Archive May 6, 2025

Rome, Italy: When Pope Francis was elected in 2013, he was criticized for enlarging the Roman Catholic Church’s role for women.

He did, at least, deliver. Women were given access to important meetings by Francis, who also appointed the first woman to the Vatican governorate. These were significant accomplishments for a deeply conservative institution for some. However, Francis’s actions were insufficient to fulfill the requirements for a truly inclusive Church, according to many others.

The role of women in the Church continues to be a divisive issue as cardinals convene daily meetings before voting on his death on April 21. Will the cardinals have chosen a pope who can build on Francis’ changes, or someone who might reverse them, when they finally leave their cocoon in the Vatican?

Women’s Ordination Conference, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting women’s rights in Church institutions, is led by Kate McElwee, the executive director. Because there is a real desire for the [women’s] inclusion project to continue, there is some concern about whether the next papacy will experience some backsliding in the progress.

The project isn’t finished.

When it comes to women in the Church, Francis’ legacy is still up for debate.

At the Synod of Bishops, he gave women the authority to cast ballots on matters relating to the Church. Additionally, he appointed a dozen women to high-ranking positions, including Sister Simona Brambilla as the first female prefect of a Vatican office overseeing religious orders for both men and women, as well as Sister Raffaella Petrini as the head of the powerful Vatican City State and Barbara Jatta as the director of the Vatican Museums. Across Pope Francis’ papacy, according to Vatican figures, the percentage of women in the Church’s workforce increased from about 19% to 23.4% overall.

These were merely cosmetic changes, some people thought. The pope did not address the contentious subject of women ordination, particularly as priests and deacons.

The deacon’s position in the Catholic Church includes a few religious duties, including assisting with mass and assisting with baptism, but it does not permit the carrying out of the most sacraments.

By examining whether women could serve as deacons in the Church’s early years, Pope Francis established two commissions: the first in 2016 and the second in 2020. The commission could not reach an agreement on the subject, according to Francis, and the second group’s report never came to an end, while the third group’s work was never finished. Pope Francis vehemently opposed the ordination of women deacons in an interview with US broadcaster CBS in 2024. However, he approved the synod’s final document a few months later, saying the matter should remain an “open” question.

According to McElwee, “it seems like he unlocked the door but didn’t completely unlock it.”

And Pope John Paul II, who prohibited women from becoming priests in 1994, has since been repeatedly refuted.

Men’s All-Star Club

Members of an all-male body are currently debating the Church’s future. This underrepresentation is on full display in this context. Cardinals are addressing the main issues and priorities that a future pope should be able to address at pre-conclave meetings in Rome, including the Church’s sexual and financial scandals, the global crisis of faith, China’s relations, and the significance of canon law.

The majority of the cardinals who will cast ballots for the new pontiff inside the Sistine Chapel this week have been chosen by Pope Francis and support his goals in many ways, including climate change, migration, and social justice. However, some observers claim that they haven’t made a clear statement about the status of women in the Church.

The Stockholm, Sweden bishop, Cardinal Anders Arborelius, said it was “important to see that there are other ways” for women to serve the Church “than ordained ministry.” And Beniamino Stella, an Italian cardinal who is close to the late pope, surprised fellow clergymen by accusing Francis of opening the Vatican offices to non-clerical figures in a speech at a pre-conclave meeting this week.

Sister Marie, a nun waiting for the new pope’s election, greeted the Vatican from Marseille, France.

She said, “Everyone has their role, and we are happy to remain in our current position, which is not within the Church’s hierarchy,” when she asked for her surname to be kept secret. Women serving as deacons or priests “would denaturalize” the Church’s foundation and the transmission of the faith,” she said.

The conservative guard also criticized Francis’s choice to appoint nonclerical people to positions of authority. Leading conservative Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Muller from Germany described the Roman Curia as an ecclesiastical body that should not be run by lay people in an interview with Repubblica last week. This was likely a criticism of Sister Brambilla’s appointment last year.

A reality that is already present

Sabina Pavone, a professor of history of Christianity at the University of Naples L’Orientale and a member of the Italian Society of Historians, claimed that the Church cannot afford to ignore the role and status of women.

“There is a realization that this topic needs to be addressed because it continues to be one of the hot topics,” Pavone said. “How to address it is not yet understood.

She noted that the inclusion of women in the Church is becoming increasingly important to the operation of Catholic institutions. Women are already taking the lead in many places around the world, from running parishes to providing local healthcare to teaching, while the majority of men are pursuing priesthood.

In Mat town, in South Sudan’s Jonglei State, Nyandeng Meeth was fetching water from a borehole one morning in the middle of April before heading home to cook for her nine children and open her small street stall.

Suddenly, the sound of gunfire and shelling tore through the familiarity and routine of the 50-year-old mother’s everyday life. She recalls how people frantically searched for their belongings, including their families, in a town that was thrown into chaos.

Meeth fled home without a trace because of her children. “I]had] left the children at home when I went to fetch water”, she said. When I returned home, there was no one I ran into. The nine siblings, ages 7 to 15, had fled along with the rest of the population.

The attacks, reportedly by Sudan People’s Liberation Army-in-Opposition forces (SPLA-IO), were part of a broader escalation in fighting between government forces – the South Sudan People’s Defence Forces (SSPDF) – and opposition troops, including the White Army group aligned with First Vice President Riek Machar.

More than 130, 000 people have been displaced by violence since late February in the Jonglei and Upper Nile states. Since then, aerial bombardments and fighter raids have emptied entire towns, hampered aid, and blocked important trade routes from neighboring Ethiopia.

The fighting is also prompting the country’s worst cholera outbreak in two decades, aid groups say, as patients fled medical centres where they were receiving treatment when the conflict broke out, spreading the disease in the process.

However, Meeth’s terror was rekindled by recent events, which occurred almost ten years ago when her husband was killed in a previous conflict.

A civil war broke out between Machar-aligned forces loyal to President Salva Kiir in South Sudan in 2013, just two years after the country’s independence. The war killed an estimated 400, 000 people and displaced 2.5 million – more than a fifth of the population.

In 2015, Meeth’s husband, a soldier, was killed.

Although there was a peace deal reached between the conflicting factions in 2018, disagreements over how to carry out it, including delayed elections, have persisted.

Unresolved political disputes have driven cycles of violence over the years. However, things got worse this year, with Machar’s arrest and clashes between government forces and opposition fighter groups. The country may be in danger of waging a full-fledged civil war, according to a warning from the UN.

“My life in Mat was better,” said one participant.

More explosions rang out in Mat town on that mid-April day as Meeth, who had not yet located her children, rang out. She ran towards the Sobat River, where panicked residents scrambled to flee across to neighbouring Upper Nile State.

She noticed her 7th-year-old daughter running alone toward the riverbank in the crowd. Without knowing whether her eight other children, who were younger than her, had survived, she grabbed her hand and leapt into a canoe.

They landed in Panam, a town in Panyikang County in Upper Nile, about 2km (1.2 miles) from their home, where thousands of displaced families who have fled bouts of conflict from previous years are gathered, with little access to food, water, or medical care.

Meeth claimed that she was unable to eat or sleep there for two anxious nights. She remarked, “If your child is lost, you can’t be happy, even when I get food,” while sat beneath a coconut tree, which has since become her refuge.

Volunteers from the Panam community searched along the riverbanks and through the surrounding bushes for missing people. Eight of Meeth’s children were discovered after two days.

According to Meeth, “some of them hid in the river, while others hid under the shade of trees,” pointing out that her children could still hear gunfire from their locations, so they hid out of fear.

The ordeal had taken a toll on them. They had lost weight from hunger and exposure, and their bodies had become mosquito-bite-covered, she claimed.

Due to fighting that is still preventing aid access, she and her children are now sleeping under the coconut trees along the river. They are surviving on the roots of yellow water lilies and other wild plants.

Before the latest wave of violence, Meeth supported her family in Mat by selling tea, sugar, and other household essentials from an informal stall. When drought or floods caused the family to lose money, relatives who had been fishing would sometimes share their catch.

But what little she had has been taken away by the conflict. “My life in Mat was better because I had shelter, I had a mosquito net and shoes, and access to a hospital”, she said. She continued, “I had two goats but had to leave them,” citing Mat’s fugitives’ relatives who had informed her that the rebels had taken her livestock.

‘ Life is very difficult ‘

Before the most recent upheaval of fighting, there was hardship in South Sudan.

According to a recent World Bank report, nearly 7.7 million people are in crisis, emergency, or catastrophic levels of hunger, and 92 percent of the population is considered to be in poverty.

Not far from the Meeth family in Panam, 70-year-old Nyankhor Ayuel sat under the shade of another coconut tree with her seven children.

In Pigi County in Jonglei, they eluded Khorfulus in April.

“We and the kids were at home. We had already prepared food, and as we started eating, the shelling started”, she said. We didn’t have any food or luggage on our run.

Although they avoided the initial hostility, Ayuel claimed that hunger and illness now pose a different threat. Pregnant and nursing mothers, she said, are suffering from diarrhoea and vomiting due to lack of access to clean water and food.

She told Al Jazeera, “Life is very difficult. Our lodging lacks any amenities, such as food or medicine.

For families like Zechariah Monywut Chuol’s, who also fled Khorfulus, hardship has only deepened.

When the shelling started, the 57-year-old father of 12 was just beginning to build a permanent home for his family. When the foundation started to fall, I was at home digging it. We ran to the riverbank and got into canoes”, he said.

Chuol and his family now rely on coconut water and whatever fruits they can find along the Sobat River to survive, just like so many others in Panam.

He claimed that “many people would have already died if hunger could kill like sickness.”

A flimsy future

More than 9.3 million people in South Sudan, or three-quarters of the population, need humanitarian aid, according to the UN. Nearly half of them are children.

All aid efforts have come to an end because of the conflicts in Upper Nile and Jonglei. Aid organizations were forced to resign from their positions due to airborne bombardment and danger, shut down cholera treatment centers, and halt aid deliveries.

This weekend, the “deliberate bombing of]a Doctors Without Borders] hospital in Old Fangak” in Jonglei killed several people, the medical charity known by its French initials, MSF, said.

Due to limited access, the World Food Programme (WFP) stopped operations in a number of areas last month.

WFP’s South Sudan country director, Mary-Ellen McGroarty, said physically accessible places can be challenging at times. “But with active conflict, WFP cannot go up, we cannot go down the river. And these are the places where there are no cars, trucks, and roads, she claimed at the time of the UN press briefing.

More than 30 000 people who fled violence in Pigi County are now sheltering in displacement camps like Panam, where aid has yet to be found, according to Peter Matai, director of the government-run Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, which collaborates with international organizations to support internally displaced people.

“We’ve reported the situation to both the state government and international organisations”, said Matai. However, “aid organizations are still waiting for clearance from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs to access displacement sites and deliver aid,” according to a statement released a few weeks after the fighting.

Thousands of displaced families are still living in limbo, caught between conflict, disease, and hunger; they are unsure when or if they will be safe to return home because the violence is still ongoing and access to humanitarian aid is limited.

For Meeth, who also serves as a deacon in the Episcopal Church of South Sudan, all she can do now is pray for her children’s safety, and hope that others will step in to help.

She claimed that “we are suffering.” We must hear that we are in a bad place from our neighbors who live abroad. They should help us provide for our needs”.