In 2021, Sister Nathalie Becquart became the first woman to vote at any Vatican meeting when Pope Francis appointed her undersecretary to the synod, a gathering of bishops whose second session opened on October 2.
She describes “synodality” as “like having a coffee together”—encouraging many Catholics to hope that their church will reimagine itself in less hierarchical ways.
Critics both within and outside the church condemned the assertion that the pope alone, without the counsel of bishops, could determine doctrine. When the German priest Ignaz von Döllinger wrote a devastating critique of infallibility from his study in Munich, he relied in part on information forwarded from Rome by his friend and protegée, 27-year-old Charlotte von Leyden.
Soup broth and red wine were cheap, she recalled, but they made for convivial gatherings that kept her informed about the council. Pope John XXIII had declared “aggiornamento”—bringing the church up to date—the order of the day, but these incidents made many wonder if aggiornamento was possible without women.
In a discussion of marriage, for instance, Luz María Alvarez-Icaza—a Mexican woman who, with her husband, José, was an auditor—informed the assembled clerics that she was confident that their mothers had conceived them in acts of love, not animal lust.Whereas the church once viewed sex between husband and wife as a check on humanity’s essentially sinful nature, new teachings described it as a positive expression of love.
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