Lady Business: Female Catholic priests; Taking women’s health seriously

Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 130th issue, published June 27, 2021.
 

Catholics Calling

 
The Roman Catholic Church has been in the headlines of late for weighing in, again, on American politics—specifically around its opposition to abortion, which tends to be The Issue that gets Catholic leaders most mobilized and vocal. But there are so many other, less-covered Church policies that also influence both its community and how it interacts with the wider world. Like the Vatican’s longtime insistence that the subordinate status of women leaders in the Catholic Church is not even up for debate:
 

In 1994, Pope John Paul II issued a stern official letter that seemed to preclude even speaking about women’s ordination. He lamented that, despite the “constant and universal Tradition of the Church,” the possibility of women priests was “considered still open to debate” in some parts of the world. John Paul went on, “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.” 

 
I wasn’t quite a teenager in 1994, but this was pretty much when I realized that things weren’t going to work out for me and the Catholic Church. Even though I was raised in a very Catholic family and spent my entire education in Catholic schools, my proto-feminist pre-teen self was very not-interested in being a part of an organization that kept women out of power.

But I was also raised and surrounded by Catholics who felt much closer to the Church, whose faith has been a fundamental part of their identities; who don’t excuse its failings, but who have spent most of their lives working hard to make Catholicism the best version of itself, a community and a religion that can do good within the wider world. I love and respect many Catholics who agree with me about some of the Vatican’s more problematic pronouncements or leadership failures, but who see other reasons to stay—or, at least, to seek out communities of like-minded Catholics.

Which is why I so enjoyed this long, thoughtful New Yorker feature about the question of women’s ordination in the Catholic Church, and the women who have defied the Vatican to become priests anyway:
 

Will the Roman Catholic Church ever ordain priests who are not men? Plenty of women feel that they have a priestly vocation, and many Catholics support them: according to a survey from the Pew Research Center, roughly six in ten Catholics in the United States say that the Church should allow women to become priests (and priests to marry). The figure is fifty-five per cent for Hispanic Catholics, the Church’s fastest-growing demographic. In Brazil, the Latin-American country with the largest Catholic population, nearly eight in ten Catholics surveyed by Pew endorse the idea of women priests.

The Pew survey also indicated that American Catholicism is suffering “a greater net loss” than any other faith tradition. If you Google the word “lapsed,” the word “Catholic” comes right up. By some accounts, in the past few years women—long the backbone of the Church—have been withdrawing from active involvement in greater numbers than men. Many people peel away because they can no longer abide teachings that refuse to recognize same-sex marriage, endorse contraception, allow divorced and remarried people to take Communion without obtaining annulments, or permit women to be priests. “My grown sons are not churchgoers,” Soline Humbert told me. “I’m not surprised. When they were young boys, we sat in church during those homilies about the great, terrible sin of sexuality, and of childbirth out of wedlock, and how it fell particularly on women and girls—homilies all delivered by people who would never get pregnant in their lives. I thought, I hope my boys aren’t listening. As soon as they were old enough, they relieved me of that worry by never going back.”

Humbert is one of several women profiled in the article, by Margaret Talbot, who have reconciled their faith and their callings by seeking unofficial ordination as priests or by creating and leading their own Catholic communities—even though they now face excommunication for doing so. It’s a less flashy headline than some of the political ones of late, but a more existential crisis for the Vatican: If it’s going to kick out many of the Catholics who otherwise want to stay and serve the greater community, how many people is it willing to watch leave? And how much power is it willing to lose, to keep what remains concentrated in the hands of men?
 

Lady Bits

—It continues to be a bittersweet yet gratifying time for me, professionally. I’m so honored that my breast-implants investigation won the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi award for public service in magazine journalism, and the Excellence in Financial Journalism award for public service from the New York State Society of CPAs. As I said at the latter’s virtual awards ceremony earlier this month, I keep on thinking about what patient advocate Maria Gmitro told me in the course of my reporting: “Patients do not have accurate information to make informed choices about our health.” That’s what Christiane Amanpour alluded to when she recently discussed her ovarian cancer diagnosis, and exhorted other women “to ensure that your legitimate medical concerns are not dismissed or diminished.” That’s what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, for tragic reasons. And that’s what Facebook App executive and women’s health advocate Fidji Simo reiterated when I interviewed her last week, for Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Next Gen virtual conference: “Doctors just dismiss women's pains and women's symptoms, and I've seen that firsthand.”

—I’m also thrilled and honored to have won the Excellence in Journalism award for business/financial reporting from the Silurians Press Club, for my Fortune feature last year on the complicated double standard facing female startup founders. And I’m incredibly grateful to my editor on both stories, Kristen Bellstrom, and all my Fortune editors and colleagues for supporting, editing, contributing to, and publishing long, ambitious journalism projects.

—On a lighter note, Hacks stresses me out with how much one of its main characters is constantly undermining herself, to an extent that I found a little unbelievable by the finale. But it’s so worth watching for Jean Smart and the rest of the cast; the long-simmering takedown of toxic male standup comedians; and the occasional joke about dating people in tech.

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