Analysis
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Cardinal Fernández, at an April 8, 2024, press conferenceMichael Haynes

VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — While meeting with members of the Synod on Synodality, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández informed them that the topic of female deacons is not closed, but simply “not ripe” for making “a decision today.”

In a 90-minute meeting on Thursday afternoon, Cardinal Fernández once again peddled confusion on the topic of female deacons, in the latest development of a furor which emerged in the Synod hall in recent days.

One of the most contentious topics pertaining to the Synod on Synodality, the issues of women in the Church and also that of female deacons, are officially designated to Study Group 5, lead by Monsignor Armando Matteo of Fernández’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF).

Synod members, especially buoyed by vocal voices outside the Synod and in the press, expressed consternation when Fernández briefed Synod members at the beginning of the month about the issue, saying that no approval would be given to female deacons at the moment but that “in-depth study” would continue until 2025.

A meeting between Synod members and some DDF personnel proved unsatisfactory and a “disaster,” prompting Thursday’s event attended by some 100 Synod members and participants.

The cardinal repeated his prior phrase of female ordination not being “ripe,” but gave considerable hope to those who still advocate for it:

The expression that the topic of diaconate for women is not ripe to make a decision today. This is a phrase of the Pope, not less.

By that phrase, said Fernández, Francis “doesn’t want” to be “closing the issue of the diaconate.”

No, he says one can still study with patience and without obsession, without haste. One can continue to study and that is very important. But he thinks things are not yet mature.

As LifeSite has reported often, calls for a new prominence for women in the Church – made in conjunction with demands for female ordination – appear increasingly likely to end up in attempts at divorcing the diaconate from the sacrament of holy orders, in order to allow men and women to access it.

In order to do so, a push would be made to remove ecclesial governance from holy orders, thus having leadership open to men and women, and the male-only ordained orders relegated to a side show.

Fernández has given repeated indications of this, but none more visibly than during his meeting on Thursday.

“It is crucial to clarify in which areas in the Church authority and leadership flow from ordained ministry and which do not,” he told the assembled Synod participants. “Leadership tasks and functions do not require ordained ministry as much as specific skills and personal aptitudes. Such deepening will help us to be a more synodal Church.”

Fernández’s personal opinion

The Argentine cardinal is no stranger to controversy, perhaps most notably of all in his book on kissing.

Perhaps aware of possible controversy on this issue also, Fernández attempted to partially assuage the activist of female ordination and Catholics attentive to preserving Church teaching.

Giving his “personal opinion” on the topic as “a theologian, not as a prefect,” he stated that he could see arguments for and against female deacons.

READ: Top Synod cardinal says ‘female deacons’ are a ‘natural deepening of the Lord’s will’

“I think the fundamentals for ‘no to the female diaconate’ are reasonable, but they are not sufficient,” said Fernández, thus revealing that he does not align with the Church’s clear prohibition on the topic.

“The grounds for ‘yes’ [to female ordination] are still not enough to answer the negative opinions,” he added.

The Argentine acknowledge that thus position would not please either side:

And with this sincere opinion I am not pleasing anyone, I do not get from the right or the left. Conservatives will say ‘he is a fool who did not understand that it is impossible to ordain deaconesses, that contrary to dogma, tradition and so on.’

Progressives will say I didn’t understand that there is nothing logical or reasonable about refusing ordination, that it’s just medieval fixism, etc.

Waving aside both forms of criticism, Fernández urged immediate action of some kind regarding the “clear steps forward for an empowerment of women in the Church, distinguishing what is absolutely inseparable and sacred from what is not.”

“In this point, however, I believe we must already move forward without waiting,” he noted.

Study Group and Catholic teaching

The Study Group is run by, and largely comprised of, the DDF members. Some of the consulters are Francis’ favored canonist Cardinal Gianfranco Ghirlanda and the pro-contraception theologian Father Maurizio Chiodi, along with leading Synod on Synodality personnel such as Fathers Giacomo Costa and Dario Vitali.

Additional members, including some of the cardinal consulters to the DDF, are Cardinals Cristophe Schönborn, Jose Tolentino de Mendonca, Marcello Semararo, Claudio Gugerotti, and Archbishop Bruno Forte.

Fernández also added that the Amazon’s Cardinal Ulrich Steiner “will help us in this sense,” namely in advising the Study Group about his experience in the Amazon, where – as he has attested – women largely take the role of clergy and even receive a laying-on of hands from Steiner to perform their duties.

READ: Amazon cardinal ‘lays hands’ to confer ‘ministry’ on women going to ‘celebrate a sacrament’

In addition, a commission set up in 2020 to study the question of female deacons, and which is led by Cardinal Guiseppe Petrocchi, has been reconvened alongside Study Group 5.

Notwithstanding the ongoing discussion about female deacons, the Catholic Church clearly and firmly prohibits the practice. In his 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, Pope John Paul II taught, “I declare 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.”

In 2018, then-prefect of the DDF Cardinal Luis Ladaria Ferrer, S.J., defended the teaching of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis as bearing the mark of “infallibility,” with John Paul II having “formally confirmed and made explicit, so as to remove all doubt, that which the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium has long considered throughout history as belonging to the deposit of faith.”

Additionally the Vatican’s International Theological Commission wrote in 2002 that the much misrepresented so-called “female deacons” of the early church – cited by activists today – were not in fact deacons as understood today, and were certainly not ordained to any ministry.

With Study Group 5 due to report in June 2025, it remains to be seen how closely Catholic teaching will be adhered to by the members in their recommendations to the Pope.

Full coverage of the Synod on Synodality can be found at this link here on LifeSiteNews, and on the X account of LifeSite’s Vatican correspondent.

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