Does the Church Have a Stained-Glass Ceiling?

Did you miss them? Did their absence reverberate like silence in a vast vacuum of negative space?

Well, guess what? That was precisely the feeling they wanted to effect. The wheels of the Church, they were certain, would grind to a halt without their many hands to steer it. And things would never be the same again.

…I’m sorry, have I lost you? You seem puzzled. Just what, you ask, am I talking about? Well, isn’t this awkward. I can’t believe you missed one of the most dramatic and impactful ecclesial events of our time. Do you mean to tell me you never heard of the Catholic Women Strike?

On March 5, 2025, Catholic women “around the world” began a Lenten strike, “withholding time, labor, and financial resources from the Roman Catholic Church,” proclaimed a press release. Hundreds, if not thousands — maybe even millions! — of women would, with this great refusal, “disrupt a patriarchal status quo that too often depends on the invisible labor and good will of women.” Oh, was this going to be good — the patriarchy would be made to endure a 40-day involuntary fast from females. It was billed as a “Global Witness for Equality” — and wouldn’t the Earth tremble and shake!

Surely, you remember all this. No? I mean, it was supposed to be a pretty big deal. Women, after all, make up more than half the Catholic population and compose a majority (about 80 percent) of lay ecclesial ministers in the United States. And, boy howdy, were they upset! They were “ready — beyond ready — for the church to recognize their equality. And they’re willing to take great risks to make that known,” strike organizer Kate McElwee told the National Catholic Reporter (Dec. 3, 2024). It would be a sterling moment of solidarity in sisterhood, a monumental blow against the sexist system. “People will feel women’s absence,” McElwee forewarned. Some women went so far as to fire off strongly worded emails to their pastors explaining why they wouldn’t be present at Mass. Ain’t that stickin’ it to the man! Gosh, the clerics who’d availed themselves of patriarchal privilege must have been shaking in their cassocks.

So, what was it that got the ladies’ pantsuits twisted in a bunch?

A few months earlier, the Synod on Synodality, a three-year-long (emphasis on long) global consultation of Catholic faithful, had concluded. The role of women in the Church was a major topic. In a historic first, Pope Francis had even given a few select women a vote in the proceedings, alongside the many male bishops and other clergymen. There was a palpable sense that the door might open for women to be ordained as deacons — a major concession, from the feminists’ perspective, and possibly an intermediate step on the path to women priests. Could it actually happen?

Francis, however, being the wily guy we all came to know and love, stunned hopeful participants and observers by slamming the door in their faces. The question of women deacons “was not yet mature,” he said. Hey, his fans didn’t call him the Pope of Surprises for nothing.

For the femmes, surprise quickly turned to sorrow. “Following the Synod on Synodality and the lack of concrete actions for women and women’s greater participation in the life of the church, there was a lot of disappointment, anger and heartbreak,” said McElwee, executive director of the Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC). “We threw our whole hearts into the synod process” — and she and her would-be women priests came out of it with their hearts shattered in pieces.

But McElwee hasn’t lost heart. She was, at the time of this writing, organizing a gathering in Detroit in May to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the WOC. The planned commemoration caught the eye of feminist agitator Heidi Schlumpf, who wrote a puff piece about it in the April issue of Commonweal. But what was meant to be an affirmation of the movement (Schlumpf’s article is titled “A Call of the Heart”) and a call to arms (the abstract reads, in part, Catholic women continue the fight for ordination) is unintentionally riddled with pathos.

The Catholic women’s ordination movement was launched in earnest at a conference in 1975, also held in Detroit. The mood at the time was “electric and hopeful,” as Schlumpf tells it. “More than 1,200 participants gathered to hear from feminist theologians such as Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Margaret Farley, and Anne Carr, and to network and strategize about how to challenge the patriarchal structures that prevented women’s inclusion in all ministries in the Church.” So popular was the event that 500 people were “turned away at the door for lack of space.” The attendees were sure they would shatter what feminists call the stained-glass ceiling, the symbolic barrier that prevents women from ascending to leadership roles in the Church, particularly what they most covet: ordination to the priesthood. The momentum of history-in-the-making seemed to be on their side. “The expectation was that priesthood would soon be opened to women, and many orders were already planning how to accommodate women priests within their communities.” Close to 50 men’s and women’s religious congregations publicly endorsed the conference, which led directly to the incorporation of the WOC. Heady times, indeed.

How is the movement faring, half a century hence?

As Schlumpf reports, two of the attendees at the 1975 conference, Carol Crowley and Mary McGlone, will be present for the golden anniversary event. Both were in their 20s back then and had independently “discerned” a vocation to the priesthood. McGlone, who’d recently professed vows as a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet, was “open about her call to ordination.” At this remove, however, Ms. Crowley and Sr. McGlone, now in their 70s, “acknowledge that institutional approval of their priestly vocations will not come in their lifetimes.”

What went wrong?

The fatal blow came in 1994, when Pope St. John Paul II — he’s the big, bad bogeyman in Schlumpf’s telling of the tale — promulgated his apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, in which he declared that “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women,” and “this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful” (no. 4). Widespread clerical and lay assent to this papal teaching (a common feature of Catholicism, duh) further torpedoed the cause — to the surprise of activists. Shortly thereafter, “invitations dried up for pro-women’s ordination speakers, Catholic publications no longer covered it, and ‘feminist’ became a dirty word in the Church.” Though it’s “hard to imagine now,” Schlumpf writes, “many bishops had subscribed to the WOC newsletter in the early days.” But once Peter spoke, the topic became “too toxic.”

Schlumpf insists that the WOC “continues to grow” and is “infused with energy from younger and more diverse members,” but she offers little evidence to support this assertion. Rather, the WOC appears to cater to a dwindling cadre of white-haired septuagenarians. Schlumpf even lets spill that attempts by the WOC to connect with young women haven’t met with resounding success. The group formed the Young Feminist Network in 1995 to attract “members and leaders from younger generations.” Today, the network has a mere 400 members in its database — fewer than the number allegedly turned away from the door at the inaugural conference 50 years ago. That’s barely a blip considering the sheer number of Catholic women in the world (they constitute a majority of the 1.4 billion Catholics across the globe).

Where have all the potential women priests gone?

“Hundreds, if not thousands, of women have left Catholicism to pursue ordination as priests or deacons in Protestant denominations, such as the Episcopal Church or the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America,” Schlumpf writes. And why shouldn’t they? That’s where they belong. After all, Protestantism is for protestors. Indeed, the WOC released a statement this January “celebrating the historic installation of Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury, the first woman to hold this role in its 1,400-year history.” Any hope of such a celebration for a female Catholic hierarch is, shall we say, farfetched — in our lifetime or in those of the generations to come.

Other women, Schlumpf says, “have been ordained through splinter groups” that are “not recognized by the Vatican.” They, too, have left the building. The handful of attempts at women’s ordinations in the early 2000s — which were both illicit (canonically unlawful) and invalid (sacramentally null) — were met generally with yawns by lay observers and warnings by prelates that those involved had incurred automatic excommunication (see, for example, Theresa Marie Moreau’s article “A Mockery of Catholicism,” Jan. 2006, and the New Oxford Note “A New Catholic Community,” Oct. 2006). One of those so “ordained,” Jennifer O’Malley, “pastored [a] small faith community until it disbanded,” writes Schlumpf.

…going, going, gone. Poof.

None of this, however, seems to have occurred to McElwee, who’s operating as if it were still 1993. The issue is settled in the mind of the Church — save for the brief but aborted deliberation over women deacons during Francis’s pontificate. After this latest defeat, the women’s ordination movement limps along, a shell of its past self, dying a stubbornly slow death. McElwee, bless her heart, still clings to the dream, which now looks more and more like a delusion. Women’s ordination, she insists, “is no longer a marginalized issue. It’s a mainstream conversation.” And yet even the WOC “leadership team” consists of a mere three people: McElwee herself, a program director, and an office manager. And the May meetup in Detroit has a grand total of three featured speakers. The allegedly “mainstream” conversation is taking place among a diminutive group of interlocutors. There’s little appetite for the stale, warmed-over fare the WOC is serving up.

Schlumpf writes that advocacy for women’s ordination “paralleled similar movements in broader society.” She’s right — and that’s precisely the problem. As the late, great Jesuit priest Vincent P. Miceli noted nearly 50 years ago, the women’s liberation movement of that era succeeded in throwing off women’s “supposed ‘inferiority’ so as to gain social power and equality with men.” Their “success in the secular sphere” spurred them to “fight another alleged ‘inferiority,’ that is, their exclusion from priestly positions in the ecclesiastical power structure.” This view, he said, is nothing but “a surrender to secularism, the philosophy that rinses reality of God and religion.” The Church, Fr. Miceli explained, “cannot be reduced to secular categories…. Applying a priori concepts to the Church — like democracy, civil rights, equality, power structure, etc. — is an attack on her very essence. Such ideas mutilate her sacramental nature…. They destroy her supernatural truth; they dissolve her transcendence before men’s eyes, for they politicize her” (Homiletic & Pastoral Review, Aug.-Sept. 1976).

Fr. Miceli’s mention of the Church’s sacramental nature is key. As he explained, “sacramental marriage is the symbol of the nuptial union between Christ and his Church. Christ, the Head, and the Church, his Body, are like husband and wife, distinct physically but united in intimate, permanent, mystical union.” This “differences of the sexes” is what assigns men and women their vocations in the Church at the “deepest levels” of their being, because “sexes and vocations are not interchangeable.”

To admit women to the priesthood would be to destroy the nuptial symbolism of Christ as bridegroom and Church as bride. It would effectively neuter the union. If a woman were to act in the person of the bridegroom, with the Church as bride, the symbolism would be of an all-female same-sex union — one that is, by nature, unable to bear fruit or generate new life, a dead end. Thus, concluded Fr. Miceli, the “agitation for women to be ordained priests is a sterile venture, an exercise in futility.” And it will “inevitably fail” — as we are witnessing in real time — “for its devotees are fighting even against God. The spirit behind the movement is one of prideful rebellion, of sitting in judgment of the ways of God.”

The Church “is not called upon to comply with any age in its fashionable prejudices,” Fr. Miceli wrote; “she is called upon to be faithful to the deposit of the truth possessed by her in her teachings and living traditions. It is not a question of progressive adaptation or reactionary obstinacy to ordain or refuse to ordain women. It is simply a question of obedience or disobedience to God’s ordinances revealed in Scripture.” Thus could Fr. Miceli see, even way back then, what McElwee & Co. cannot see today. And thus he could say, with resounding confidence, “In the Roman Catholic Church women will never be ordained priests.”

The so-called stained-glass ceiling, if you want to call it that, remains intact, and — sorry, ladies — it is a permanent, impenetrable barrier.

©2026 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved.

To submit a Letter to the Editor, click here.