How an accidental email captured what some call Pope Francis's mixed legacy on women

As the Catholic Church mourns the death of Pope Francis and its all-male College of Cardinals prepares to elect his successor, some say an accidental email sent last month captured the contradictions at the core of Francis's legacy on women.

In January, Francis made his highest-ranking female appointment, naming Sister Simona Brambilla prefect of the Vatican's Dicastery for Religious, which oversees nuns, monks and religious orders. The role had always gone to a cardinal, so Brambilla was mistakenly invited to pre-conclave meetings — exclusive to cardinals and, by definition, men.

The bureaucratic slip-up, reported by the Catholic online news site Crux, underscored what some view as a central contradiction of Francis's papacy: While he opened a few new doors for women, he left the most important ones firmly shut.

Catholic observers, activists and feminists say they had hoped to see, at the very least, women like Brambilla included in these pre-conclave meetings.

"They could have easily invited top nuns to the cardinal gatherings before the conclave," said Lucetta Scaraffia, an Italian author of several books on women and the Vatican.

"Nuns make up more than half of all religious in the world. Their work literally keeps the church standing. The cardinals could have listened to what they had to say about the church's future. The fact that they didn't proves Francis changed nothing."

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Symbolic changes

Scaraffia cites, in her view, just two positive changes Pope Francis made for women: the promotion of Mary Magdalene to an apostle and the cancelling of a norm that considered abortion a "reserved sin" that could only be forgiven by a bishop or appointee of bishop, and not a parish priest.

"A woman who walked into a church and wanted to confess to an abortion couldn't, while a murderer could," she said.

Even Francis's much-praised hiring of women into Vatican leadership roles, she says, was mostly symbolic.

Along with Brambilla, the pontiff also appointed Sister Raffaella Petrini as president of the Governorate of Vatican City State, which oversees the day-to-day operations of the Vatican, and economist Sister Alessandra Smerilli as secretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, responsible for issues like justice, migration and care for the environment.

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"The few women who landed high-up roles didn't really have any power — they were surrounded by male priests who refused to recognize their authority, and their positions were fragile," she said.

Even when Brambilla was appointed head of the Dicastery for Religious, a new "pro-prefect" role was created alongside hers and given to a cardinal, since canon law — which Francis didn't change — requires certain documents to be signed by a cardinal. Observers say it effectively installs a shadow leader to maintain the status quo.

"It was clear she'd have to defer to him," Scaraffia said.

Francis 'a gift' wrapped in unfulfilled promise 

Kate McElwee, executive director of the Women's Ordination Conference, a group founded in 1975 that advocates for women's ordination as deacons, priests, bishops and pope within the Roman Catholic Church, calls Francis "a gift," though one wrapped in a lot of unfulfilled promise.

"He made important cracks in the glass ceiling," McElwee said, citing the female Vatican appointments, as well as granting lay women voting rights in global church gatherings known as synods, a move she says helped change the culture within the Vatican.

Through his synodality project — a global consultation of parishioners followed by two Vatican assemblies in 2023 and 2024 — Francis encouraged open discussion on the role of women in the church, despite what she calls his own reservations.

From every continent, Catholics called for greater female participation in the church, with some describing it as a "duty" to correct their exclusion, McElwee says. At the October 2024 synod, when a Vatican department tried to shut down the conversation, lay women in the room — accustomed to higher standards of equality — pushed back and kept the issue on the table.

Still, resistance to female participation remains deeply ingrained in the male hierarchy, says veteran Vatican observer Giovanni Ghirri.

"Some priests and bishops were actually grumbling at the synods that they had to wait their turn — because women were speaking first," she said.

And while Francis talked a good game about studying the possibility of female deacons — who can preach, baptize and officiate at weddings and funerals — observers say it was mostly a way to kick the can down the road.

Men behind closed doors 

Ghirri says she'll be watching the next pope to see if he dares challenge the resistant base and push for female inclusion, particularly on the issues of female deacons and priests.

"As much as Francis is described as a disruptive pope, his overriding concern was always unity, not creating divisions that could tear the church apart."

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Full female participation, she says, in 2025 is apparently still a wrenching issue for many clerics in the Catholic Church.

Clericalism — a culture that elevates ordained men as spiritually superior and untouchable — often goes hand-in-hand with a deep discomfort around women and sexuality, a dynamic some observers connect to the high number of closeted gay men in the priesthood.

"The culture of clericalism is linked to a culture that denies various things [including] homosexuality," said Austen Ivereigh, a prominent British Catholic writer, "often associated with the more conservative and orthodox voices."

Ivereigh points out that Francis was an open critic of clericalism. He says the late pope ushered in a sea change at the Vatican regarding women — both with his inclusion of female theologians and opening up discussions about the role women play in ministry, especially during the Vatican conference on the Amazon, as well as the synods.

"You might say it doesn't add up to much, but it feels to me like things are very, very different as a result of Francis," he said.

McElwee, though, says progress has been slow. Still, she holds out hope that the next pope will be someone who took part in Francis's synods — where lay women had a seat at the table — seeing it as a sign of openness to treating women as equals.

Yet their exclusion looms large, as the church now prepares for its next conclave, a monumental decision still made entirely by men, in total secrecy.

"It's a scandal and a sin that women aren't part of the conclave process," she said.

"Men gather behind closed doors to make consequential decisions about the future of the church, and that's something we can't ignore."