As the 17 young men preparing to be ordained as Catholic priests entered the sanctuary at St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church in Chicago, they each pinned a tiny light-blue ribbon to their white robes. The gesture was small but explosive: It signified their belief that women, too, should be allowed into the priesthood.
It was April 1981, and the men were students at Catholic Theological Union, a divinity school founded in the 1960s and still on fire with the era’s radical spirit. Women’s ordination as Catholic priests was one of the most urgent topics for men and women on campus, the subject of constant discussion, organizing and, for many, optimism.
One of their classmates was Robert Prevost, who was named pope last week. As Leo XIV, he now leads a global church that has firmly closed the door on the question of women as priests, but has left open the possibility that women could someday be ordained as deacons, the step before the priesthood.
The men at St. Thomas in 1981 were there to be ordained as deacons. Many in the sanctuary that day recall it vividly decades later. First, the prelate presiding over the ceremony, Bishop Alfred Abramowicz of Chicago, refused to continue unless the men removed their ribbons. (At least one quietly refused, moving his ribbon to a less visible placement.)
A woman in the choir joined the protesters halfway through the ceremony, her high heels clicking down the center aisle of the sanctuary. Then, as part of the proceedings, the bishop asked the men individually by name if they were “ready and willing” to serve.
After the last man answered, a woman’s voice rang out from the pews.
“I am ready and willing,” she announced.
“It was this lacerating sound,” recalled Judy Connolly, the woman who had joined the protest from the choir. The congregation gasped. Then, one by one, at least a dozen women wearing light-blue arm bands stood up throughout the church and repeated the same vow.
“I am ready and willing.”
“I am ready and willing.”
“There was this chorus of voices, women’s voices, that just echoed through the church,” Ms. Connolly said. “It was the most electric thing I have ever experienced inside the walls of a Catholic church.”
Leo was not one of the men being ordained that day, and multiple people who attended the ceremony could not recall whether he was in the packed pews of the large church, although they said they would be surprised if he wasn’t, given the event’s importance to his classmates.
Either way, it would have been impossible to miss that the demonstration had happened. “It was the talk of all the classes the next day,” said the Rev. John Merkelis, a longtime friend of Pope Leo’s who was a year behind him.
The protest is a window into a formative period in Leo’s intellectual and spiritual life. And it is also a time capsule of both the chaos and the optimism that flowed through the church in the long wake of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, which shook up everything from the institution’s liturgy to its rules for priests and nuns.
The Catholic Church said at the time that only men could be ordained as deacons and priests, a doctrine it maintains to this day. But in the 1970s, many in the church saw glimmers of hope. Propelled by feminist ideals, determined nuns and others had begun strategizing. One national group, the Women’s Ordination Conference, organized at a meeting on C.T.U.’s campus in 1976 after a conference the previous year in Detroit attended by 1,200 people, according to records in C.T.U.’s archives.
“Those were the years when a lot of people thought there was a possibility that things were going to change,” said Sister Dianne Bergant, a faculty member who arrived at C.T.U. in 1978. “There was an openness.”
Eleven women were ordained into the Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in 1974 in defiance of church leadership; the denomination voted two years later to allow women to become priests and bishops. When Pope John Paul II visited the United States in 1979, dozens of nuns challenged him on the ordination question at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, in what was seen as a shocking confrontation. (In 1994, John Paul II wrote that “all doubt” should be removed that women are not allowed to be priests.)
At Catholic Theological Union in the 1970s, multiple faculty members were engaged in the question as academics, as activists or both. The school newspaper included articles about new feminist studies classes, and at least one opinion column urged the ordainment of women. Ms. Connolly was the first woman to receive a Master of Divinity at the school, in 1981.
She recalled a final exam where she had to preside over an unofficial liturgy, essentially a nonsacramental Mass to test whether the student was prepared for work as a priest. When her two professors, both priests, came forward to receive “communion” from her, one of them had tears streaming down his face.
“What he eventually got out was that it was truly a sacred experience,” she said. “To think that I wasn’t going to be ordained, he was just undone by that.”
During the 1981 ordination protest, Bishop Abramowicz was visibly irate and paused the service to sit in silence for what felt like an excruciatingly long time, according to multiple people present.
“I remember saying to my parents, ‘Well, I guess I’m not going to be ordained today,’” recalled the Rev. Guy Blair.
Cardinal John Cody, the leader of the archdiocese of Chicago, later rebuked the school, the parish and several of the individuals who had participated. He called Father Blair to tell him he would never work in his diocese. (Six months later, he relented.)
Later that year, Pope John Paul II ordered an investigation into American Catholic seminaries. Experts at the time viewed it as an attempt to halt the increasingly vocal calls for women to serve in more roles in the church.
The Rev. Mark Francis, who was ordained as a deacon at the 1981 ceremony and went on to serve as C.T.U.’s president from 2013 to 2020, said he believed the agitation of women at the school and elsewhere — including their protest at the ordination — had “probably contributed” to the Vatican’s inquiry.
C.T.U.’s president at the time of the investigation, the Rev. John Linnan, said then that the inquiry appeared to have been started by “the radical right in the Vatican,” according to The Chicago Tribune.
The investigation was opened while Leo was in the last few months of schooling and represents a remarkable bridge across more than four decades of the Catholic Church. John Paul II had opened a wide-ranging investigation into hundreds of seminaries, and the man who would rise to become the first American pope was at that moment attending one.
By that time, though, Leo and a close friend and classmate, the Rev. Robert Dodaro, were in the last year of schooling and viewed as highly intelligent men with a promising future in the church.
Unlike many of their classmates, they were ordained as deacons in September, at an Augustinian parish in Grosse Pointe, Mich. The presiding bishop for their ordination was Thomas Gumbleton, a longtime supporter of the ordination of women.
Father Dodaro declined an interview request. The Rev. Joe McCormick, a fellow Augustinian who graduated in 1977 and was stationed at the Michigan parish at the time, said that his recollection was that the location was chosen as a matter of logistical expediency.
The ordination protest in 1981 was talked about on campus for decades afterward, even as the student body became less rabble-rousing.
“By the time I got there, you were hearing these stories almost like, How on earth did any of this happen?” said the Rev. Max Villeneuve, who graduated from the school in 2018.
Father Villeneuve, now a chaplain at a Catholic high school in San Diego, lived with Leo for several months at the Augustinian friary on campus in 2014, when the future pope was supervising the house. The man that he knew did not seem to be connected to the campus politics of the 1970s.
“He’s not one to just get caught up in the flavor of the moment,” Father Villeneuve said. “He’s not going to get swept off his feet and go protest or anything like that, and likewise I don’t think he’d show up at the counterprotest, either.”
As a prelate, Leo has said little about the issue, but has indicated he will maintain the church’s position. At a news conference in Rome in 2023, when he was a cardinal, he affirmed that teaching against women as priests “has been spelled out very clearly,” and expressed broader concerns about “clericalizing” women. He said that the question of women as deacons is under study, again affirming the Vatican line, which has frustrated activists who hoped for movement on the deacon question under Pope Francis.
Even those who knew Leo in the 1970s and ’80s say they are not sure what he thought of the conversations and the activism around the question of women’s ordination. In class, “there were guys that were willing to participate and there were guys that were very quiet,” recalled the Rev. Fred Licciardi, who was ordained as a deacon at the 1981 ceremony. “He was one of the more quiet ones.”
Father Merkelis, who still corresponds with Leo, said that one of the pope’s greatest abilities was how he was able to make people on all sides of an issue feel heard. “He would have certainly listened and not judged,” he said of Leo’s reaction to the women’s efforts.
Classmates of Leo’s said that the prevailing politic of the school at the time was progressive. John Schneider, a lawyer who attended C.T.U. and ultimately chose not to be ordained, agreed but said it did not mean that everyone who studied there was of the same mind.
“Just because you went there doesn’t mean you’re liberal,” Mr. Schneider said. “You’re just more in tune with where the actual universal church is.”
Leo graduated from C.T.U. with a master’s degree in divinity in May of 1982. At the graduation ceremony, the commencement address was delivered by Cynthia Wedel, a president of the World Council of Churches.
Speaking on the theme of “The Future of the Church,” she closed with a discussion of the role of women in Christian ministry, and of God as an entity that is neither male nor female, according to a copy of her remarks in C.T.U.’s archives.
Changing people’s perceptions “will not be easy, or quick,” she said, adding that it might not happen within the lifetimes of anyone in the room. “But somewhere in the future the church will become in fact what it has always been in the mind of God — ‘the blessed company of all faithful people.’”
She concluded, “You will have a share in making this come true.”
The next month, Robert Prevost became Father Prevost in Rome, when he was ordained as a priest at the Augustinian College of St. Monica. In Rome, he earned two degrees at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, and then began rising through the ranks of the church whose future he now stewards.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
