It's hard not to be fascinated by the Catholic church's relatively new Pope Francis. From his opening act washing the feet of Muslim women prisoners (three no-no's in one) to urging young Catholics to break out of their "spiritual cages" and "make a mess" in their diocese, to his casual chat this week with reporters on the plane back from his triumphant trip to Brazil, this pope has demonstrated a charming willingness to shake up the conservative institution and to make it a more open and accepting place.

When it comes to making the church a more equal institution, however, where roughly half the population (that is women) are not actively discriminated against, Pope Francis is sadly proving to be as traditional and conservative as the best of them.

The big takeaway from the plane chat, or at least the big media takeaway, was the pope's acknowledgement that gay priests exist and that they have as much right to their affinity with God as their heterosexual counterparts. When asked about the so called "gay lobby" within the Vatican, the pope replied:

When I meet a gay person, I have to distinguish between their being gay and being part of a lobby. If they accept the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them? They shouldn't be marginalized.

Considering that his predecessor, Pope Benedict, declared in 2005 that men who had deep rooted homosexual tendencies should not be priests, the new pope's words can at the very least be viewed as a step towards cementing gay men's rights to equal status and treatment by the church, including their right to be ordained. This step in the right direction would be easier to applaud, however, if it had not been followed by two steps backwards on the rights of women, straight or gay, to ever having a chance to enjoy the same equal treatment.

When the thorny issue of women in the church came up, the pope kindly acknowledged that a woman's role "does not end just with being a mother and with housework," (something mainstream society figured out about a century ago). He went on to pay lip service to the need to expand women's role in some way, but while he had no concrete ideas on what this might entail, he made it clear than it would never include the right to be ordained alongside men:

On the ordination of women, the church has spoken and said no. John Paul II, in a definitive formulation, said that door is closed.

This bold statement did not go down well with advocates for Catholic women who were quick to point out the hypocrisy of the pope's position. He was happy to dismiss the declarations of his predecessor, Pope Benedict, regarding gay priests, but an apostolic letter written nearly 20 years ago by John Paul II outlining his personal objections to the ordination of women is held to be a "definitive formulation" that is not open to further discussion.

As Erin Saiz Hanna, executive director of Women's Ordination Conference said in a statement, there are plenty of other sources the pope could have looked to regarding women's ordination that did not involve slamming the door in their faces:

[Pope Francis] could have quoted the Vatican's own Pontifical Biblical Commission that concluded in 1976 that there is no valid scriptural or theological reason for denying ordination to women. Pope Francis could have cited history that documents women's leadership in the early church, or acknowledge the great works Roman Catholic Women priests are doing today. He could have looked to Jesus who welcomed women as his equal.

He could indeed have done all of those things, but like pretty much every other member of the all male hierarchy in the church, the pope's mind appears to be "definitively" closed on this issue. The church has gotten away with blatant sexism for so long that even a leader who says all the right things about the need to be inclusive and forgiving and non judgmental (and who probably genuinely believes what he says) loses all self awareness when the rights and expectations of women to be judged as equals within the church are raised.

Despite the church's intransigent position on female ordination, however, the Roman Catholic women priests movement is growing exponentially. In 2002, seven women were ordained by a male bishop on the banks of the Danube River in Germany. Now there are 158 ordained women priests, mostly working in the US, but also in Europe, South America and South Africa. Yet despite their growing numbers and acceptance in the Catholic communities in which they minister, Suzanne Thiel, a spokeswoman for the group, told me that the church hierarchy has refused to meet with them or engaged in any kind of dialog. The only acknowledgement of their existence came in a decree issued by the Vatican in 2008 warning the women priests that their ordination would be punished with automatic excommunication.

In the church's eyes then, these women are sinners who have broken Canon and so must be punished. That would be fair enough I suppose if punishments for breaking church laws were evenly applied. Engaging in homosexual acts is also a sin according to Catholic teaching, but when asked about the case of Monsignor Battista Ricca, who had an alleged gay relationship, the pope waxed lyrical about the need to forgive past sin and forget it:

The theology of sin is important. Saint Peter committed one of the greatest sins, denying Christ, and yet they made him pope. Think about that.

Those are noble words that the pope might want to think about further himself. If a male priest can be forgiven for engaging in sexual acts that the church considers sinful, can a female priest be pardoned for the "sin" of simply becoming a priest? If Francis' own concept of forgiveness and forgetting were equally applied, and the women priests were welcomed back into the fold, we could end up with a woman pope some day. Now that is something worth thinking about.