unions, among other things.

Laudato si’, his papal encyclical on environment and related issues, foregrounds the moral roots of environmental degradation, climate change, and its punishing consequences. He pins this on an impoverished spirit driven by crass materialism that decimates nature to produce, consume, and distribute unsustainably, and to climate injustice wherein powerful nations contribute disproportionately to global warming, while poorer nations carry the greater burden of environmental and climate crises.

He has long recognized women’s masterly environmental custodianship and urges their fuller and equal participation in sustainable growth and development, and planetary protection.

He has unequivocally condemned conflict that engenders deadened human sensibilities and wanton destruction of life and property, and urges women with their tenderness, compassion, intuition, and mediation skills to forge peace through dialogue and restore humanity’s humaneness.

We deeply appreciate his recognition of women’s ecclesial intuition, contribution to education, healthcare, pastoral and community work, the Church as feminine, and “women’s contribution as the unique reflection of God’s Holiness through feminine genius.”

We applaud his call for more women in theology, for a more Christ-centered, inclusive future theology that, among other things, reflects the perspectives of diverse women worldwide, and his appointment of five women to the International Theological Commission — the highest ever before.

We commend his appointment of women in leadership roles in very important Curia offices — a path-breaking step that only he has ever taken, and women’s increased presence in the Vatican city state from 19.2 percent to 23.4 percent between 2013 and 2023.

But we lament his refusal to ordain women as deacons and priests, and that none of these recently appointed high-ranking women in Curia offices are Asian.

We do have a long arduous journey on issues of sexuality, procreation, women’s status, leadership, and decision-making in the Church, including with reference to women from the Global South.

But Pope Francis bequeaths a rich historical legacy that melts a church frozen in time, pushes boundaries towards its prophetic mission for the excluded, staying stubbornly focused on the vulnerable, especially women, rather than the powerful forces of opposition.

*Dr Jean D’Cunha is a gender expert with a continuing body of work on women’s labor migration and the links between gender, climate change, conflict and migration. She worked with UN Women in senior management and technical positions worldwide and retired as Senior Global Advisor on International Migration and Decent Work. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.