Greg DalyA well-known academic who believes the Church should ordain women deacons has been appointed to a Vatican commission to consider the issue.
Prof. Phyllis Zagano, who teaches at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, has long written for the US-based National Catholic Reporter. She has occasionally contributed to The Irish Catholic, in April writing of how the Diaconate was a creation of the early Church.
“Well, what the Church has created the Church can amend, and what the Church has done, the Church can do again,” she wrote, continuing, “and the Church – for many centuries – ordained women to the diaconate.”
Pope Francis has established the Commission for the Study of the Diaconate of Women following comments in May, when he was asked about the possibility of women being ordained deacons.
Status
Acknowledging that there were deaconesses in the early Church, the Pope said their status seemed obscure, and that he would ask the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) to share relevant studies on the subject with him. “I would like to constitute an official commission to study the question,” he added, continuing, “I think it will be good for the Church to clarify this point, I agree, and I will speak to do something of this type.”
The International Theological Commission, which advises the CDF, issued a report on the matter in 2002, stressing that there is a clear distinction between priestly and diaconal ministry, and finding that the deaconesses of the early Church “were not purely and simply equivalent to the deacons”.
The 2002 report found, however, that Church teaching needs further clarification in this area, concluding that “it pertains to the ministry of discernment which the Lord established in his Church to pronounce authoritatively on this question”.
The Pontiff’s announcement was widely reported as him taking steps towards the ordination of women to the diaconate, but in an in-flight conference the following month he took issue with this, saying this was not his intent, and that he had asked CDF head Cardinal Gerhard Müller to provide him with a list of possible commission members from whom he could choose.
The new commission will have 12 members, six men and six women, and will be presided over by CDF secretary Archbishop Luis Ladario Ferrer SJ.