As the Catholic Church celebrates its first American pope, women activists send a bold message from Vatican City: Equality must include ordination and full participation in Church leadership.
Leo XIV, born in Southside Chicago, was elected as the first American pope last week by a conclave of 133 cardinal electors. After three rounds of inconclusive votes marked by black smoke, white smoke arose in St. Peter’s Square, signaling the election of the 267th pope in the history of the Catholic Church. Chaotic excitement erupted in the square, complete with a gay couple kissing as a camera panned across the crowd—a subtle protest to the church’s continued homophobic stance.
But before black and white smoke rose from the fated Vatican chimney, a group from the Women’s Ordination Conference released pink smoke before the start of another male-only conclave on Wednesday. It was a symbolic act of protest, accompanied by song and prayer. Women sent out what they called a “distress signal” for women’s equality in the church—a Church that continues to restrict women for positions of spiritual leadership and deny reproductive justice, despite 68 percent of U.S. Catholic adults opposing the reversal of Roe v. Wade.
While Pope Francis pushed for women’s inclusion in the Vatican, appointing women to top roles in the Vatican and selecting a woman as president of the Vatican City State, he continued to restrict women from being ordained and serving as deacons and priests. Despite establishing two commissions to study women’s role in the church and calling to “demasculinize” the Church, he continued to ban women from ordination to the priesthood and continued to utilize sexist and gender essentialist language and frameworks to describe women’s roles.
Yet for the first time in the history of the church during Pope Francis’ 12-year papacy, laypeople, including women, were able to vote during the Synod on Synodality, and he explicitly modified the Code of Canon Law to ensure women can serve as lectors and altar servers. While many women and girls have served in these roles ever since the Second Vatican Council, more conservative Catholic parishes continue to restrict this just to men and boys.
In fact, the Women’s Ordination Conference—the same group that released the pink smoke—participated in the Synod and was included on the Synod website. But as the Women’s Ordination Conference wrote in a piece on May 7, it was not enough. Their “pink smoke sends a clear message: A woman’s place is in the conclave.” Women’s equality cannot be delayed, they argue.
“The church has lost generations of women who endured the pain and humiliation of having to prove the validity of their calling and the value of their ministry,” the Conference continued. “Pope Francis inspired a spirit of dialogue and great inclusion for women in the life of the church, yet that work remains painfully incomplete.”
The Women’s Ordination Conference has been calling for women’s ordination and gender equity in the Catholic Church since 1975. It is the oldest and largest organization calling for the Church to ordain women as deacons, priests and bishops. The grassroots movement was founded by Mary B. Lynch, the first woman to apply for the master of the divinity program at the Catholic Seminary of Indianapolis. The first ordination conference in November 1975 featured over 1,000 people, including many religious sisters, and continues to grow today.
The Women’s Ordination Conference is separate from other organizations that continue on without the express approval of church leadership, including the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests, a renewal movement that first began with the ordination of seven women in 2002. This group holds that the first women bishops were ordained in communion with Rome, despite the Vatican excommunicating women who are part of the organization and minister to Catholics as ordained leaders.
As the Roman Catholic Women Priests and Women’s Ordination Conference assert, their work enriches the Catholic Church. Despite a growing push of young men joining Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity, women have long constituted the majority of Catholic Church attendees, especially in the United States, and play vital roles in sustaining the church, from maintaining, outfitting and organizing the church space to overseeing church finances, teaching and overseeing religious education and leading church choral and garment-making groups.
Yet, the church continues to oppose surrogacy, contraception and gender-affirming care. The Women’s Ordination Conference argues that this is because women have always been banned from church leadership—without women to sit at the table and speak to their lived experiences, the church will never acknowledge its own failings in terms of gender equity and take the necessary steps to correct it. And in upholding its ban on women being ordained as deacons, priests and bishops, they continue to deny the history of women holding leadership positions in the early Christian church.
There is a rich history of women serving as deacons within the early Church, Laura Wilson and Anna Zaika wrote based on theological and historical research. In fact, historically, the term “diakonos” or spiritual servant applied to both men and women in the early Church, and archaeological evidence in the form of tombstone inscriptions indicate that women held these positions within the church. It is with this evidence that groups like the Women’s Ordination Conference argue that women have a historical and theological right to be in closed circles like the conclave and that their contributions would strengthen the Church that, through its colonial power, has routinely denied the rights of lay women through its outreach.
This is why last Wednesday, mere hours before the start of conclave and sealing of the Sistine Chapel doors, women released pink smoke over the Vatican in a call for inclusion.
