Sister Mary Barron, a religious sister from Ireland, first landed in Tanzania as a missionary three decades ago. That experience had a huge impact on her and the roles she has held since — including her latest appointment as president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Mission Societies and adjunct secretary of the Dicastery for Evangelization.
“I went there as an evangelizer, but I in turn was evangelized,” Barron told EWTN News in Rome on Oct. 19, speaking of her time in Africa.
“I learned so much from the people in Tanzania about how they see God, how they relate to God. And I, in turn, was able to share [my perspective],” she said.
Barron, the latest woman to be named a superior of a Vatican office, also spoke about women’s role in Church leadership and the possibility of their ordination as priests.
The Pontifical Mission Societies (PMS) is a worldwide network of four missionary bodies — the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, the Society of the Holy Childhood, the Society of St. Peter the Apostle, and the Missionary Union.
An official instrument of the Holy See, PMS supports the Church’s missionary activity around the world. An annual offering taken up in Catholic churches on World Mission Sunday, observed on the third Sunday of October, supports its work. In 2026, World Mission Sunday was observed on Oct. 18.
Barron said when she was a missionary in Tanzania, she cherished the spiritual support of her parish in rural County Donegal, which would pray for her every Sunday as a missionary abroad.
“World Mission Sunday is a day when every parish, every diocese in the world thinks of all those missionaries and prays,” she explained. “Of course, there’s the material support also. But first and foremost, [what’s important is] that spiritual connection, that universality of our Church, where we’re actually connecting with each other around the world.”
As she takes up her new roles in the Vatican on Jan. 4, 2027, Barron said that same spiritual connection of the Church with missionaries remains important to her.
“The priority for me … is very much about the missionary spirit,” Barron said, underlining the Second Vatican Council’s emphasis on the missionary vocation of members of the Church.
“Everyone is called to mission by virtue of their baptism … and weʼre slowly growing into that realization,” she said.
Women’s leadership in the Church
Barron is the first woman to be president of the Pontifical Mission Societies, but she said she sees her appointment to such a position to be less about raising the profile of women, as being “for the Church … for all of us.”
Leadership roles in the institutional Church used to be limited to ordained men, members of the “hierarchical Church,” she said. “And now gradually thereʼs an awareness that, yes, there are other dimensions of the Church that also are gifted … And I think itʼs for all of us. … For me, it’s never been a man-woman thing. Itʼs [that] weʼre all in this together as witnesses to God who created us all in Godʼs own image.”
Barron said she appreciates the willingness of Pope Francis and now Pope Leo to consider a person’s overall capability for a role — outside of whether or not he is a cleric.
“Itʼs beginning to use the giftedness of all the baptized for the good of Godʼs mission,” she said.
Views on women’s ordination
Barron has served since 2018 as congregational leader of her order, the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Apostles. She was also president of the International Union of Superiors General (UISG), which represents approximately 600,000 religious sisters in 80 countries, from 2023 to 2025.
In that role, she participated in the two monthlong assemblies of the Synod on Synodality at the Vatican in October 2023 and 2024.
In 2024, during a press conference following synod discussions, Barron addressed the question of women who experience “a call to priesthood.”
“I think we have to look at the question very much from … the Spirit. ‘Is the Spirit calling women?’ Because some women do sense a call to priesthood or diaconate,” she said on Oct. 7, 2024.
St. John Paul II, in the 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, stated that all Catholics must “definitively” follow the Church’s teaching on a male-only priesthood.
Pope Francis also repeated John Paul II’s declarations on the issue during his pontificate, saying in 2013 that on the ordination of women “the Church has spoken and says, ‘No.’ … That is closed, that door.”
Speaking to EWTN News this week, Barron expressed the same views she espoused in 2024 — underlining the importance of being open to where the Holy Spirit guides the Church on the issue.
“Who am I to say whether the door is open or closed [to women priests]?” Barron said.
“Women today may hear the call to priesthood. Some of the great women saints heard that call also,” she said. “So for me, itʼs how do we within Church facilitate that discernment?”
The sister said she thinks the Church could do more to accompany women who feel called to the priesthood.
“What do we do as a Church to accompany that discernment to see if, yes, this is what the Spirit is calling the entire Church to or not at this point?” she said. Then, “in the discernment, thereʼs always a choice at the end. Itʼs either yes or no.”
Barron cited a line from the final document of the Synod on Synodality, published in October 2024, which says: “What comes from the Holy Spirit cannot be stopped.”
“So I think even though … there have been moments where we’ve been told we canʼt talk about this at all, itʼs over … it comes back and it comes back,” she said. “So I think the Spirit will guide us even if we say we canʼt talk about it now. I think at another moment itʼll probably come up again.”
“And I think the Spirit will guide us to when and if the time is right,” to consider allowing women’s ordination, she said.
Francis X. Rocca contributed to this report.
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