Among the many achievements of Francis during his years in the Vatican, I would regard his designing and launching the Synodal Pathway as the most significant.

It’s aim, as I understood it, was to change the way the Church was structured, and how it was governed. By emphasising Baptism as the fundamental sacrament, it established the equality of all believers. I could see from the start that this indeed was radical, at least in the sense that it promised to give a voice to all, and that decisions and developments in the Church would no longer be the exclusive domain of the clerical caste, but that all would have a say in decisions.

A Call for a New Reformation by John S. Spong

In the 16th century the Christian Church, which had been the source of much of the stability of the western world, entered a period of internal and violent upheaval. In time this upheaval came to be called the Protestant Reformation, but during the violence itself, it was referred to by many less attractive adjectives. The institution that called itself the body of Christ broke first into debate, then acrimony, then violence and counter-violence and finally into open warfare between Protestant Christians and Catholic Christians.

My initial reaction to the statement from the Vatican ruling out the possibility of women being eligible for the diaconate in the Catholic Church was one of great sadness.

This development has something of the same feel for me as the papal document, Humanae Vitae, of 1968 declaring that the use of artificial means of contraception was a serious sin. One of the great problems with that document was that it emerged from a ‘shadowy’ group of male clerics in the Vatican — largely nameless – and that it went against what was then the developing consensus among the members of the Church.