Pope Gives Women a Vote in Influential Meeting of Bishops

“It’s church changing. It is paradigm changing, it is literally restructuring one of the most important ways that the church makes decisions and looks at pastoral issues within the church,” said Deborah Rose, co-director of Future Church, an organization seeking greater involvement of laypeople.

“There will be times we are disappointed because he won’t follow through as he has decreed,” she added. “Nonetheless, what he has done is open a dam and opened a door, and I think there’s no going back.”

Conservative critics of Francis, some of whom disdain the synod on synodality as a bureaucratic circus that undercuts the majesty of the church, excoriated the new rules as a Trojan Horse for a liberal ideological invasion of the church.

“It is clear that Pope Francis” and the cardinals leading the synod “are trying, in every way, to bring into this institution all those people who have an interest in disrupting the church for their own personal ambitions,” read a post on the conservative Catholic site Silere non possum. “No longer finding many bishops willing to trample on Christ’s teaching, they are now turning to ambitious lay people.”

But even the generally liberal Cardinals who spoke about the new rules on Wednesday insisted that the overwhelming influence of the synod remained in the hands of the bishops known as “synodal fathers.”

“The 70 new members are 21 percent of the assembly, which remains an assembly of bishops,” Cardinal Hollerich, archbishop of Luxembourg, told reporters, declining to speak for the women when asked how they would refer to themselves.

Cardinal Mario Grech, another top synod official, doubled down.

“The Synod will remain a Synod of Bishops,” he said, though one enriched by the participation of lay members.

But Ms. McElwee, who still hopes women will one day be ordained as priests, believed the “inclusion of women in this sort of significant way will change the church, will create new conversations and new ways of making decisions within the church.”