'Women cannot be priests' - Holy Father insists

Once again, Pope Francis insists that

Speaking with Reuters, the pontiff admitted that he wants to have more women in leadership roles in the Roman Catholic church but maintained that he does not support the idea of female priests.

Why women can not be priests

"No Church without women," he said, quoting Swiss theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar concerning having more women in church but explained that he has to stick with the church rules when it comes to the clergy.

"With sacred orders, you can't do anything because dogmatically it doesn't go - and John Paul II was clear and closed the door, and I won't turn on this. It was a serious thing, not capricious," said Francis, as quoted by the Catholic site Crux.

Pope Francis continued, "But we mustn't reduce the presence of the women to their role … No, it's a thing that man can't do. Man cannot be the bride of Christ. It's the woman, the Church, the bride of Christ."

ALSO READ: On March 12, 1994, 32 female priests were ordained for the first time

"I have no problem with naming a woman as head of a dicastery, as long as the dicastery doesn't have jurisdiction. The one for clergy does, so it has to be a bishop," he added.

The conversation between Pope Francis and a journalist from the British news agency took place on Sunday, June 17, 2018.

It covered the ongoing migrant crisis in the United States, female ordination, the ongoing Vatican talks with China and the clerical sexual abuse scandals in Chile.

Women in Catholic church leadership

Meanwhile, Reuters also reports that a preparatory document for a meeting of Catholic bishops from the Amazon shows plans to consider ordaining elderly married men as priests and having women in some "type of official ministry."

Concerning having women in leading roles, the preparatory document says: "It is necessary to identify the type of official ministry that can be conferred on women, taking into account the central role which women play today in the Amazonian Church."

The document adds that having married priests and women in leading roles will give more access to Mass in the area of more than seven and a half million sq km (more than three million square miles).

"One of the main points to be heard is the cry of thousands of communities deprived of the Sunday Eucharist for long periods of time," the document says.

The synod (meeting), which will be held in October 2019, will include bishops and other representatives from the nine countries of the Amazon.