Analysis
Featured Image
Victor Manuel Cardinal Fernández, Oct 2024.Michael Haynes

Editor’s Note: When you finish reading this article, please consider donating to our Fall Appeal so that LifeSiteNews can continue its mission.

VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández has given an update on the Vatican’s latest study of female deacons, ruling out any immediate changes but also leaving the door open for future announcements.

Addressing the 350 participants of the Synod on Synodality assembly October 2, Fernández – prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith – gave an update on the work of the synod study group which he is leading.

Of the 10 study groups established by Pope Francis in the spring to examine key themes from the synod so far, Fernández’s is examining “theological and canonistic questions around specific ministerial forms” including the female diaconate – as requested at the October 2023 synod session.

The Catholic Church infallibly teaches that it is impossible to ordain women to sacred orders, including the diaconate.

“The Dicastery judges that there is still no room for a positive decision by the Magisterium regarding the access of women to the diaconate, understood as a degree of the Sacrament of Holy Orders,” said Fernández. “The Holy Father himself recently confirmed this consideration publicly,” he added.

While saying that the Vatican could not approve female deacons yet, Fernández nevertheless added that “in any event, the Dicastery judges that the opportunity to continue the work of in-depth study remains open.”

The study group is examining the question by drawing on the October 2023 Synthesis Report and the Vatican’s 2016 and 2020 commissions on “female deacons.” In addition, Fernández told the synod assembly yesterday that he was using Evangelii Gaudium 103-104, Querida Amazonia 99-103, and Antiquum Ministerium 3.

He also revealed the style of the study group’s work, saying that it is analyzing “in depth the lives of some women who – in both the early and recent history of the Church – have exercised genuine authority and power in support of the Church’s mission.”

The “authority or power” of these women “was not tied to sacramental consecration, as would be in the case, at least today, with diaconal ordination,” he said.

Though such women were not sacramentally consecrated, Fernández noted they made significant contributions to the Church’s life. “Therefore, it is a matter of completing a reflection on the expansion of the Church’s ministerial dimension in light of her charismatic dimension, to suggest the recognition of charisms or the establishment of roles of ecclesial service that – while not directly connected to sacramental power – are rooted in the Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation.”

He cited the examples of women such as: Matilda of Canossa, Hildegard of Bingen, Bridget of Sweden, Joan of Arc, Teresa of Ávila, Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mama Antula, and Elizabeth Ann Seton.

“Equally, it will be crucial to listen to those women today who hold leading roles within the People of God and to the Churches to which they belong,” he noted.

Here, Fernández suggested possible openness to a female diaconate, or female ministry of some sort, in the future.

“In the light of these beautiful testimonies, the question of women’s access to the diaconate takes on a different perspective,” he opined. “Meanwhile, the in-depth study of their multifaceted Christian witness can help today imagine new forms of ministry that can ‘create still broader opportunities for a more incisive female presence in the Church’ (EG, 103).”

Querida Amazonia (QA) – the document Fernández’s group is studying and which emerged from the 2019 Amazon Synod – is particularly notable for its recommendation of married priests, the so-called viri probati.

But Querida Amazonia, while citing the testimony of Amazon women in promoting the faith – also counsels against bestowing holy orders upon women.

Referencing the Amazonian’s testimony, the document states that:

This summons us to broaden our vision, lest we restrict our understanding of the Church to her functional structures. Such a reductionism would lead us to believe that women would be granted a greater status and participation in the Church only if they were admitted to Holy Orders.

But that approach would in fact narrow our vision; it would lead us to clericalize women, diminish the great value of what they have already accomplished, and subtly make their indispensable contribution less effective.

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

Evangelii Gaudium also states that “[t]he reservation of the priesthood to males, as a sign of Christ the Spouse who gives himself in the Eucharist, is not a question open to discussion, but it can prove especially divisive if sacramental power is too closely identified with power in general.”

Given this condemnation of female ordination in the very documents Fernández is using, combined with the synod’s push for female ministry, it seems increasingly likely that an attempt will be made to divorce the diaconate from the priesthood and thus open it up to all.

Indeed, this has been the demand from a number of synod members including Cardinals Blase Cupich and Robert McElroy. Earlier this year, McElroy argued that divorcing the diaconate and the priesthood “could make it easier to have women deacons.”

READ: Cardinal McElroy: Synod could end link between diaconate and priesthood to allow ‘female deacons’

Notwithstanding these arguments, the Catholic Church has clearly pronounced the impossibility of “female deacons.”

One such pronouncement is found in Pope John Paul II’s 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, where he wrote, “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.”

Indeed, in 2018, the then-prefect of the CDF, 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.”

21 Comments

    Loading...