While 115 cardinals elected a new pope inside the Sistine Chapel, about 50 Roman Catholic nuns and lay women protested in front of Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago about the absence of women in the conclave. The Women’s Ordination Conference, a group that advocates removal of the Catholic ban on female priesthood, organized this protest and other similar demonstrations throughout the country.

You go, girls.

Born to and raised by a good Irish Catholic family (by “good” I mean “large”), it seems that the minute I was able to talk I was asking my parents why I never saw woman priests at Sunday mass. By fourth grade or so, I was old enough to be offended when one of the priests at my hometown church gave a homily denouncing a group of demonstrators for female priesthood, declaring the issue unimportant.

Unimportant? The Vatican and its cardinals, all men, make decisions about the life and spirituality of the Church that apply to both men and women. Half of the Church’s faithful are excluded from interpretation of God’s will, yet are expected to live out these interpretations, and this is unimportant?

So often I hear the following argument for retaining this patriarchal setup of the Church: The Church’s job is to guide Catholics spiritually and institute God’s will regardless of political trends. If the Church ordained women, it would be failing this mission and caving in to political correctness.

Thus, we are led to believe that the original exclusion of women from the priesthood, and thereby from Church leadership, remains completely separate from historical political and social views, while ordination of women would reflect recourse to contemporary political views. Yet, it seems to me that Jesus named men as His disciples exactly because the political and social structures of His time period ensured that women weren’t considered respectable sources of information. People of that period would not have listened to Jesus’ message had women relayed it. In fact, ideas about men’s superior intellect and reliability lasted until very recently, so the Church’s decision to ordain only men both reflected that attitude and catered to it. Church leaders knew that the word of God would reach more people through male spiritual leaders than through female spiritual leaders due to the prevalent political and social ideas about gender.

Today, we are beginning to understand that women are apt leaders and thinkers. Accordingly, most Catholics would listen to and respect female spiritual leaders. If the Church recognizes this and ordains women, it will not be “caving in” to contemporary political views. Rather, it will be recognizing that the exclusion of women from priesthood itself reflected and catered to historical political views that have since been proven discriminatory.

Priests act as mediators between God and His people. They are spiritual descendants of Jesus’ disciples, who brought Jesus’ word to people and people to an understanding of Jesus. Accordingly, priests are fashioned in the image of the disciples’ evangelical role – not in the image of the disciples’ maleness. It is time for the Church to recognize that God may be calling women as well as men to spiritual leadership within a parish community or even to spiritual leadership of the entire Church.

The Women’s Ordination Conference’s Web site encourages prayer that “the Holy Spirit will continue to work in the Church to bring about Jesus’ gospel message of justice, inclusion and love.” I invite Catholics everywhere to pray that although the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI is known for a hard-line stance against women’s ordination, the Women’s Ordination Conference and the new leader of the Church can cooperate to bring about at last Jesus’ message of inclusion.

I’ll leave anyone still unconvinced of women’s right to ordination with the words of Sojourner Truth: “He says women can’t have as much rights as men ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.”