Epiphany 2024

Dear Pope Francis,

I write to you yet again. I hope you are well. I keep praying for you. Your concern for injustice, migrants, the poor, reform of the Vatican, environ-ment, climate change, and synodality is quite exceptional. Enclosed are a letter to each member of your Council of Cardinals and an article that describes human integrity and mutuality together.

In the beginning of your papacy, you addressed the need for honest dialogue in the church. It was quite encouraging. You used to say: “dia-logue, dialogue, dialogue.” You even said: “dialogue fearlessly.”

On the ordination of women, however, there is only silence. You urge no dialogue at all let alone anything synodal or gender inclusive. You are our leader, our Supreme Bridgebuilder. When will you call for the reform most critical for the church’s oneness and its leavening of the world?

How can our church be whole if every woman in it is “not fully in the likeness of Jesus”? Why the imago Dei of women ignored, disparaged, and nullified by you and the Vatican? What is it that keeps women from fully imaging our Three-In-One God? Will women’s integral development ever be included in your signature “integral human development”?

Will an intelligent view of gender ever dawn on a tragically uninformed, indolent, sleep-walked, dogma-feared magisterium? Will today’s Vatican misogyny robust, centuries-encrusted, unjust, puerile, and degrading-thwart the Spirit’s animation of the church now and for ages to come?

Pope Francis, if the clericalism you love to rail against is a symptom, will you decry the underlying disease? Will you ever liberate servant ministry from patriarchal conceit? Will you insist on being a Patriarchal Pontiff who honors male gonadal difference but fails to honor the obvious body-and-soul integrity of the millions and millions of women in your care?

How long this confounding contradiction? How long this confounding violation of solidarity? How long this confounding defenestration of women from a church with no windows. How long, how long, how long?

Sincerely,

John J. Shea, O.S.A.

Copy: Each Member of the Council of Cardinals