Even though there used to be a period of Pornocracy™, it was a political thing, there were no female priests.

This is extremely unlikely to resolve YES. Consider:

• Current Catholic doctrine says that the Church does not even have the ability to change the rule against ordination of women. According to the RCC, this rule was instituted by Jesus himself and is thus absolute. They haven't left any room for ambiguity on it either - the RCC has made many official statements, even relatively recently, saying that they can never change it, and that this is an official doctrine of the church.

• The Catholic Church also claims that all of their doctrines are infallible and can never change. So they can't just go back on it and say, "I guess we were wrong about that one." And given how unambiguously the doctrine has been stated, they can't claim that it was never really an official doctrine, as they do with other beliefs that people accuse them of changing in the past.

• The Catholic Church's entire claim to authority rests on the idea that it is guided by the Holy Spirit to prevent it from ever teaching erroneous doctrines.

Putting these facts together, we find that the Catholic Church would have to give up their entire claim to legitimacy if they wanted to ordain female priests. So even if church leaders get much more progressive and really wish they could ordain women, it would still never happen.

Also, even though there is obviously some pressure on the RCC to become more egalitarian and thus get rid of rules that discriminate based on sex, this pressure isn't at strong as you might think. Why?

• Most of the Catholic Church's membership is in developing countries, not the developed liberal democracies that value gender equality the most. This will probably become increasingly true as time goes on, since developed countries are getting more secular.

• Many church members don't think the rules should change, even in more progressive countries. Also, I think there's a pretty good chance that the average Catholic will become more conservative, at least compared to the rest of society, as time goes on, given that the church's beliefs about abortion, LGBT issues, and of course female ordination will drive progressives away, while making it more attractive to conservatives. Thus, even if there is strong external pressure on the RCC to become more egalitarian, there might be strong internal pressure pushing against this.

And finally, even if there is strong pressure from both church members and wider society for the doctrine to change, the Catholic Church's leadership is mostly composed of older men who are more conservative than the average Catholic. They are also much more likely to care about all of the specifics of Catholic doctrine than the average Catholic (which is why those first three bullet points are so important). So they are highly unlikely to want to change this rule in the foreseeable future, and even if they do want to change it at some point, it will probably take a very long time to do so.

@JosephNoonan All makes sense and seems likely, but 30 years is a long time for the world to potentially change. Also, it's not that hard for religions to change things & argue it was human error / bias. The Mormon church claimed the same infallibility back in the early 1900s, but underwent the mental gymnastics to change its tune to allow for getting rid of polygamy and removing racial discrimination from temple worship. Seems possible this could happen to Catholocism re: gender in the next 30 years.

@CarsonGale How set-in-stone were the doctrines about polygamy and race, though? The big problem with the Catholic Church allowing female priests is that they can't really reinterpret the doctrine at this point, because they have made it so explicit that the rule forbidding female priests is an official doctrine, not just an interpretation of a doctrine, a consequence of a doctrine, or a structural/logistical rule that the Church would be allowed to change. I also think that the large scale of the Catholic Church (in terms of both its age and its global reach), the way it goes about its proceedings (having very strict and formal procedures for major decisions), and the importance it places on doctrine, official rules, and infallibility, means that it changes much more slowly than other institutions, including most other churches. The LDS Church is much younger, and most adherents are part of the same culture (U.S. culture), so I think this makes it more likely to make significant changes, and to make them quicker.

@JosephNoonan Faithful infallibility just doesn't work with religions over time IMO - they have to adapt. I'm not that well-versed in Catholicism, but isn't there precedent? Maybe there's some nuanced mental gymnastics that leads one to believe that pulling the plug on indulgences / the Pope Wars doesn't count as violating infallibility, but if so I think those same gymnastics can be applied to priest gender. It's as easy as giving a high-brow argument saying that the doctrine was infallible for its period because members weren't faithful enough to where God could direct the Papacy to ordain female priests, but now members are in a position to accept it.

That's just an example, not necessarily a rationale I'm trying to defend. I could think of several other "rationales" for switching the policy while retaining the idea of infallibility.

I agree that the LDS church being younger makes it a worse comp for this question.

@CarsonGale Guess I never responded to this earlier, but I just got a notification from this market, and I actually don't think there is any precedent for the Catholic Church going back on something this clear-cut. I don't think there's any mental gymnastics required for indulgences or Pope Wars (regardless of whether that's referring to controversies over who is the legitimate pope or to wars started by popes like the Crusades). Both of those are pretty clear-cut examples of things that are not official doctrines that the church has reversed. In fact, they haven't even pulled the plug on indulgences. Those are still a thing, you just can't buy them anymore. There has never been a Catholic doctrine saying that it was okay to sell indulgences - the Catholic Church has never held that its actions are infallible, just that its official teachings are.

There are some cases where it requires a little mental gymnastics to say that certain things that the Catholic Church no longer holds as doctrines were never really doctrines in the first place. For example, it used to be considered a sin to change any interest on loans, but now the church claims that charging interest is permitted as long as it meets certain conditions. But I still don't think this is anywhere near as clear-cut an example as female ordination, because, as far as I can tell, it wasn't so explicit that absolutely every case of charging interest on loans was banned.

lol @ AI generated image for this market