In Feminism We Trust?
There may never be a female pope, but Catholics' views on gender could be evolving.
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The forgotten gardener
So you think you’re a rocket scientist?
“Will there ever be a woman pope?” one of my editors asked me on Wednesday last week, just as more than a hundred cardinals from around the world were gathering inside the Sistine Chapel trying to choose the next leader of the Catholic church.
“Nope,” I responded, without really thinking about it.
Surely, I started to reason, an institution as wedded to the patriarchy as the church would never be comfortable with a female leader. Surely, it would take a dismantling and rebuilding of the entire notion of Catholic faith before something like that would even be considered.
Not wanting to jump to unfounded conclusions, though, I did a bit of digging. And, surely enough, it didn’t take long to corroborate my instinct.
In basic terms, the bible teaches that Jesus chose only male apostles, creating divine precedent and ensuring that the priesthood will always be entirely male. In 1994, that teaching was reinforced by Pope John Paul II. In a so-called apostolic letter, he determined that the church simply doesn’t have the power to confer priestly ordination on women.
As someone who was born and raised an atheist, I read the letter with great interest and—in my humble opinion—this is the TLDR line: “I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful.”
Michele Dillon, a sociologist at the University of New Hampshire who studies Catholic culture in America, explained the logic in slightly less flowery terms to NBC News in March: "Had Jesus wanted women to be priests he would have called them to be his apostles.”
Ok, so no wiggle room there. But what about Catholicism more generally? Are Catholic values and beliefs evolving? Is the institution becoming more inclusive and are interpretations of the bible that aren’t strictly literal becoming more widely accepted?
Well that—it seems—might be a slightly different story.
Earlier this year—and before Pope Francis’s hospitalization on February 14—the Pew Research Center conducted a survey of over 9,500 Americans on the topic of religion. Almost 1,800 of the respondents identified as Catholic and their responses revealed that a majority of Catholics today hold views that differ from church teachings on issues including birth control, marriage and, yes, the priesthood.
At 84%, for example, an overwhelming majority of Catholics said that the church should allow Catholics to use birth control. Some 83% said that they thought the church should allow couples to use in vitro fertilization (IVF) to get pregnant, and 68% said that the church should allow women to become deacons. Further, 63% said that priests should be allowed to get married and 59% said that the church should ordain women as priests.
Pew also asked respondents to choose which of two statements they agreed with more. Almost two thirds—or 60%—of Catholics said that the church “should be more inclusive, even if that means changing some of its teachings,” while only just over a third—37%—said that it should “stick to its traditional teachings, even if that means the church gets smaller.”
To be sure, there was a big difference in the attitudes and opinions of Catholics who go to church at least once a week and those who don’t. At 54% compared to 74%, for example, the regular churchgoers were fully 20 percentage points less likely to favor allowing women to serve as deacons than those who identify as Catholic but don’t go to church at least once a week. And at 49% versus 69%, the difference was the same when it came to opinions on whether priests should be allowed to get married.
Only 72% of the Catholic church-goers said that Catholics should be allowed to use birth control, compared to 72% of the non-church-goers, and over half—or 56% of those attending weekly mass—said that the church should not allow women to become priests. Exactly two thirds of that group said the church should not recognize the marriages of gay and lesbian couples.
The full report has a lot more interesting data, but I was particularly fascinated to learn that Pew found women to be only “somewhat” more likely than men to want a “more inclusive” church, and to say women don’t have enough influence in the church. Perhaps less surprisingly, Catholic Republicans and independents who lean Republican tended to have more traditional views than Catholic Democrats and Democratic leaners when it came to questions about ordaining women, allowing priests to get married and allowing Catholics to use birth control and IVF.
As for the new pope, what do we know about his views on gender? So far, not that much. It is, as the New York Times reported, unclear whether Pope Leo XIV, who is the first American pope, will be as open to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Catholics as his predecessor was.
One noteworthy tidbit: According to the paper, in a 2012 address to bishops, Pope Leo lamented Western news media and popular culture for fostering what he described as “sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel.” And he specifically cited the “homosexual lifestyle” and “alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children.”
He served as a bishop in Peru, during which time he also reportedly opposed a government plan to add teachings on gender to school curricula. “The promotion of gender ideology is confusing, because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist,” he told local news media.
For years, progressive Catholics have been urging the church to allow for women to be ordained as deacons and priests. Pope Francis certainly seemed to inspire some hope for progress towards this. He opened high-level offices offices in the Vatican to women, for example, and he appointed the first woman governor of Vatican City. But, of course, he never went so far as to actually abandon these aforementioned divine precedents and teachings on women in leadership.
I’m hardly anything even akin to an expert, but considering that nothing really changed in this respect under a pope once dubbed “The Great Reformer,” how likely is it really that Leo will instigate radical change?
A Forgotten Gardener
Elsewhere last week I had the opportunity to write—not once but twice—about my absolutely favorite topic for The Persistent: under-appreciated women from history.
First up, I wrote about Fanny Wilkinson, Britain’s first female professional landscape gardener. More than 70 years after her death, a sculpture commemorating her—designed by the artist Gillian Brett—is set to be unveiled in one of the parks she designed.
Fanny was born in 1855 in the Manchester suburb of Greenheys. Her father, Matthew Wilkinson, was a doctor who became president of the British Medical Association. Her mother, Louisa Letitia, was an American woman of Yorkshire descent. Around 1880, after her father’s death, Fanny developed a passion for gardening that eventually became so fervent, she persuaded the newly formed School of Gardening at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham—an esteemed institution for aspiring professional gardeners— to take her on as their first female pupil.
In 1884, having completed an 18-month course at Crystal Palace, Fanny was elected as an honorary landscape gardener to the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association (MPGA), a charity formed in 1882—and that still exists today—dedicated to giving ‘to the people gardens, and to the children playgrounds.’
The MPGA was particularly committed to creating public parks—designing what the organization described as green ‘lungs’ in poorer districts of the city. Fanny ended up designing two of the most prominent ones: Myatt’s Fields Park in Camberwell, and Meath Gardens in Bethnal Green.
Some of her other projects included Red Lion Square Gardens in Holborn, Paddington Street burial ground in Marylebone, St. Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield, St. Martin’s in the Fields on Trafalgar Square. In total, she’s believed to have designed 75 public gardens in London during a career of about 20 years.
But Fanny wasn’t only a pioneer in the world of landscape design and gardening, she was also an ardent champion of women’s rights and an advocate for pay equality, decades before the notion of a working woman was an accepted social norm. (Which OK, even in 2025, is questionable.—your editor)
In an interview with a newspaper in 1890, Fanny—who was on the central committee for women’s suffrage with her friend Millicent Fawcett—is quoted as saying: “I certainly do not let myself be underpaid as many women do. There are people who write to me and think because I am a woman I will ask less than a man. This I never do. I know my profession and charge accordingly, as all women should do.”
She also campaigned for sanitary and political reform, and for women’s education and political rights.
In 1902, just before Fanny stopped working for the MPGA, she became the first female principal of the prestigious Swanley Horticultural College in Kent. After her retirement she settled in Suffolk, where she spent several years breeding prize-winning goats. Fanny died on 22 January 1951 at the age of 95.
A bronze statue of Fanny Wilkinson by the sculptor Gillian Brett is set to be installed on a water fountain in Coronation Gardens in Wandsworth, south west London, on July 3.
An Actual Space Trailblazer
The second woman I wrote about was Valentina Tereshkova.
Wait, does that name sound familiar? If so, that’s probably because you read a footnote mentioning her in news coverage last month of the space-bound glamor squad: Katy Perry, Gayle King, Lauren Sánchez, Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyen, and Kerianne Flynn. In fact, Tereshkova was the first ever woman in space—a solo mission in 1963 that was somehow almost forgotten.
I wrote about her life and achievements, but I also considered the question of why we tend to forget certain women and underplay their achievements. Here’s an excerpt from the piece:
[It’s] maddening that so many journalists, commentators, and other eager onlookers put the crew of the New Shepard on a pedestal they don’t deserve. Why did they do this? Well, there are a few explanations.
One, of course, is that the flight that took place in early April just makes for such a good story. A pop star who’s spent the last decade singing about being a firework is finally catapulted into space just like, well, a firework? What’s not to like? As humans, we’re conditioned to be enthralled by the weird and the unlikely. And if this is not that, then I don’t know what it is.
Social media plays a role here, too. The availability heuristic means that it really does matter whether something has gone viral on social media or not. By being recirculated it becomes more salient and we may well be fooled into thinking that it’s more significant than it actually is. Sure, in 1963 Valentina Tereshkova might’ve made the front page of every Soviet newspaper, but that doesn’t have the staying power of a constantly re-sent and re-posted meme. When we conjure an image of a woman in space, who are we more likely to remember? A serious-looking Soviet cosmonaut or a posse of manicured celebrities, clad in skin-tight “space suits” sporting a fresh blow-dry and a dewey just-left-Sephora look?
Social media has morphed and created its own truths about who deserves which accolades and what glory. That’s not right. But it’s the way things are.
So here’s my call to action: Let’s look beyond the silly memes and whimsical social posts and actually do a bit of digging. Let’s trot out those names from history of people who really changed the world. Let’s be sure to talk about them to our daughters and sons and do the noble work of telling their stories over and over until they too become as commonplace as household names.
For sure, let’s give the members of the New Shepard crew the credit they deserve: Aisha Bowe, a former rocket scientist at NASA was the first person of Bahamian heritage to go to space. Amanda Nguyen, a bioastronautics research scientist and prominent advocate for sexual assault survivors, waited years to be the first Vietnamese woman in space. But let’s also not allow someone’s stardom to create a narrative that discounts another woman’s glory. We owe it to those who came before us to recognize the hard work they did as they paved the way—both on earth and far, far beyond.
That’s all from me for this week. I’ll be back in your inboxes May 26.
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Josie
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