By Anthony Esolen, The Catholic Thing - I am relieved to find that Pope Francis has refrained from saying that someday we may be conferring, or pretending to confer, Holy Orders upon women. It keeps alive the possibility that the churches East and West may reunite. It averts an inevitable and devastating schism. It allows the faithful to retain their trust that, as Sigrid Undset’s convert Paul Selmer says in The Burning Bush, it is the Church’s boast not to have changed her doctrine, so that what we believe is but an organic development of truths revealed already to the apostles.