Women as deacons

Female parishioner hopes to break ground

An Illinois woman hopes the Vatican changes its policy on male-only deacons

By Manya Brachear

Chicago Tribune

Appeared in print: Saturday, Aug. 25, 2012, page D4

CHICAGO — Lynne Mapes-Riordan of Evanston, Ill., hopes women will one day serve as Roman Catholic deacons. After 800 years, she could be one of the first.

Growing up, she never gave ordination a second thought. But then she learned that, unlike the church’s verdict barring women priests, the question of women deacons has never been resolved.

That open question has led Mapes-Riordan, 49, and her fellow parishioners at St. Nicholas Catholic Church in Evanston to seek an answer. If the church finds in favor of female deacons, she could become one of the first women ordained since the 12th century. After meeting last winter with members of the parish, including Mapes-Riordan, Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George reportedly promised to raise the question in Rome during his visit earlier this year.

Scholars say women deacons wouldn’t be a novel or new idea, but the restoration of a tradition abandoned centuries ago.

The idea of female deacons “is being talked about very slowly,” George said earlier this year during a forum at the Union League Club in response to a question about the future likelihood of women priests. “The diaconate is a more open question. At this place, at this time, it is not a possibility.”

Mapes-Riordan, a lawyer, wife, mother of two and longtime parishioner at St. Nicholas, does not take a position on whether women should become priests. The church has made it clear that’s not permitted. Ordaining women as deacons is not the same, she said.

“In a strange way, I don’t see this being about women,” Mapes-Riordan said during a recent interview inside St. Nicholas. “I see it as being about church and mission. We have this part of a puzzle, this piece, that I’m not going to say is missing, but we could have a fuller picture if this (letting women become deacons) was added. I don’t see it as a women’s issue. I see it as a matter for our church.”

“Message of hope”

At a time when critics have accused Catholic church leaders of declaring a war on women by restricting insurance coverage for contraceptives, rebuking American nuns and maintaining an all-male priesthood, a renewed discussion about ordaining women as deacons indicates high-profile church leaders such as George want to give women more opportunities for church leadership.

“It’s a message of hope. It’s a way to stay within the boundaries of Catholic teachings and have women with real preaching authority within the system,” said Phyllis Zagano, one of the American church’s leading researchers on the subject of women deacons. “I think the bishops need to address this issue directly.”

In the Catholic Church, there are three levels of ordained clergy: bishops, priests and deacons. Deacons can’t say mass, hear confessions or anoint the sick, but they can baptize, officiate at weddings or funerals and preach.

A handful of scholars, including Zagano, argue that the diaconate of the early church included both men and women. In fact, they say the Apostle Paul tapped a woman deacon, Phoebe, to deliver his most important epistle to the Romans, explaining the concept of salvation through Jesus Christ.

Historians say in an attempt to accommodate societal norms, the church ceased giving women public leadership roles. The permanent diaconate vanished until the Second Vatican Council asked Pope Paul VI to reinstate it in the 1960s. Even then, the pope asked what role women should play, but the question reportedly never got a public answer.

In 2002, the International Theological Commission of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a report that didn’t rule out the possibility of women deacons. Seven years later, Pope Benedict XVI issued an apostolic letter that distinguished between the role of bishops and priests and the purpose of deacons. While bishops and priests act as icons of Christ, deacons act as Christ’s servants, he wrote.

Zagano, whose archives are housed at Loyola University Chicago, believes if the church had resolved the question and invited women into the permanent diaconate, there would be less upheaval about women priests.

“It’s clear that women were ordained sacramentally as deacons and could be so ordained again,” Zagano said. “Because the church is not moving, a lot of people are moving beyond it.”

But Sister Sara Butler, a professor of systematic theology at University of St. Mary of the Lake Mundelein Seminary, does not believe there is sufficient historical or theological evidence to support adding women to the permanent diaconate. One of the first two women named to the International Theological Commission in 2004, Butler said the church is still trying to sort out just what it means to be ordained a deacon.

“I don’t think it’s because they don’t want women,” she said. “The theology of the diaconate needs to be thoroughly refined. A woman should not be prepared for this or encouraged to prepare themselves. This has been explicitly discouraged repeatedly.”

“Women want to have the right to exercise jurisdiction and make decisions, and that has always been tied for centuries to ordination,” Butler continued. “People like Phyllis Zagano want to be able to preach and be judges in the canonical tribunal. They want power, to put it boldly. They don’t think men alone should exercise this kind of office. It seems clear to me the Lord himself gave it to men, used a man as a model for it and it’s a male responsibility, not some elite privilege.”

Right questions

Mapes-Riordan never dreamed of becoming a priest or deacon. She believed neither was permitted by the church. But when she discovered that the diaconate might one day be open to women after all, she began to lose sleep at night.

It was not political. It was deeply personal. As Oldershaw had always taught, she tuned into what God was asking of her and she told Tkachuk.

“I honestly said to her about what she was perceiving and experiencing: ‘If you were a man I would be handing you the application and encouraging you to fill it out to begin this journey,’ ” Tkachuk said. “She was asking all the right questions. It was coming from all the right places.”

Mapes-Riordan has served as a Eucharistic minister. She has helped prepare second-graders for First Communion and has served as a mentor for lectors training to read Scripture. When the parish underwent a redesign of its worship space, she served on that committee and has worked for several years on the parish’s liturgy board, which essentially choreographs the liturgy in the new worship space. In her kitchen on Sundays at dawn, she even bakes the bread later consecrated for communion.

As Mapes-Riordan waits for permission to discern what she perceives as a call to the diaconate, she is working on a master’s in liturgy at Catholic Theological Union.

George declined to answer specific questions from the Tribune, reiterating through his spokeswoman that the matter of women deacons was still an “open theological question” for the church. During his meeting with parishioners, George expressed reservations, suggesting some theological questions had to be resolved first.

But he also promised to include it in his report to the pope and to raise it with key leaders during his February meeting in Rome with the church’s leadership.

“He did say it’s a question of our time,” Mapes-Riordan said. “It’s a question to get answered. There’s a sense of some urgency around it.”

Tkachuk believes Cardinal George recognizes Mapes-Riordan’s authenticity.

“I think he was truly valuing that,” Tkachuk said. “This is church at its best. We’re having a conversation. And we can all trust each other in this conversation.”

 

GUEST VIEWPOINT: Church’s stance on female deacons is mystifying

By Phyllis Zagano

Published: September 20, 2012 12:00AM, Midnight, Sept. 20

Sometimes just a little push upsets a whole hive of bees. This time the swarm is over restoring the tradition of ordained women in the Roman Catholic Church.

Yes, “ordained.” Yes, “Roman Catholic Church.”

Little did anyone expect that a Chicago Tribune story about Roman Catholic women deacons (Register-Guard, Aug. 25) would set off such excitement in the neighborhood. One Lane County pastor even wrote a dense eight-page commentary for his parish bulletin, arguing that women were never ordained and deacons aren’t really necessary anyway.

The fact of the matter is that a Chicago area pastor, his parishioners and a woman candidate are in conversation with their archbishop, Cardinal Francis George, about possibilities. And George has said women deacons are an “open theological question.”

History tells us that from antiquity to about the 12th century Christian women in the West were ordained as deacons. In various Eastern Orthodox Churches, the tradition lasted much longer, even to today. Some were called “deaconesses,” but even they belonged to the roster of clergy.

What’s the problem? The main fear of naysayers is that if you can have women deacons, you can have women priests. All manner of strange objections pop up — such as a man can’t be a mother so a woman cannot be a priest. But the folks in Chicago are not talking about women priests. And deacons are not priests.

Deacons are ordained not to the priesthood but to the ministry. Their principal functions flow from the charity of the church. So they proclaim the Gospel and preach at Mass, they witness marriages and perform baptisms. Because they are clerics, they can be single judges in church law proceedings.

Several major church councils, notably Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451), actually give instructions on ordaining women deacons.

Many medieval liturgical books present the same diaconal ordination ceremony for both men and for women. A specific ceremony for women was not dropped in the Roman pontifical ritual book until the 13th century. There are medieval letters from popes to diocesan bishops affirming their right to ordain women as deacons.

So what’s all the excitement about? Why not restart the tradition?

Exactly. For several centuries, scholars have dug into earlier manuscripts and found evidence of women ordained as deacons. Since the close of the Second Vatican Council, researchers inside and outside the Vatican have studied the issue. In 1974, Cipriano Vagaggini, a member of the International Theological Commission, published a paper affirming the history of ordained women deacons. In 1992, the International Theological Commission completed an affirmative 17-page study never published until it grew to over 70 (somewhat ambivalent) pages.

That 2002 Vatican study found that 1) women deacons of history are not the same as male deacons today; 2) the ministries of priest and deacon are distinct. In summation, the commission left women as deacons up to “the ministry of discernment, which the Lord has established in his Church, to speak authoritatively on this question.”

Soon folks were buzzing that because the commission did not rule out women deacons, then maybe the church would restart the tradition.

Then one of the older members of the commission — Father George Cottier is now 90 — said he thought the study tended to exclude them. But that’s the opinion of one commission member about one study document 10 years ago.

Bottom line: The opinion of the International Theological Commission is not an authoritative ruling, and there has been a lot of additional research supporting the tradition of women as deacons since the study document came out.

So will the church make a ruling? Will the church now support the early church councils that allowed women deacons? Will the church take note of the many liturgies used in the past to ordain women to the diaconate?

As a matter of fact, they really can’t say “no.” They just don’t seem to want to say “yes.”

Phyllis Zagano, a leading expert on women deacons in the Catholic Church, teaches at Hofstra University on Long Island, New York. Her books include “Women Deacons: Past, Present, Future” (with Gary Macy and William Ditewig) and “Women in Ministry: Emerging Questions about the Diaconate” (Paulist Press).