Members of Francis’ Women Deacons Commission Express Diverse Views

La Stampa-Vatican Insider ^ | 10/8/16 | Joshua J. McElwee

[marshmallow]

Some have written extensively on the subject in the past

The members of Pope Francis’ new commission to study whether women might serve as deacons in the Catholic church have expressed a wide range of views on the subject in the past, with some clearly supportive of the possibility while others say there is no firm historical precedent to follow.

Very few members of the commission -- comprising six men and six women and led by Vatican Archbishop Luis Ladaria -- have made public comments since their appointments were announced in a brief press release Aug. 2.

But as many of the appointed experts are theologians or other kinds of academics, some -- like member and NCR contributor Phyllis Zagano of Hofstra University -- have written extensively on the subject in the past.

Jesuit Fr. Bernard Pottier, a commission member and theologian at the Institut d’Études Théologiques in Brussels, co-authored a book on the diaconate in 1998 with Fr. Alphonse Borras, a priest of the Belgian diocese of Liege who is a theologian at the Catholic University of Louvain.

The book, La grâce du diaconat, Questions actuelles autour du diaconat latin (”The grace of the diaconate: Current questions around the Latin diaconate”), is now out of print.

But a summary of its contents that contains some quotations from its pages was published in a 2001 volume of the French journal Recherches de Science Religieuse (”Religious Science Research”) and is available online.

The summary indicates that the authors argued that historical evidence of women serving as deacons in the early church pointed to those women receiving ordination to the diaconate in a similar way as their male counterparts.

The summary states that the book’s authors cite a 1972 work by another French author -- The ministry of women in the early church.....

[ebb tide]

It’s becoming more and more obvious that Francis has stacked the deck of his commission to rule as Francis and his “Nuns on the Bus” desire.

[marshmallow]

There was no need for this commission. There was no pressing emergency which demanded it. Its very existence speaks volumes and is a very bad sign, even before one looks closely at the pedigree of its members.