It would be unnecessarily cheeky of me to tell readers of The Lamp that I have read the report of the Synod on Synodality’s fifth working group, “The Participation of Women in the Life and Leadership of the Church,” so that you all don’t have to. That said, I am aware that those among us who don’t have three to four hours of study time available in the week are unlikely to get round to ploughing through it. It is, after all, quite a hefty document. I have decided to charitably assume that the befuddling length of the English version (which clocks in at approximately forty-five thousand words, not all of which are directly conducive to the reader’s understanding of the topic) is the result of a hurriedly completed translation of an originally brisk, concise Italian text.

The document may not be as beautiful a meditation as Saint John Paul II’s Mulieris dignitatem, or as precise a theological text as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World. But all the same, there are definitely some leafy greens to be found hidden in this particular synodal word salad. Its description of the “fundamental issues” underpinning the question, both anthropological and ecclesiological, was helpful; it makes some very thoughtful observations about Our Lady; I appreciated its theological commentary on some of the more recent developments in women’s participation in ecclesial ministry. I actually enjoyed reading “The Participation of Women in the Life and Leadership of the Church.” In fact, I enjoyed it so much that it has encouraged me to raise my standards for all future discussions of female participation in ecclesial life.

The Church, after all, is now very comfortable with praising and encouraging Catholic women using the vocabulary magisterially given to us by John Paul II; there are references to the “feminine genius” in all sorts of ecclesial documents. But if we are to talk in a genuinely rigorous and theologically principled way about the participation of women in the life of the Church, then Catholic women must not only be praised and encouraged for their achievements, but also criticized and challenged for their failures.

After all, the Church does not teach that the mere presence of women in a room is itself enough to ensure the exercise of the feminine genius. To believe such a thing would be a well-meaning, but nevertheless destructive and belittling, form of biological determinism. If power and authority can be corrupted, and if power and authority can belong to women as well as men, it follows that women’s power and authority can be corrupted too. This means that Catholic women must be held to account when they permit, or even actively cause, such corruption.

Consider an example from my particular corner of the Church on earth: the consecrated religious life. If it is true, as John Paul II taught in Mulieris dignitatem, that “God has entrusted the human being” to women in a particular way, then it is alarming to observe how that trust has been squandered by certain female religious communities. The recently announced Vatican investigation into allegations of spiritual and psychological abuse in the Sister Adorers of the Royal Heart of Jesus is not an unprecedented event. In the past twenty years, similar investigations have been conducted into the Loyola Community (resulting in its dissolution), the Contemplative Sisters of Saint John (resulting in the dismissal of several sisters from religious life and the community’s split), and the Servants of the Lord and the Virgin of Matará (resulting in the appointment of pontifical delegates to oversee the governance of the community).

Some might argue that these sorts of dysfunctional and corrupt communities are, in fact, the result of the undue influence of an abusive male. It is especially tempting to lay the blame at the foot of a man because many such communities—such as the Contemplative Sisters of Saint John and the Servidoras mentioned above—come under scrutiny as part of a more comprehensive investigation of a religious family which includes a male as well as a female branch. But this confronts us with another disturbing fact. Beside many high-profile abusive religious priests, we find a woman actively aiding and abetting him: Consider Ivanka Hosta and Marko Rupnik, for instance, or Alix Parmentier and Marie-Dominique Philippe, or Marthe Hubac and Wandrille Sevin.

Moreover, several of the best writers on the phenomenon of sexual, psychological, and spiritual abuse in the consecrated religious life have observed that, far from being protected against the likelihood of such abuse, female religious communities seem in some ways to be particularly vulnerable to it. Dysmas de Lassus discusses this in Abuses in the Religious Life and the Path to Healing, as does Barbara Haslbeck in her report The Sexual Abuse of Religious Women in the German-Speaking World.

Abusive communities are, of course, absolutely not the norm in female religious life. But they are a sobering counter-argument to the easy claim that the Church’s abuse crisis would have looked very different if more women had been in positions of authority. Recent ecclesial history demonstrates that female power deserves just as much scrutiny as male power. Yet as far as I am aware, relatively little is ever said in our ecclesial documents about this failure of the feminine genius. Perhaps the next report on women’s participation in the Church could devote a page or two to it.

Women’s power in the Church must go together with women’s responsibility. The participation of Catholic women in the Church’s mission is indeed as significant and necessary as the synodal report claims it to be. But if women are to be genuinely included in ecclesial life, then they must be included not only in parish councils and Vatican dicasteries, but also in the just demand for accountability and the humbling commitment to ongoing purification and reform which the Church has received from the hand of Her Lord.