A meeting between Pope Leo XIV and Sarah Mullally, the first woman to lead the Church of England, is set to spotlight divergent paths on gender inclusion in the two major Christian institutions. Mullally begins a four-day visit to Rome and the Vatican on Saturday, her first overseas trip since being enthroned last month. In the Catholic Church, only men may serve as clergy, including as cardinals, priests or deacons, and the papacy has always been male. Pope Francis appointed women to senior administrative posts, including Sister Simona Brambilla as prefect of the Vatican office overseeing religious orders and Sister Raffaella Petrini as president of the governorate of Vatican City State in March 2025. Women were allowed to vote in the Synod for the first time in 2023, but a Vatican commission in December 2025 rejected the possibility of women becoming deacons, disappointing advocates. Deacons can officiate baptisms, weddings and funerals but cannot lead mass. Pope Leo XIV, in his first interview after succeeding Francis, said he would not alter doctrine on female deacons or on issues like gay marriage. As of 2025, the Catholic Church had 589,000 nuns and lay sisters, down over 9,000 from the previous year, alongside 5,430 bishops, about 407,000 priests and 51,400 deacons. The Church of England reported 1.02 million regular worshippers in 2024, a 1.2 percent increase, with an estimated 85 million Anglicans across 165 countries. Women were first ordained as priests in 1994 after a 1992 Synod vote, prompting some male Anglican priests to leave for the Catholic Church. Female bishops were approved in 2014, and today 37 percent of the Church of England's 18,000 active clergy are women, including 36 female bishops, 12 of whom lead dioceses. Most trainees for ordained ministry in the Church of England are also women.
The Catholic Church elevates women to high administrative roles while still barring them from ordination, a contradiction its own statistics expose. With over half a million nuns yet no female priests or deacons, the institution relies on women's labour without granting equal spiritual authority. Pope Leo XIV's refusal to revisit the deacon issue signals continuity, not change. For women in global Catholicism, especially in majority-Anglican regions like Nigeria, the hierarchy's stance may deepen existing tensions between devotion and exclusion.
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