Pope Francis criticised by Belgian Catholic university, moments after visiting

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Pope Francis was sharply criticised on Saturday by one of Belgium’s Catholic universities over his stance on the role of women in society, in a strongly worded press release issued just moments after the pontiff spoke at the college.

Professors and students at UCLouvain, where the 87-year-old pontiff had made a speech on Saturday afternoon, said they wanted to express their “incomprehension and disapproval” about the pope’s views.

“UCLouvain … deplores the conservative positions expressed by Pope Francis on the role of women in society,” said the statement, in extraordinary language from a Catholic university about a pope.

Francis went to the university on Saturday to celebrate its upcoming 600th anniversary as part of a weekend trip he is making to Belgium. His speech largely called for global action on climate change, but he also responded to a letter to him from students and professors that had asked about the Catholic Church’s teaching on women.

The pope emphasized that the Church was not run like a corporation. “A woman … is a daughter, a sister, a mother, just as a man is a son, a brother, a father,” he said.

The pope also described women as having “a fertile welcome, care (and) vital devotion”.

The university statement called the pope’s position on women’s roles in society “deterministic and reductive”.

Francis has faced criticism during events throughout his trip to Belgium. The country’s king and prime minister called on the pope to take more concrete actions to help survivors of abuse by Catholic clergy, and a rector at a different Catholic university asked him reconsider the Catholic Church’s ban on ordaining women as priests.

UCLouvain is a French-speaking university in Belgium. It has some 38,000 students studying across 20 faculties.

The Catholic Church has an all-male clergy. Francis has created two commissions to consider whether women could serve as deacons, who, like priests, are ordained, but cannot celebrate Mass, but has not moved forward on the issue.

However, during his 11 years as pontiff, Francis has also changed the Vatican’s primary governing document to allow women to lead departments, and has also allowed women to vote at major global meetings of bishops, known as synods, for the first time.

(Reporting by Joshua McElwee and Marine Strauss; Editing by Frances Kerry)