Women Deacons; not so fast but...

Ordain women as deacons now! Why not?

Friday, October 28, 2011

By Bryan Cones

 

U.S. Catholic spent the last two days interviewing three scholars on the topic of women deacons at the book launch of Women Deacons: Past, Present, and Future (Paulist, 2011) at Loyola University's Gannon Center for Women in Leadership. The interviews with Gary Macy (on the history of women office holders in the medieval church), William Ditewig (on the restoration of the permanent diaconate at Vatican II), and Phyllis Zagano ("the" expert on the topic of restoring women to the diaconate) will appear in later issues of U.S. Catholic (Zagano in our Jan 2012 Women's Issue). But our mini-seminar leaves me convinced that there is not a single good reason for not ordaining women as deacons--and a lot of reasons to do it.

1. History: The church in the West ordained women as deacons, with ordination rituals that included the laying on of hands and the conferral of a stole, for 700 years, and the East for much longer. Those women clearly read the gospel, preached, and ministered to women. What the church has done, it can do again.
2. Vatican II restored the permanent diaconate as an order of ministry distinct from priesthood, recognizing it as a unique vocation to the gospel, to the liturgy, and to charity as an icon of Christ the servant (as opposed to Christ the head of the church). There is no "slippery slope" from women's diaconate to women as priests because being a deacon is no longer understood as a "lower step" on the ladder of holy orders.
3. The official teaching against the ordination of women as priests--that the church does not have the authority to ordain women because Christ chose only men for the close circle of the Twelve--does not apply because the church itself (in Acts) chose the seven to serve as deacons (though a bit of an anachronism). Nevertheless, the diaconate as an office in the church is not of dominical institution (Jesus didn't found it, so the argument goes), so the teaching about women priests does not apply.
4. Finally, there is a need for women among the Roman Catholic clergy (deacons are clergy after all), to preach, exercise canonical authority, and serve in those places where the official public ministry of women as deacons is especially needed--women in prison, women in situations of domestic violence, women who are ill or infirm. That's why the ancient church ordained women as deacons.
But even more, the whole church, men and women, lay and ordained, would benefit from the preaching, liturgical service, and pastoral care of women who minister in the name of the bishop, as priests and deacons do now.
Why not? And why not now? 

 

>>>This is just an opinion piece for the publication U.S. Catholic.  It is an opinion I do not share.  However, the impetus for this type of opinion piece comes, in part, from the recent book release about women deacons, written in part by uber Deacon William Dietwig.  I offer the above for your review and below, an article on the actual book:

 

“This is a book that will get people thinking — and talking”

October 25, 2011 by Deacon Greg Kandra

If you find yourself in Chicago Thursday, you might want to wander over to the Simpson Living Learning Center (1032 West Sheridan Road) at 4 p.m. for what promises to be a lively presentation and discussion on the topic of women deacons.
It’s to mark the official publication of the long-aborning book “Women Deacons: Past, Present and Future,” written by my good friend and brother deacon William Ditewig with Gary Macy and Phyllis Zagano.
The discussion (including Q&A) will be moderated by Dr. Susan Ross, who wrote the forward to the book and who chairs the Theology Department at Loyola University.
As Dr. Ross notes in her forward:

Gary Macy, William Ditewig and Phyllis Zagano have performed an invaluable service in writing Women Deacons: Past, Present and Future.  To the question of whether there is historical precedent for women being ordained to the diaconate, Gary Macy offers ample evidence for women’s official and clerical ministry in the Church.  He also shows how this practice was first discouraged and then ended.  What “ordination” means has actually changed over time, Macy shows, and the distinctive developments in the late medieval Church that excluded women once and for all from ordained diaconal ministry are revealed for their misogyny.  William Ditewig, himself an ordained deacon, examines the present state of the issue.  He works through the documents of and following Vatican II, showing how the question of women’s diaconal ministry has arisen over and over and why it is time for this issue to be resolved.  Lastly, Phyllis Zagano, already an authority on the issue of women and the diaconate, looks toward the future, showing the benefits and possibilities that the ordination of women to the diaconate would bring to the Church.

I read a draft of the manuscript some months back, and what I wrote in response (and what appears on the back cover) still holds:

This is a book that will get people thinking — and talking.  After all the debate about ordaining women as Catholic priests, here at last is a timely and trenchant analysis of something even the pope hasn’t dismissed: ordaining women as deacons.  Forget everything you know, or think you know, about this hot-button issue.  Women Deacons breaks ground, shatters misperceptions and adds immeasurably to the ongoing discussion about women in the Church.

Drop by the Simpson Living-Learning Center for more on this — or check out the Amazon link to order the book, read it and draw your own conclusions.