Women Deacons in the Catholic Church?
On May 12, 2016 during a meeting with Catholic women religious leaders, Pope Francis said he will create a commission to study the possibility of allowing women to serve as deacons in the Church.
As part of their triennial meeting this week in Rome, some 900 leaders of the world's orders of Catholic women religious met with Pope Francis at the Vatican on May 12, 2016.
During the meeting, members of the International Union of Superiors General (UISG) asked the pontiff four questions about their lives and the wider role of women in the global Catholic church.
1. A better integration of women in the life of the Church
Do you see a way to separate the role of leadership or preaching at the Eucharist from ordination, in a way that our church might be more open to receiving the genius of women in the near future?"
2. Role of consecrated women in the Church
What impedes the church from including women among permanent deacons, just as it happened in the early church?"
3. Role of the International Union of Superiors General
Can the Church permit itself to continue speaking about us, instead of speaking with us?"
4. Obstacles we encounter inside the Church
Could we be open to temporary commitments? Which value is given to consecrated apostolic life, in particular that of women, from some parts of the hierarchical church?
According to Joshua J. McElwee in the National Catholic Reporter, the Pope would have commented on a conversation he had with a "good, wise professor” who had studied the use of female deacons in the early centuries of the church. Francis said it remained unclear to him what role such deacons had.
It was a bit obscure,” said Francis. "What was the role of the deaconess in that time?”
“Constituting an official commission that might study the question?” the pontiff asked aloud. "I believe yes. It would do good for the church to clarify this point. I am in agreement. I will speak to do something like this.”
“I accept,” the pope said later. “It seems useful to me to have a commission that would clarify this well."
The deaconesses, as a distinct ministry in the Church, arose out of necessity, as the deacons did. The close community life of the early Church required particular services of charity and hospitality to be rendered to the female members of the community, services which, by reasons of propriety, were more suitably rendered by other women: the attendance of the poor and the sick, the preparation for baptism and the assistance in the actual ceremony (which required full immersion and anointing of the body), the guarding of the church doors, on the side reserved for women; etc.
A special ritual was developed for their consecration and installation, modelled on that of the deacon’s ordination, but with clear differences that indicated their different status, powers and functions in the Church. In fact, from the very beginning the ecclesiastical authority made clear that the deaconesses could not perform the offices of the priest or deacon. [1]
As time passed and the local churches grew in importance and numbers, the deaconesses’ functions were extended. And as human nature is wont to do, these developments encouraged also their ambition for even more and more important functions. Thus, the abuses soon multiplied: in different places and times (most particularly in the Eastern churches, but also in the West), deaconesses were found preaching or reading the epistle and gospel in the liturgical ceremonies, or mixing the wine and water in the chalice, or otherwise serving at the altar, or administering baptism by themselves, or entering into doctrinal controversies…
Confronted with these mounting abuses – and as the growth of the Church and the development of the baptismal liturgy reduced the need for a specific female ministry – the ecclesiastical authority, by means of local and regional synods, condemned the abuses and soon suppressed altogether the consecration of deaconesses and turned them back into the laity. [2]
Considering the unchangeability of human nature, and in view of these lessons of history, it is reckless, to say the least, to talk about considering the restoration of the deaconesses as a specific ministry in the Church. In the present crisis, it could only bring the Church a step closer to the admission of women’s priestly ordination…
1. Apostolic Constitutions, VIII, 27: "the deaconess gives no blessing, she fulfills no function of priest or deacon".
Council of Nicea, 325, canon 19 (regarding certain repentant heretics who, if they had been ordained priests, should be reordained by a Catholic bishop): "Nous rappelons aux diaconesses qui sont dans cette situation [i.e. in the heretical sect but repentant] qu'elles n'ont pas été ordonnées et qu'elles doivent être simplement comptées parmi les laïques."
Council of Nimes, 394.
2. First Council of Orange, 441, canon 26: “Diaconissae omnimode non ordinandae. Si quae jam sunt, benedictioni quae populo impenditur, capita submittant” [i.e. counted among the laity to receive the penitential blessing].
Council of Orleans, 533: “Ut nulli postmodum feminae diaconalis benedictione, pro conditionis hujus fragilitate, credatur.”
