Women Should Be Deacons in the Catholic Church Last week, Pope Francis told a group of Catholic women that he would set up a commission to study the role of female deacons in the early history of the Catholic Church with an eye toward reinstating a modern version of the diaconate open to women. To me it’s clear: The people of God need to hear the good news of Jesus Christ preached from the lived experience of more than half its members. As a traditionalist dedicated to conserving some of the earliest traditions of the Roman Catholic Church, I think this is a wise decision. Like their male counterparts, female deacons would be able to baptize, preside at marriages, funerals and other liturgies, and preach homilies during Mass. To me it’s clear: The people of God need to hear the good news of Jesus Christ preached from the lived experience of more than half its members. After all, that was the way it was in the beginning. After Jesus’ death, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb to remove his body. On the way there, she encountered a gardener. The gardener revealed himself to be the risen Christ. As Mary ran to tell the other disciples the good news, she held within her the very reason of the church: to share God’s saving love in Jesus. In that moment, she was Jesus’s first evangelist and -- perhaps -- the church’s first deacon. Critics of the women diaconate will argue that such a move will both suggest the church will one day ordain women to the priesthood. This slippery slope fallacy is the result of bad theology and a profound misunderstanding of the intrinsic nature and primary mission of the diaconate. Make no mistake: Deacons aren’t “mini-priests.” Their role and function is different in kind from that of priests. Benedict XVI made that particularly clear in 2009, when he changed church law to clarify that, unlike priests, deacons do not act in persona Christi (in the person of Christ) during liturgical celebrations. Rather, deacons have a particular nonliturgical focus on service to God’s people -- particularly those who are most excluded. St. Lawrence, one of the church’s earliest and most famed deacons, vivified this reality. During Rome’s persecution of Christians, the empire’s prefect demanded that Lawrence bring the church’s treasure to him for confiscation. So Lawrence went around and gathered all the poor and sick people that Rome ignored and the church supported, and brought them to the prefect and said, "this is the church's treasure.” Lawrence’s subversive act ended in his martyrdom at the hands of the emperor. Being a deacon isn’t easy. It’s gritty work. It requires one to be in touch with the realities of others, their hopes and joy, and their sufferings and anxieties. It’s a tough job. And as the old adage goes, when you have a tough job, give it to a woman.

Catholic Women Must Be Valued, Not Clericalized Catholic deacons, priests and bishops are all clerics; each receives in ordination the sacrament of Holy Orders. Those advocating for women deacons claim that, in the first centuries of the church, women deacons received the sacrament of Holy Orders just as male ones did. But did they really? “Deaconesses” did exist, but, as Pope Francis observed in the meeting with mother superiors where he agreed to have a commission study the question of women deacons, their main duty involved nude baptism (which was then the norm): They spared priests the awkward task of anointing women prior to immersion. For that work, as well as charitable outreach to women, they were “ordained” — but, unlike male deacons, they neither preached nor assisted at the altar. Granted, one fourth century text, written in Greek, loosely calls them kleros, or clergy. But it also distinguishes them from their male counterparts: “The deaconess does not bless, and she does not fulfill any of the things that priests and deacons do.” When both clergy and laity think the clerical office means power rather than service, the answer is not to upend the sacramental system by ordaining women. With nude baptism (mercifully) out of fashion, female-ordination advocates today push for women to do the very “things that priests and deacons do.” Priesthood, however, is off the table: John Paul II pronounced definitively that, given Jesus’s practice in freely choosing only male apostles, as well as the church’s constant teaching and practice, “the church has no authority whatsoever” to ordain female priests. So they argue instead for women deacons, as did the questioner at the meeting of mother superiors who complained to Francis that women are “excluded” from preaching at Mass. Francis responded with a tale of “two temptations:” “feminism,” which prescinds from women’s true dignity as members of the baptized, and “clericalism.” Between them, he said, clericalism poses the greatest danger. It reduces the clergy/laity distinction to a power relationship and so “obstructs the correct development” of the laity’s gifts. His words recall his earlier comment on the question of women cardinals: “Women in the Church must be valued, not ‘clericalized.’” As a woman, I believe with Francis that, when both clergy and laity think the clerical office means power rather than service, the answer is not to upend the sacramental system by ordaining women. The answer is rather to dissociate Holy Orders from unholy ambition — something that requires a change not of doctrine but of hearts.

Allowing Female Deacons Has Nothing to Do With Clericalism Dawn argues that making women deacons is an attempt to “clericalize” women. Clericalism is a charged word in the Catholic Church. It is an unhealthy attitude of profound deference toward the clergy. It misconstrues an unjust power dynamic between the clergy and laity, where priests and other clerics can lord over the people of God. I agree with Dawn: Clericalism is a total affront to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Where Dawn goes wrong is when she suggests that women who want to become deacons suffer from such clericalism. I find no widespread evidence that women want to join the diaconate as part of some power grab. This isn’t, as Dawn suggests, “unholy ambition.” This isn’t about grabbing a mantle of power. It’s about allowing women to more effectively serve God’s holy and faithful people. Listen to the reasons why the nun addressing Pope Francis on this issue suggests that women should be included in the diaconate: Like deacons, she argues, consecrated women "already work very much with the poor and the marginalized, they teach catechesis, accompany the sick and the dying, distribute communion, and in many countries lead the common prayers in the absence of priests, and in those circumstances deliver the homily.” This isn’t about clericalism. This isn’t about grabbing a mantle of power. This isn’t about “unholy ambition.” It’s about allowing women to more effectively serve God’s holy and faithful people. It’s about allowing those same people of God to experience in a consistent way the wise and fruitful pastoral experience of more than half the members of our apostolic faith. Dawn is correct that Pope John Paul II said that ordination to the priesthood has “from the beginning always been reserved to men alone.” But notice that John Paul II didn’t say the same about women in the diaconate. The question of ordaining women to the priesthood and including them in the diaconate is all together different-in-kind. The question before us is about diaconate alone. To deny women entry into the diaconate because of this slippery slope fallacy is unwarranted. The history of women deacons is complex, but in this complexity, the commission will find that women had institutionalized leadership in the early church in ways that are somewhat unimaginable today.



The church is always, as St. Augustine reminds us, in the process of reform. Shortly after experiencing the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, Peter declared, “in truth, I see that God shows no partiality.” Two millennia later, the church that Jesus entrusted to Peter is beginning to see anew that same reality.