03/07/2026 18:30 - 19:30

HALL: Parenzo - A19

Contact: Dias D.

Chair: Heany M.L.

This panel reconsider relationships between contemporary theologies of presbyteral ordination in the Catholic Church as it functions in the world and offers a voice of a moral authority in its championing of human dignity. At the same time, the Catholic Church maintains a commitment to essentialising theologies of difference in relation to its understanding of baptismal dignity and ordained authority. Therefore, the Church has provided some of the most trenchant and far-ranging critiques of inequality across the globe, while also carrying the profound legacy of its past implication in colonial projects that generated the vastly unequal global present.
How should presbyteral priesthood in the Catholic Church be understood theologically in the light of this complex past and present? The Second Vatican Council reframed Catholic ecclesiology to focus on the shared reality of Baptism, insisting that all Catholics were equally called to holiness and to participate in the prophetic priesthood of Christ - an awareness would soon develop into the various, manifold ministries in which the people of God work out this call to follow Christ as members of his body. That same Council, however, did not offer an account of presbyteral ministry commensurate with this significant reframing. These panels seek to consider how Catholic theologians might offer generative theologies of the priesthood for the 21st century, taking the implications of Vatican II into the era of the Synodal Church. Each panel will consider a key issue from both an inside and outside perspective, considering how priesthood can be understood from within traditional sources of authority, and from outside of them.