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Some 500 activists wanting women’s ordination will gather for a meeting in Philadelphia one week before Pope Francis arrives in the city.
The US-based Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC) is hosting the Women’s Ordination Worldwide meeting from September 18-20.
The gathering will assess the place of women in church and society and develop plans to advance their Gospel-based justice agendas.
WOC co-executive director Kate McElwee told the National Catholic Reporter she hopes the meeting will help “mainstream the conversation” of women’s ordination by claiming it as a justice issue.
The conference theme is “Gender, Gospel, and Global Justice”.
Delegates will also assess advances and setbacks within the movement since the 1970s.
Among the speakers will be veteran Catholic feminists Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Mary Hunt, Mercy Sr Theresa Kane and Loretto Sr Maureen Fiedler.
Also among those speaking will be British theologian Tina Beattie and Australian historian Paul Collins.
Delegates are expected to come from 17 nations in Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia.
Sr Fiedler (who blogs for the National Catholic Reporter) has also been an ordination advocate since 1975.
Asked what she thinks might come out of the Philadelphia gathering, she replied: “I think the people who organised this conference hope it will light a fire under Francis, that it might send out a signal to him that this is an issue that needs to be addressed.”
She added that Francis “is too intelligent to simply disregard what’s going on around him”.
Catholic feminists say they find no theological substance in teachings that exclude women from the priesthood.
But Pope Francis, who has pushed for change on many fronts, has dismissed the possibility of women’s ordination.
“The Church has spoken; that door is closed,” he has said.
In 1994, St John Paul II issued Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, in which he wrote the Church “has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women”.
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