A Pope Who Changed Who Gets Their Feet Washed

The foot-washing rite had traditionally been performed only on men, reflecting the twelve male apostles Christ washed at the Last Supper, but Pope Francis broke with that custom from the first year of his papacy in 2013, washing the feet of women, non-Christians and prisoners at services held in a youth detention centre and later at refugee centres and prisons, a deliberate widening of who is included in the rite that some traditionalist Catholics criticised as a departure from the text's literal historical basis, while supporters welcomed it as recovering the rite's underlying meaning of humble service to whoever is present rather than a re-enactment restricted to a literal apostolic cast.

Francis formally revised the church's liturgical rules in 2016 to make the inclusion of women in the foot-washing rite the general norm rather than an exception requiring special permission, a change that individual bishops and parishes worldwide have adopted at different speeds, so that the specific group of people whose feet are washed on Maundy Thursday now varies by parish in a way it did not before 2013, depending on how far a given diocese has implemented the wider practice the pope himself set out to establish.