BY FATHER KENNETH DOYLE
QUESTION CORNER
Q. Our current priest always looks exhausted. He is attempting to pastor three parishes that were merged into one. Our parish has no deacons. With the shortage of priests and deacons, will the church ever allow women to become deacons? (southern Indiana)
A. This same issue, in fact, is currently being studied by the church. In April 2020, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis had created a new commission to study the question of a female diaconate in the Catholic Church. This followed the suggestion by the 2019 Synod of Bishops on the Amazon, which had recommended that women be considered for certain ministries in the church, including the permanent diaconate.
An earlier study on the same topic had been commissioned by Pope Francis in August 2013, soon after his election as pontiff. At a 2016 meeting with the women's International Union of Superiors General, Pope Francis told the sisters that his understanding at that point was that women described as deaconesses in the New Testament were not ordained, as permanent deacons are, but were commissioned to assist with baptism by immersion of other women.
In 2019, aboard a papal flight with journalists, Pope Francis told reporters that the first commission he had appointed to study the topic had not reached a unanimous conclusion. "What is fundamental is that there was no certainty that there was an ordination with the same form and the same aim as the ordination of men," the pope told reporters on that May 7, 2019, flight from Macedonia to Rome.
In 2002, the same topic had been studied by the International Theological Commission, an advisory body to the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which had cast some doubt as to whether female deacons in the early church had a liturgical or sacramental function.
So the creation in 2020 of this new commission has given new hope to some that the ordination of women deacons could someday happen.
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Questions may be sent to Father Kenneth Doyle at [email protected] and 30 Columbia Circle Dr., Albany, New York 12203.