Women’s Diaconate: The Issue at the Synod

Will the question of the female diaconate end in an equivocal response from the Vatican? 

The thorny issue of the women's diaconate seems first to have been shelved by Pope Francis himself, who withdrew it from the synodal agenda in February 2024. This was without counting the women's lobbies represented by the 58 women present at the autumn session of the 16th Ordinary Assembly of the Roman Synod.

Women—religious or lay—who, as Jean-Marie Guénois noted in Le Figaro on October 25, “ended up forcing the Vatican, which intended to control this sensitive subject, to come and render an account before the synod assembly on Thursday evening, in an unexpected and unprecedented manner.”

The crisis came to a head on October 18, 2024, during a meeting between some 100 Synod members and two experts within the framework of reflection circles on the role and place of women in the Church.

According to the media, which reported extensively on the event, the meeting was tense, all the more so because the Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) was conspicuous by his absence: a decision termed “scandalous” and “disappointing” by several participants.

The Synod's communicators immediately took matters into their own hands, and a few days later Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández came to address the Synod assembly for an hour and a half on the role of women in the Church. And to avoid any further controversy, the Vatican decided to make the recording of the meeting public.

The “patron of the Faith”—controversial for his progressive stances—distinguished the issue of ordination to the diaconate from that of the promotion of women, reaffirming that “clear and concrete" steps "are already being taken to give more responsibility to women in the Church, taking care to distinguish between what is inseparable from the sacrament of Orders and what is not.”

For the Argentine porporato, most women “are not asking for the diaconate, in the sense that they don't want to be aggregated to the clergy,” but they would aspire, according to him, to “exercise more authority and develop their charisms and abilities.”

If the female diaconate is an issue that is “not yet ripe” for Cardinal Fernández, he affirms that his services are working “to be able to entrust the laity—and, consequently, women—with functions of authority in the Church.”

As reported by FSSPX.News, 30% of voters said “no” to Article 60 on the place of women in the Church, a sign of progressive dissatisfaction with a document deemed too timid. In the more conservative ranks, however, people were astounded to find that a question already decided under the seal of infallibility was deemed not yet “ripe” by the current Prefect of the DDF.

But could the Holy See do better than this shaky response, when the dilution of the teaching authority of faith and morals has characterized the synodal approach put into place several years ago? We are almost relieved that the final text of the synod avoided the worst.

It is a small consolation that should not obscure the fact that this session did, after all, outline a shift, under the control of the bishops, toward a greater supervision of the laity. The session also contemplated a change in the relationship between the Holy See and the local Churches that could “eventually upset the current balance of the Catholic Church, which is highly centralized in the Holy See, where many things are decided,” as noted by the head of Le Figaro's religion section.