Leo XIV-appointed nun again says women ‘may hear the call to priesthood’
‘Who am I to say whether the door is open or closed (to ‘women priests’)?’ Sister Mary Teresa Barron scandalously told EWTN News.
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Wed Oct 21, 2026 - 4:27 pm EDT
(LifeSiteNews) — Sister Mary Teresa Barron, NSA, who Pope Leo XIV recently appointed as adjunct secretary of the Dicastery for Evangelization, has again suggested that women may be called to be “ordained” as priests, contradicting Catholic teaching.
The nun, who is currently the superior general of the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Apostles, during an October 20 interview with EWTN News, stood by the previous erroneous remarks that she made during a 2024 Synod on Synodality assembly that women “may hear the call to priesthood.” Barron also falsely claimed that some female saints heard this “call” to the priesthood.
“Who am I to say whether the door is open or closed (to ‘women priests’)?” the nun told EWTN News. “Women today may hear the call to priesthood. Some of the great women saints heard that call also. So for me, itʼs how do we within Church facilitate that discernment?”
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“What do we do as a Church to accompany that discernment to see if, yes, this is what the Spirit is calling the entire Church to or not at this point?” she added. Then, “in the discernment, thereʼs always a choice at the end. Itʼs either yes or no.”
In his 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, Pope John Paul II reaffirmed the perennial Church 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.
As previously reported by LifeSiteNews, 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.”
READ: Leo XIV appoints nun who floated women’s priesthood to Vatican leadership
“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.”
The nun will assume her new position as adjunct secretary of the Dicastery for Evangelization on January 4, 2027. In this role, Barron will be president of the Pontifical Mission Societies.
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- heterodoxy
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- Sister Mary Teresa Barron
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