Leo XIV appoints nun who floated women’s priesthood to Vatican leadership
Sister Mary Teresa Barron has claimed that women can 'sense a call to priesthood.'
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Thu Oct 8, 2026 - 11:12 am EDT
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(LifeSiteNews) — Pope Leo XIV appointed as adjunct secretary of the Dicastery for Evangelization a religious sister who claimed that women can “sense a call to priesthood.”
Sister Mary Teresa Barron, NSA, who is currently Superior General of the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Apostles, will begin her new position on January 4, Vatican News reported.
During a 2024 Synod on Synodality assembly in Vatican City, Barron said we should not look at the question of women’s ordination in terms of whether they can be ordained “from a theological or a canonical point of view.”
“I think we have to look at the question very much from … the Spirit. ‘Is the Spirit calling women?’ Because some women do sense a call to priesthood or diaconate,” she said, according to EWTN News.
“I think one of the calls from this synod is to share the possibilities that are open to women for governance, leadership roles within the Church, and there are many good practices from all around the world,” she told a journalist at the time. “But we as Catholics are very ignorant of the possibilities that are there.”
In her new role, Barron will take on responsibility as president of the Pontifical Mission Societies.
Her claim that the Holy Spirit can call women to the priesthood or diaconate defies the direction of Jesus Christ and the perennial teaching of the Church.
In his 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, Pope John Paul II reaffirmed the perennial teaching that it is impossible for women to validly receive the sacrament of Holy Orders:
Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.
In his book Ministers of Christ, Dr. Peter Kwasniewski has pointed out that “(a)ll liturgical services within the sanctuary of the church represent Christ, the supreme ‘deacon,’ and therefore, according to the uninterrupted tradition of the Church, both the higher and lower liturgical services are performed by male persons.”
Barron was born in Donegal, Ireland, on November 7, 1968. She served as president of the Service of Documentation and Study on Global Mission (SEDOS) from 2022 to 2025 and as president of the International Union of Superiors General in Rome from 2023 to 2025.
