The Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC) organization requested in coincidence with the celebration of the conclave a greater participation of women in the Catholic Church, with several acts in Rome, among which a pink smoking as a symbolic protest for its exclusion in the decision -making processes.
The activists gathered in a park near the Vatican, with the dome of the Basilica of San Pedro in the background, and, emulating the black or white smoke that thousands of faithful expect these days in the Vatican Square, they threw a pink ‘smoking’ into the air to claim a greater representation of the woman within the Catholic institutions.
“While a group of 133 ordered men meet behind closed doors to make a transcendental decision on the future of the Catholic Church, we, defenders of the ordination of women, we launched pink smoke on the Vatican to demand the full equality of women in the Catholic Church,” the Woc Executive Director, Kate Mcelwee told Efe.
Mcelwee defined the pink smoke as a “relief call that the cardinals cannot ignore” and assured that the equality of women within the church cannot wait.
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The activist said that although more than half of the 1,400 million Catholics in the world are women, “there is no present in the room that decides who will be the leader of the global church.”
Under the slogan “Smoke Out Sexism”, which could be translated as “expelling sexism” or “making sexism visible”, the WOC organized several claiming acts during these days of conclave to point to an institution that, as they denounce, systematically excludes women from decision -making processes.
“The exclusion of women from equitable decision -making and ordination roles is a scandal and sin; the place of a woman is in the conclave,” Mcelwee claimed.
The Women’s Ordination Conference is an organization that, since 1975, works to ensure that women can order deacons, priests and bishops, and to achieve gender equality within the Catholic Church.
For the organization’s executive director, Pope Francis “inspired a spirit of dialogue and great inclusion” of women in the Church, although he considers that this work remains “painfully incomplete”, and hopes that the next pontiff “bravely hug the synodality and correct the injustice of the exclusion of women from the ordered ministry.”
With EFE information.
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