Lost Generations
After the release of a Vatican report opposing the restoration of women deacons last week, the advocacy group Discerning Deacons quickly put together two online prayer and reflection gatherings that attracted more than one hundred people. Many of the attendees were women who have felt called to the diaconate for much of their lives and have been engaging with the synod process in the hopes of seeing some positive change on the issue. They were disappointed with the latest setback.
But the gatherings quickly took on a hopeful if not optimistic tone, with leaders and participants saying they would not be deterred. Some found a sliver of positivity in the fact that the report was released only in Italian, that the Vatican News headline said it was not “definitive,” and that it called for more study. Others have already put the news behind them and vowed to move forward.
The December 4 report came from the second papal women’s deacons commission, founded in 2020 and chaired by Italian cardinal Giuseppe Petrocchi. This group had only recently received the charge of advancing the synodal discussion of women deacons, after the Vatican announced last month that the topic was no longer being considered by one of the study groups formed during the Synod on Synodality to handle controversial issues. The Petrocchi commission said that its 7-1 vote, taken in July 2022, concluded that “in light of Sacred Scripture, Tradition, and ecclesiastical teaching,” the Church cannot move to admit women to the diaconate.
Discerning Deacons believes the report “should not be read as a conclusion,” according to its statement. “Rather, it is a renewed call to listen more deeply and to take seriously the testimonies of women whose vocations have long been recognized at the local level…. We encourage future states of discernment to make more visible the voices and pastoral experiences of women who are already serving with a diaconal heart in so many communities.” In other words, they’re moving ahead with diaconal ministry, even without the title.
Others were not so positive. The Women’s Ordination Conference was “appalled by the Vatican’s refusal to open its doors to women, even a crack,” it said in a statement. “Make no mistake: this is a decision that will harm the global church.” Phyllis Zagano, who served on Pope Francis’s first women-deacons commission, said the document “further damages the world’s picture of the Catholic Church, already tarnished by pederasty scandals and reports of financial mismanagement.” She also said it reeks of clericalism and called it an “ecumenical misstep” (because the Orthodox Church has women deacons).
Those who don’t closely follow internal Church affairs perhaps didn’t pay much attention to a news story that effectively said, “The Catholic Church is still sexist.” A high schooler I queried said as much. “Doesn’t the Church already say women can’t do all that?” she asked. Women who have already made the choice to separate themselves from the institutional Church must have felt confirmed in their decisions upon reading this latest missive that bent over backwards to reiterate that while women can live lives of holiness, they can’t image Christ. Those advocating for priestly ordination for women likely see that goal receding still further.
But for women tenuously holding onto hope that male leaders in the Church will someday, maybe in their lifetimes, acknowledge women’s full humanity and share power with them, this news may feel like the Church is practically escorting them to the door. Younger women are already exiting institutional religion—and the Catholic Church specifically—in droves, many of them citing lack of inclusivity as a motivating factor.
Gen Z women, age twenty-eight and younger, have been described as the most progressive group in the country, especially on gender issues. Since 2007, women have outpaced men in disaffiliating with religion, becoming part of the so-called “nones,” according to a just-released study from the Pew Research Center. This steep decline in women’s religiosity has led to a narrowing of the so-called gender gap, with women and men now roughly equal in their rates of religious belief and practice.
Overall, only about half of young Americans identify with a religion, according to the Pew study. This also refutes the narrative of a revival of affiliation and practice among more traditional religions, including Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism. Instead, the data show that both faiths lose far more people than they gain. Among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, only one percent have converted to Catholicism, while 13 percent have left the Church after having been raised in it—with little variation by gender.
For many years, growth among the Latino population in the United States had counteracted the declines caused by disaffiliation, although that growth may be slowing. The slight leveling of overall religious disaffiliation in the United States, shown in the Pew study, is likely only “the calm before the storm,” Ryan Burge of the Jan C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis told Religion News Service.
Today’s younger women are not the first generation to struggle with their relationship to the Church. But there’s no denying that things have gotten more urgent as entire generations of women (and men) are losing their religion. Church leaders talk a lot about evangelization but ignore the most obvious way to bring people in. It isn’t the Christian message that is lacking, nor is there a shortage of women who, like Mary of Magdala and St. Phoebe the Deacon in scripture, are ready to bring that message to a weary world. But the Church’s consistent exclusion of women—especially with misogynistic pronouncements that paint women as the “other”—makes it harder and harder for them to stay in an institution that ignores the radical inclusion practiced and preached by Jesus himself.
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