Question Corner: Will the Catholic Church have women deacons?

Q: I heard that the Vatican recently decided against having women deacons for now, but that they will revisit the question at a later time. How long will we have to wait before we have women deacons? (Ohio)

A: The short answer is, we’re unlikely to ever have women deacons in the way you’re probably expecting.

To unpack this a little more, we can start by recalling the church’s teaching on women’s ordination in general.

In 1994, Pope St. John Paul II issued the Apostolic letter “Ordinatio Sacerdotalis,” in which he reaffirmed the consistent teaching that “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”

It might seem odd to hear that the church “doesn’t have the authority” to do something like administer a sacrament. But the idea is that it was Christ himself who gave us the sacrament of holy orders. That is, holy orders is not something we invented ourselves or that we have the power to change. When Jesus walked the earth, he called only men to serve as Apostles, the first priests and bishops.

Since Jesus was the all-powerful God incarnate, he certainly could have called women to serve as Apostles, despite the social expectations of the historical time in which he ministered. And in fact, the Gospels share many instances in which Jesus did treat women with an equality that defied the customs of his day. But for whatever reason, Jesus called only men to this role. He did not even call his blessed mother to be an Apostle, despite the fact that she, a woman, was the holiest person alive besides him!

Over the years, different theologians have proposed reasons why Christ might have made the choice he did in this regard. For example, it’s often suggested that male clergy as men are better able to image Christ, the bridegroom of the church. However, at the end of the day the reason why the church has an all-male clergy is because of the pattern Christ set during his earthly ministry.

Building upon this, the Catholic theological appreciation of the sacraments has grown and developed over the centuries, and we now understand holy orders as one sacrament with three degrees — i.e., ordination as a deacon, priest and bishop — as opposed to three entirely separate sacraments. Because the impossibility of ordaining women as priests is a settled question, it would logically follow that the sacrament of holy orders in general cannot admit women, not even on the first “level” as deacons.

Yet even in light of this, the call for further study, which was included in the report of the commission tasked with considering the question of women deacons, still makes sense. While we should not expect to see women literally ordained alongside male diaconate candidates, the question of deaconesses in general is a complex and multifaceted one with many positive implications.

For one thing, we know there were historically women in the early church who were called “deaconesses.” Even though they do not seem to have been ordained sacramentally, it could be interesting and helpful to come to greater clarity on what their role actually was. Additionally, the commission’s report recommended greater study on the theology of the diaconate in general.

Finally, the commission also endorsed greater study on women’s unique place in the church, “thus ensuring adequate ecclesial recognition of the diakonia [i.e., the Christian call to service] of the baptized, particularly of women.”

And while it was not referenced directly in the commission’s report, it’s worth noting that the ancient vocation of consecrated virgins — which was restored to the life of the modern church at the same time and in a similar way as the permanent diaconate was — could be a helpful point of reference, since consecrated virginity is a vocation of prayer and ecclesial service reserved exclusively to women.

Jenna Marie Cooper, who holds a licentiate in canon law, is a consecrated virgin and a canonist whose column appears weekly at OSV News. Send your questions to CatholicQA@osv.com.

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