By 
Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, SJ, the former general relator of the Synod on Synodality, has publicly called for the ordination of women, arguing that the Church cannot long endure if half of the people of God lacks access to ordained ministry.
“I cannot imagine in the long run how a Church can survive if half of the people of God suffers because they have no access to ordained ministry,” Hollerich said Thursday at a symposium on synodality and Praedicate Evangelium at the University of Bonn, according to news agency KNA.
The archbishop of Luxembourg, who previously described himself as more conservative on the question, said his views had changed. “I have also learned as a bishop that this is not just a desire of a few left-wing women’s associations,” he claimed.
While calling for patience with other cultures who may see the ordination debate as an “artificial problem,” Hollerich cited what he asserted was widespread support for women’s ordination in his parishes.
“When I speak with the women in the parishes, 90% among us have the same opinion,” he said, adding that bishops are obliged to listen to such voices.
Church’s definitive teaching
In his 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, Pope John Paul II declared definitively 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.”
Since holy orders is a single sacrament with three degrees, that ruling covers the diaconate and episcopate equally.
Curia reform and papal succession
Hollerich also praised the late Pope Francis’ impact on the Roman Curia. Through his apostolic constitution Praedicate Evangelium, Francis — who served as pope from 2013 until his death in 2025 — opened leadership positions in the Vatican to women. Hollerich said this trajectory would continue under Pope Leo XIV. “It would be my deepest wish that the whole Church rejoices in this,” he said.
The symposium was organized by the University of Bonn’s Department of Moral Theology under theologian Jochen Sautermeister. Also speaking were Cardinals Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga and Oswald Gracias, along with Bishops Franz-Josef Overbeck of Essen, Germany, and Klaus Krämer of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, Germany.
This story was first published by CNA Deutsch, the German-language sister service of EWTN News, and has been translated and adapted by EWTN News English.
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Another homosexualist sympathizing bishop?????
Another pathetic and spiritually weak priest that wears too many vestments and too many funny looking hats. The sooner all these priests that came out of the 1960’s and 1970’s go to meet their maker the better off the Catholic Church will be.
Ain’t gonna happen. It just ain’t.
We all know the reasons why women can’t be priests. Cardinal Hollerich needs an apostolic visitation ASAP, and/or be removed from ministry.
Yet another radical Bishop who mistakes himself for the Pope.
As a woman myself, I think women need to butt OUT of pressing for ordination. If Jesus had wanted this, He surely would have made that VERY clear. Its evident He did not leave any mandate to do this. There are a ton of things women can do in service to the church. Becoming a priest is one that they CANNOT do. Get over it and move on.
We read: “The archbishop of Luxembourg, who previously described himself as more conservative on the question, said his views had changed” [….] “I cannot imagine in the long run how a Church can survive if half of the people of God suffers because they have no access to ordained ministry.”
Immediately after his successful second election in 2012, the politician President OBAMA likewise reversed his apparent earlier position regarding the oxymoron of gay “marriage,” announcing that his position had “evolved.”
Now, the oxymoron of an ordained female Holy Orders! About oxymorons, how about this:
HOLLERICH, on Christian anthropology and sound moral theology vs the homosexual lifestyle:
“I think that’s wrong. But I also believe that we are thinking ahead here in [terms of] teaching. As the Pope has expressed in the past, this can lead to a change in doctrine. Because I believe that the sociological-scientific foundation of this teaching is no longer correct.” https://www.newwaysministry.org/2022/02/04/leading-cardinal-in-synod-seeks-change-in-church-teachings-on-homosexuality/
And, HOLLERICH, in an interview with The Pillar, pontificated thusly:
“In Japan, I got to know a different way of thinking. The Japanese don’t think in terms of the European logic of opposites. We say: It is black, therefore it is not white. The Japanese say: It is white, but maybe it is also black. You can combine opposites in Japan without changing your point of view.” https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/who-is-cardinal-hollerich.
You just can’t make this stuff up….
Romans 1:26-27
26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
1 Corinthians 6:9-11
9 Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men[a]
10 nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.
11 And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
SAINT EUSEBIUS OF CAESAREA
“[H]aving forbidden all unlawful marriage, and all unseemly practice, and the union of women with women and men with men, he [God] adds: ‘Do not defile yourselves with any of these things; for in all these things the nations were defiled, which I will drive out before you. And the land was polluted, and I have recompensed [their] iniquity upon it, and the land is grieved with them that dwell upon it’ [Lev. 18:24–25]” (Proof of the Gospel 4:10 [A.D. 319]).
SAINT CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA
“All honor to that king of the Scythians, whoever Anacharsis was, who shot with an arrow one of his subjects who imitated among the Scythians the mystery of the mother of the gods . . . condemning him as having become effeminate among the Greeks, and a teacher of the disease of effeminacy to the rest of the Scythians” (Exhortation to the Greeks 2 [A.D. 190]).
SAINT BASI THE GREAT
“He who is guilty of unseemliness with males will be under discipline for the same time as adulterers” (Letters 217:62 [A.D. 367]).
SAINT JOHN CHRYSOSTOM
“[Certain men in church] come in gazing about at the beauty of women; others curious about the blooming youth of boys. After this, do you not marvel that [lightning] bolts are not launched [from heaven], and all these things are not plucked up from their foundations? For worthy both of thunderbolts and hell are the things that are done; but God, who is long-suffering, and of great mercy, forbears awhile his wrath, calling you to repentance and amendment” (Homilies on Matthew 3:3 [A.D. 391]).
“All of these affections [in Rom. 1:26–27] . . . were vile, but chiefly the mad lust after males; for the soul is more the sufferer in sins, and more dishonored than the body in diseases” (Homilies on Romans 4 [A.D. 391]).
“[The men] have done an insult to nature itself. And a yet more disgraceful thing than these is it, when even the women seek after these intercourses, who ought to have more shame than men” (ibid.).
SAINT AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO
“[T]hose shameful acts against nature, such as were committed in Sodom, ought everywhere and always to be detested and punished. If all nations were to do such things, they would be held guilty of the same crime by the law of God, which has not made men so that they should use one another in this way” (Confessions 3:8:15 [A.D. 400]).
TERTULLIAN
“[A]ll other frenzies of the lusts which exceed the laws of nature, and are impious toward both [human] bodies and the sexes, we banish, not only from the threshold but also from all shelter of the Church, for they are not sins so much as monstrosities” (Modesty 4 [A.D. 220]).
SAINT JUSTIN MARTYR (the first recognized philosopher of the Christian era)
“[W]e have been taught that to expose newly-born children is the part of wicked men; and this we have been taught lest we should do anyone harm and lest we should sin against God, first, because we see that almost all so exposed (not only the girls, but also the males) are brought up to prostitution. And for this pollution a multitude of females and hermaphrodites, and those who commit unmentionable iniquities, are found in every nation. And you receive the hire of these, and duty and taxes from them, whom you ought to exterminate from your realm. . . . And there are some who prostitute even their own children and wives, and some are openly mutilated for the purpose of sodomy; and they refer these mysteries to the mother of the gods” (First Apology 27 [A.D. 151]).
THE DIDACHE
“You shall not commit murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not commit pederasty, you shall not commit fornication, you shall not steal, you shall not practice magic, you shall not practice witchcraft, you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill one that has been born” (Didache 2:2 [A.D. 70]).
Neophiliacs worship their neophilia, and little else.
A stumbling block on my path to becoming a Catholic decades ago was placed by confusion as to why dumb Catholic theologians, featured in publications like The New York Times and Time magazine, did not face discipline from their bishops. Little did I know that many bishops agreed with the dumb theology. Then I came across a good priest who explained it all to me. Catholic witness to God’s truth is clearly protected by God when it can survive fools in both the episcopate and in academia.
Is it a requirement to be an apostate or heretic to be a Cardinal in Europe?
How’s the Episcopal Church doing with women clerics? One article said Anglicans have grown 100% in fifty years. (Compound annual growth rate 1.4%) It is not, as the article claims, massive growth.
And the only place it’s growing is in sub-Saharan Africa and the global south, bastions of conservatism.
“Forgive me, Mother, for I have sinned”.
Nah, doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Cardinal Hollerich says that “When I speak with the women in the parishes, 90% among us have the same opinion,” adding that bishops are obliged to listen to such voices.
Sure, ok. Listen all you want, but it doesn’t give you the authority to do something contrary to Church teaching.
It also doesn’t matter whether it’s 90% or 10%. The simple fact remains the same: Women cannot be ordained to Holy Orders. Those who attempt to be ordained and those who attempt to ordain will be excommunicated immediately.
If you speak to a majority of Catholics they will tell you that they DO NOT believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Would this cardinal/bishop listen to what THEY have to say and take it seriously? This guy needs to go; he does not have the mind of the Church.
Women have enough to do. Just let us alone, what’s wrong with doing the things that women have always done?
If women get ordained, it would be the nail in the coffin
The harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few. May the Lord of the harvest inspire zealous laborers to come forward and join in the challenging mission of humble service to God’s creation.
🗿
“When I speak with the women in the parishes, 90% among us have the same opinion,”
Yes, all three women!!! The faith in Luxembourg and all of Europe is dying; if not dead, on life support. Cardinal Hollerich’s views are parallel to the secular ideology of the late Doctor Kevorkian on mercy killing. Women’s ordination is the mercy injection for the dying patient…
Because this has worked out so well for the Church of England and every other shrinking and greying denomination that ordains women…
Him too?
Have they observed nothing?
“SJ” – need I say more? I probably don’t, but I will. I think the longer anyone stays in the college/university environment the more they become radicalized, and the Jesuits are famous for “over education.” The longer your roll around with skunks the more likely you will pick up a stench.
Is this what His Eminence has in mind? https://archive.is/H3mHK
After all the modern Catholic Church is already half way along the flaky
& fluid «unity in diversity» path already in some countries. However, did not the Catholic Church survive nearly two turbulent millennia without benefit of female clergy?
The journey the Anglicans are making is to total irrelevance as an institution, much that it does can easily be provided by secular social workers or the concert hall.
I do trust the cardinal’s understanding of his «trade»is better than his grip on the nature of Japanese culture where «diversity» in the western sense is considered rather weird.
The Japanese are not in the least «religious», as Christians would understand the term.
These guys forget, if they ever knew, that the Mass is the sacrifice of the New Adam for the New Eve. It is the Bridegroom offering himself for the Bride.
It’s marital, from Genesis to Revelation.
Many mainline Christian churches have empty pews, and one shared characteristic is they accepted modernism by having women pastors. If the goal is more priests, then cease with the limp-wristed and chestless pansies and articulate the gospel of Jesus Christ and allow God to find his priests.
How do these leaders hold positions in the Church? Who gives them the authority to speak without correction? If the Church chases modernist goals, it will lead to a period of apostasy. Thankfully, there will always be a faithful group that stays true to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and stands firm.
Will Pope Leo check this, or will he do nothing? This is where men are made. What is it going to be, His Holiness? The world is watching.
He will respond to the cardinal the same way he responded to James Martin, SCH, sad to say. Sad, but not surprising.
Hollerich is still so conservative to demand “women” priests. What is a woman? Why have priests? Why worship at all?
The future katholic church according to Hollerich:
https://apnews.com/photo-gallery/sarah-mullally-archbishop-of-canterbury-anglicans-8e8b3de7387d9cd9ab65aeee9fcc78af
Another heretic in need of excommunication.
To the attention of Eminence Hollerich:
The fundamental reason why the Church is suffering is that men like you * have access to the priesthood.
No one accuses you of Christianity, your Eminence.
(* Note: i.e., a publicly self-declared heretic who rejects the authority of Jesus and his commandment of chastity given on the Sermon on the Mount, which is probably because you are yourself an active homosexual).
According to Vatican statistics from 2022, the archdiocese is estimated to have 271,000 Catholics, which is 41 percent of the population — a steep decline from 2018, when an estimated 63 percent of the population identified as Catholic.
“The statistics on the practice of the Catholic faith are even more dismal, however. A 2022 TNS Ilres survey found that of the population that considers itself religious, the vast majority of whom are Catholic, only 6% say they go to Mass weekly and 30% say they “never or almost never” attend Mass.”
“We once used to be as Catholic as Ireland was,” Hollerich said. “And like Ireland, not much has been left from that time.”
Luxembourg \Hollerich doesn’t need women priests, it needs men and women parishioners
Every letter in the New Testament is an exhortation to go back to the path that was shown to them. To return to the teachings that were given to them. We should expect the church to admonish us in the same way. Our failings are the same as theirs. We too lean toward the seven deadly sins. Seldom mentioned is the message that not all will get to heaven, that the gates are narrow, and needle width. That while many knock at the door, for some it will not be answered. Pope Francis failed to steer our biblical course choosing his own path for the Church to follow. Pope Leo’s vision remains to be seen. He seems to be using the tiller of the church to steer governmental policy rather than laying out a course for our salvation.
I thought they had the NHS in England, don’t they provide orthodontic and dental care?