Posted on 04/08/2020 6:46:36 AM PDT by ebb tide
VATICAN CITY, April 8, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) ― Pope Francis has reopened the investigation into the possibility of women’s ordination as deacons.
This morning the Vatican released a memo stating that the pontiff had decided “during a recent audience granted to His Eminence Cardinal Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [CDF]” to appoint a new commission on the “study of the female diaconate.”
Francis appointed Cardinal Giuseppe Petrocchi, the Archbishop of L’Aquila, as the new commission’s head and Fr. Denis Dupont-Fauville of the CDF to be its secretary.
The ten other people officially named to the women’s diaconate commission are American Dr. Catherine Brown Tkacz, who received a PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Notre Dame; Deacon Dominic Cerrato, a theologian in Steubenville, USA; Fr. Santiago del Cura Elena, a theologian from Spain; Dr. Caroline Farey, a British Catholic theologian; Dr. Barbara Hallensleben, a German theologian who teaches in Freiburg, Switzerland; Fr. Manfred Hauke, a German theologian in Lugano Switzerland; Deacon James Keating of Creighton University, Omaha; Fr. Angelo Lameri, an Italian professor of Liturgy; Dr. Rosalba Manes, an Italian consecrated virgin and biblical scholar; and Dr. Anne-Marie Pelletier, a biblical scholar from Paris.
According to Joshua J. McElwee of the National Catholic Reporter, none of these people were in the previous commission asked to study the woman deacon question.
“Francis had promised at the end of the October 2019 Synod of Bishops on the Amazon region that he would be instituting a new commission on the issue, but the April 8 announcement had not been rumored and was unexpected,” he wrote.
In March 2019 German theologian Professor Peter Hünermann told LifeSiteNews that, according to members of the German bishops' doctrinal commission who spoke to him, the report of the first Vatican commission on female deacons found that “there is no historical evidence that in the patristics women were ordained as deacons.”
A January 2020 book co-authored by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Cardinal Robert Sarah – the Prefect for the Congregation of Divine Worship – ruled out the possibility of the Church creating female deacons, a matter that came up at the Amazon Synod that concluded in October.
The “possibility of women being ordained as priests or deacons,” Sarah stated in From the Depths of Our Hearts, “was settled definitively by Saint John Paul II in the Apostolic Letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis dated May 22, 1994.”
“The Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women, and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful,” state the authors, quoting John Paul II.
Developing…
Ping
I wonder if Jesus would have a problem with a woman being a pastor and teaching the Word? I can’t remember him saying differently.
How many of Jesus’s apostles were women?
Never let a crisis go to waste...
It’s not surprising that Francis would bring this up again on Spy Wednesday.
Please, no agnostic progressive priestesses. Next on the horizon is horny lesbians lusting after little girls.
Which, of course, is why all the apostles that He choose were men. All the attempts to disregard our Lord's actions as normative are just rationalizations for doing our will rather than His.
Perhaps the Pope should read his bible for a change.
“But a female Deacon? Why not?”
___________________________________
Because many progressive women will resent being ‘good enough’ to be a female Deacon and not a Priestess.
The same as little Alter Girls are unhappy they cannot/could not go further...
Yeah, that rogue Paul dude, what does he know about it anyway? /s
If by "pastor" you mean something like "parish administrator", then the Catholic Church already has, in some cases, female administrators (e.g. members of administrative teams in priestless parishes). This is not, however, the same as a deacon.
If by "teacher of the Word," you mean somebody who helps guide the Church according to Christ's truth, then the Catholic Church already has female teachers, from the greatest (Doctors of the Church like St.Teresa of Avila) to the lowliest (catechists --- like me!)
Look, Mary was the unique childhood teacher of Jesus Christ! They were a home-schooling family there in Nazareth!
But that's not the same as a deacon.
Big mistake. He will get mostly lesbians clamoring to be ordained as priests.
The pope-a-dope should find another line of work.
But "job description" is not the thing that distinguishes a deacon. It's not exactly what you "do" but what you "be" ("are").
For example: a deacon could "do" anything --- he could practice medicine as a MD, conduct tours and pilgrimages, be in charge of investment and finance-- and still be a deacon.
Yet a woman could be the Diocesan Chancellor --- basically, the top administrative officer in the Diocese--- and still not be a deacon.
It's because being a deacon is not, per se, a job. It's a participation, to a degree, in the priesthood of Christ, and that involves something you sacramentally "be". Like everything sacramental, it is an outward bodily sign.
A woman can "do" almost anything, but cannot "be" an embodied sign of Christ as Christ the Son, as Christ the "Beatus Vir", as Christ the Bridegroom. I think that's the underlying theology.
I'm pointing toward the sacramental significance of embodiment. Not job, not work, but embodiment. In the priesthood (and the diaconate is a level of the priesthood) embodiment counts: thus the body (as male) counts. E.g. a "transman" could not be an ordained deacon, because a transman is not a true male.
It's the distinction between what you do (job) and what you signify (sacrament).
I trust I have made this sufficiently obscure?
You did a great job. Can I quote this comment in my Blog? I would attribute it to your Freep name or keep it anonymous.
But it’s a great explanation.
You my certainly quote it and attribute it any way you wish. I’m glad it was helful. It’s a hard one.
Thank you so much.
Pope Francis is trying very hard to break Catholic tradition in every way he can think of. I cannot wait until he is gone.
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