The Belgian Catholic university is criticizing the visiting pope’s views on women after delving into their role

BRUSSELS – Pope Francis’ arduous journey through Belgium reached a new low on Saturday when rebellious Catholic university women demanded he face a “paradigm change” on women’s issues in the church, then expressed deep disappointment when Francis resigned dug into it.

The Catholic University of Leuven, the French-speaking campus of Belgium’s famed Catholic university, released a scathing statement after Francis took his stand and reiterated that women are the “fertile” caretakers of the church, prompting grimaces from his audience.

“UCLouvain expresses its incomprehension and disapproval of Pope Francis’ position regarding the role of women in the Church and society,” the statement said, calling the pope’s positions “deterministic and reductive.”

Francis’ trip to Belgium, ostensibly to celebrate the university’s 600th anniversary, was always going to be difficult given Belgium’s miserable legacy of clerical sexual abuse and secular trends that have emptied the churches in the once staunchly Catholic country .

Francis heard a lot about the abuse crisis on Friday, starting with King Philippe and Prime Minister Alexander Croos and continuing to the victims themselves.

But it is one thing for the Pope to be criticized by the Liberal Prime Minister over the Church’s abuse of priests who raped children. It is quite another to be openly criticized by the Catholic university that invited him and was for a long time the intellectual fiefdom of the Vatican in Belgium.

PHOTOS: Belgian Catholic university slams visiting pope’s views on women after delving into their role

The students made an impassioned plea to Francis to get the church to change its view of women. It’s an issue Francis knows well: He made a number of changes during his 11-year pontificate that allowed women to serve as acolytes, appointed several women to high-ranking positions in the Vatican and said women should play a greater role in decision-making . the church.

But he has ruled out the ordination of women as priests and has so far refused to budge on demands to allow women to serve as deacons, who perform many of the same duties as priests. He has taken the women’s issue off the table for debate at the Vatican’s next three-week synod, or meeting, because it is too touchy to deal with in such a short time. He has submitted it to theologians and canonists to chew on next year.

In a letter read on stage as the pope listened intently, the students noted that Francis’s landmark 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Si (Praised Be) made virtually no mention of women, cited no female theologians and “glorifies their motherly role and prohibits them from entering ordained ministries.”

“Women have been made invisible. Invisible in their lives, women are also invisible in their intellectual contributions,” the students said.

“Then what is the place of women in the church?” they asked. “We need a paradigm shift that can and should draw on the treasures of spirituality as well as the development of the various disciplines of science.”

Francis said he liked what they said, but repeated his frequent refrain that “the Church is a woman,” only exists because the Virgin Mary agreed to be the mother of Jesus and that men and women were complementary.

“Women are fruitfully welcome. Concern. Vital devotion,” Francis said. “Let us pay more attention to the many daily expressions of this love, from friendship to the workplace, from studies to exercising responsibility in church and society, from marriage to motherhood, from virginity to serving others and building the kingdom of God.”

Leuven said that such terminology no longer has a place in a university or society today. It emphasized this point with the entertainment for the event, which included a jazz rendition of Lady Gaga’s LGBTQ+ anthem ‘Born This Way’.

“UC Leuven can only express that it does not agree with this deterministic and reductive position,” the statement said. “It reaffirms the desire that everyone can flourish in it and in society, regardless of origin, gender or sexual orientation. It calls on the church to follow the same path, without any form of discrimination.”

The comment followed a speech Friday by the rector of the university’s Dutch campus in which he ventured that the church would be a much more welcoming place if women could be priests.

The university’s successive criticisms were especially important because Francis has long been seen in Europe as a beacon of progressive hope after the conservative popes of John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.

And yet Francis also followed the conservative line earlier in the day.

He went to the royal crypt at the Church of Our Lady to pray at the tomb of King Baudouin, best known for refusing to give royal assent, one of his constitutional duties, to a bill passed by Parliament that legalized abortion.

Baudouin resigned for one day in 1990 to allow the government to pass the law, which he would otherwise have had to sign, before being reinstated as king.

Francis praised Baldwin’s courage when he decided “to leave his position as king so as not to sign an assassination law,” according to the Vatican summary of the private meeting, which was attended by Baldwin’s cousin, King Philip, and Queen Mathilde.

The Pope then referred to a new bill to extend the legal limit for abortion in Belgium from 12 weeks to 18 weeks after fertilization. The bill failed at the last minute because parties in the government negotiations found the timing inconvenient.

Francis urged Belgians to look to Baldwin’s example in preventing such a law, adding that he hoped the former king’s beatification would progress, the Vatican said.

Valentine Hendrix, a 22-year-old master’s student in international relations in Leuven, told reporters that students had hoped Francis would respond positively to their call, but that his comments on abortion and the role of women meant he had “abandoned a committed act.” dialogue.”

“We had expectations, even though we saw him disappoint us within a few hours,” she said. “His position on abortion – saying that the abortion law was a murderous law – is extremely shocking to see, even if we did not expect major steps towards modernity.”

Francis started the day with breakfast – coffee and croissants – with a group of 10 homeless and migrants hosted by the Saint-Gilles parish of Brussels.

The breakfast meeting was chaired by Marie-Françoise Boveroulle, deputy episcopal vicar of the diocese. The position is usually held by a priest, but Boveroulle’s appointment is being highlighted as evidence of the role women can and should play in the church.