Pope Francis' burdensome trip through Belgium reached new lows on Saturday when Catholic university women demanded to his face a "paradigm change" on women's issues in the church and then expressed deep disappointment when Francis dug in. The Catholic Louvain University, the Francophone campus of Belgium's storied Catholic university, issued a scathing statement after Francis visited during his four-day trip and repeated his view that women are the "fertile" nurturers of the church, inducing grimaces in his audience. "UCLouvain expresses its incomprehension and disapproval of the position expressed by Pope Francis regarding the role of women in the church and society," the statement said, per the AP, calling the pope's views "deterministic and reductive."
Francis' trip to Belgium, ostensibly to celebrate the university's 600th anniversary, was always going to be difficult, given Belgium's legacy of clerical sexual abuse and secular trends that have emptied churches in the once staunchly Catholic country. Francis got an earful on Friday about the abuse crisis starting with King Philippe and Prime Minister Alexander Croos and continuing on to the victims themselves. More out of the norm was the next day's open criticism of the pope by the Catholic university that invited him. The students made an impassioned plea to Francis for the church to change its view of women to better appreciate their gifts.
Francis has made some changes during his 11-year pontificate, allowing women to serve as acolytes, appointing several women to high-ranking positions in the Vatican, and advocating for women to have greater decision-making roles in the church. But he has ruled out ordaining women as priests and has refused to budge on demands that the church allow women to serve as deacons, per the AP. He has taken women's issues off the table for debate at the Vatican's upcoming three-week synod because it's too thorny to be dealt with in a short time. He has punted it to theologians and canonists to chew over into next year.
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In a letter read aloud onstage as the pope listened, the students noted that Francis' landmark 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Si (Praised Be) made virtually no mention of women, cited no female theologians and "exalts their maternal role and forbids them access to ordained ministries." The letter said women have been made invisible and called for a paradigm shift. Francis said he liked what they said but repeated his frequent refrain that "the church is woman," only exists because the Virgin Mary agreed to be the mother of Jesus, and men and women are complementary. The university said such terminology had no place in a university or society today, calling the pope's stance a "deterministic and reductive position."
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