SPEYER, Germany (LifeSiteNews) — Catholic laywomen demanded that the Church allow “female deacons” during a women-led church service in Speyer Cathedral that featured a dancing clown.
On February 29, representatives of Catholic women’s organizations and the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK), a prominent lay group, hosted a Liturgy of the Word in the Cathedral of the Diocese of Speyer in the context of the nationwide “Day of the Deaconess.” According to the organizers, more than 350 people attended the service, most of them women.
The liturgy was led by women, according to a report from katholisch.de, including one dressed as a clown.
The laywomen called on the Church hierarchy to open the sacrament of Holy Orders to women, despite the Catholic Church’s dogmatic teaching that only men can be ordained.
According to katholisch.de, at one point during the service, the woman dressed as a clown danced in front of the altar, raising her hands in the air while singing, “Come to God. He will revive you.”
“The abundance of gifts and vocations of women given by God must finally be recognized in the Roman Catholic Church,” said Ulrike Göken-Huismann, one of the leaders of the Catholic Women’s Community of Germany (kfd), calling for ordination of “non-male people.”
It is “incomprehensible and no longer understandable that the decision-makers in our church have remained inactive for so long,” she claimed. “It is a form of abuse of power when non-male people remain excluded because of their gender.”
The women who organized the event did not only subscribe to feminism but also gnostic gender ideology. Ute Zeilmann, vice president of the Catholic German Women’s Association (KDFB), lamented that, in addition to women, so-called “intersex, trans, and non-binary people” are also barred from becoming deacons and priests.
In March, the head of the German Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Georg Bätzing, welcomed the idea of “female deacons,” saying that it would be “wonderful” if he could ordain women to the diaconate.
Bätzing, who has rejected Church teaching on numerous subjects without sanction from Pope Francis or the Vatican, wrongly claimed it would not distort the nature of the Church “if women were to exercise leadership, responsibility and decision-making in it on an equal footing with men.”
Catholic impossibility of ‘female deacons’
As LifeSiteNews Vatican correspondent Michael Haynes explained in an article, the Catholic Church has pronounced the impossibility of so-called “female deacons.”
“The diaconate, as part of the sacrament of Holy Orders, is not possible to be opened to women,” Haynes wrote.
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 2002, the Vatican’s International Theological Commission wrote after much study that:
- The deaconesses mentioned in the tradition of the ancient Church — as evidenced by the rite of institution and the functions they exercised — were not purely and simply equivalent to the deacons;
- The unity of the sacrament of Holy Orders, in the clear distinction between the ministries of the bishop and the priests on the one hand and the diaconal ministry on the other, is strongly underlined by ecclesial tradition, especially in the teaching of the Magisterium
In 2019, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), spoke with LifeSite’s Dr. Maike Hickson about the issue of “female ordination,” issuing a categorical clarification about the Catholic prohibition on the matter of women as priests or deacons:
It is certain without doubt, however, that this definitive decision from Pope John Paul II is indeed a dogma of the Faith of the Catholic Church and that this was of course the case already before this Pope defined this truth as contained in Revelation in the year 1994. The impossibility that a woman validly receives the Sacrament of Holy Orders in each of the three degrees is a truth contained in Revelation and it is thus infallibly confirmed by the Church’s Magisterium and presented as to be believed.
In 2018, Cardinal Luis Ladaria Ferrer, S.J., then prefect of the CDF, defended the teaching of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis as bearing the mark of “infallibility,” with St. 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.”
READ: Female Synod adviser appointed by Pope Francis says ‘women deacons’ are a ‘possibility’