Bishops call for more female voices in church

VATICAN CITY — A report approved Oct. 27 at the Catholic Church’s Synod of Bishops on Young People, the Faith and Vocational Discernment had strong language on women in the church, citing the need to increase their decision-making “at all levels” and speaking of “the urgency of an inescapable change.”

The bishops acknowledged that the church’s teaching on the inherent differences between men and women can lead to “forms of domination, exclusion and discrimination from which society and the church alike must free themselves.”

The bishops avoided using the word “complementarity,” a John Paul II term that feminists see as demeaning, instead referring only to “reciprocity between man and woman.”

The document does not open the way for women’s ordination to the priesthood or the diaconate. Nor does it call for allowing women to vote in the synod.