"It’s therefore unclear whether they are also talking about sacramental ordination, or the creation of a new lay ministry, or the restitution of the early Church ministry of deaconesses in some form."
Not every proposal for women deacons involves the Sacrament of Holy Orders. And while the Church may be protected from teaching error about her Sacraments, she may still make imprudent decisions surrounding them. Like here. Even if creating (or restoring) a lay ministry for "women deacons" is technically within the bounds of orthodoxy, I believe that it would be more likely to confuse the faithful than help them. Even if lay women deacons were present in the early Church, we cannot ignore that the Church since then has identified deacons only in terms of sacramental ordination, or that she has often conferred the diaconate with the expectation of a future ordination to the priesthood. In light of that history, allowing for women deacons today - in any form - seems like it would lead many to believe that these women are actually being ordained (or that the Church may allow them to be ordained in the future).
And why don’t our bishops and the faithful stick our heads up and see the uproar and disagreement now emerging out of the Eastern Orthodox deaconess recently ordained in Africa . Let’s take a look around and see what we can learn and what could impact ultimate reunion
How do you manage to be both this historically illiterate and unaware of all the Protestants who did this bleeding out? There was a certain phrase between the Wayne’s World guys and Madonna that comes to mind.
Let’s have an instituted ministry (non clerical) for women specifically that we kind of “brand” as “the diaconate for women.”
But, to avoid confusion with Holy Orders, rather than calling them “deaconesses,” we can simply refer back to the original Greek to inspire a new term that distinguishes them.
The word “deacon” really just comes from the Greek word for “servant,” so we can just refer to them as “servants” in English.
However, since it’s a specifically female oriented ministry, we should use a properly gendered term for a female servant. An adequate synonym for “female servant” could be “handmaiden.”
This “ministry of handmaidens” will need appropriate vestments to distinguish themselves from male clerics in the performance of their duties. Since the people asking for it are clamoring for a return to the allegedly “ancient tradition” of female deacons, we could make reference to traditional garments worn by women historically.
White head coverings, perhaps some kind of bonnet to distinguish them from nuns’ veils or from mantillas, could be used. Long, ankle length robes could be worn, in an appropriately liturgical color. Red would be a nice color, to recall the passion, and to put them on equal footing with the cardinals.
Once the ministry of handmaidens is established, and the Vatican has unveiled the white bonnet with red cloaks liturgical vestments, we could open it up to the women who have felt so “excluded” from the life of the Church and see how many of them sign up.
The kind of people who want a “female diaconate” aren’t concerned with the sacramental life of the church, they’re only concerned with the optics of “not having female clergy.” Let’s just call their bluff and make the optics of introducing something for them so unpalatable to them as to extinguish it altogether.
You are trying to make "lust for power" less appealing by countering it with "vanity", and sometimes pitting one vice against another does actually work to free a person from a temptation (at least temporarily), but I am confident that if the position came with apparent power, the lust for power would win. There are already people with a lust for power who cosplay Handmaid's Tale when they are protesting the Catholic Church's opposition to abortion, and nothing about the cognitive dissonance troubles them at all (maybe they did not actually read the book.)
Deacons, who were left out of the synod on synodality entirely, can affirm that deacons do not actually have power (by this time I have used the word "power" enough to flash back to a Star Wars scene "UNLIMITED POWER!"). But we also know that deacon is considered a stepping stone on the way to priest, and for good reason: as soon as you are ordained a deacon, you become a player character such that all you have to do is acquire enough experience points in dungeon-crawling campaigns, and you will simply level up and gain new abilities, as I am given to understand from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons; if it is possible to become a priest there is nothing to stop you from also becoming, e.g., a Thuc-line bishop and then an antipope, ... not necessarily in that order, as a footnote in the handbook would doubtless clarify.
How about 'Doula'? It's already on its way back in to common parlance, and as some have pointed out it is the actual Greek word used to refer to the Virgin Mary in Luke's Infancy Narratives.
Also, snarky Handmaid's Tale reference aside... I think that is unfair to some of the quieter and more serious thinkers on women in the Church.
The most frustrating thing about the whole 'women deacons/clergy' debate is that 1) the completely miss the real power women DO currently hold within Church. and 2) It completely smothers any potential for the Holy Spirit to creatively call forth the gifts of women to serve the Body of Christ anew in this age because of a fixation on dress and office.
As my mother has said repeatedly to women who complain about 'being held back by the clergy': "who said you needed Father's permission to go and start a ministry or attend to a need? If it's of God, it will go somewhere, if its not, maybe you're the problem."
This should be a kind of non-question. Even if the great majority of Catholics living today around the world thought women deacons would be a great idea, that wouldn't matter, because the Church Universal is not simply "the Church of What's Happening Now." It includes the Church throughout time as well as space, going all the way back to the apostles. And despite the rather scanty evidence that in the early centuries of the Church women sometimes assisted at baptisms (of other women in times when full immersion was the norm), for reasons of modesty and were referred to by a term that today might be translated "deacons" or "deaconesses," there is NO UNBROKEN TRADITION of women in any kind of holy orders, and it certainly was not mandated by either Our Lord or His apostles. That's all we need to know: hasn't ever been done, so shouldn't ever be done.
My main takeaway from the quoted portions of bishops’ responses seems to be a theme of “if we accept that the world says we are deficient because that is the actual truth instead of Truth being truth and we do what the world wants us to do, the world will suddenly accept Truth from us.” Hey guys, pitifully lowly unordained woman supposedly without possible hope of fulfillment here, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work that way.
I can tell you… that Australian Report greatly exaggerates the support of women deacons. Hiding behind the eastern churches… pathetic. There has been robust push back on a whole lot of noisy and public advocates who spat the dummy at the plenary council. They are not normative and I’d challenge their data that says so (if there is any).
It's all a matter of whether the hierarchs and the other assorted bureaucrats decide that the Church needs to adjust its dogma to groupthink. We seem to be moving that way. If they have their way, Catholicism will have another Great Reformation. Ratzinger saw that coming, no?
I have always had a problem with deacons, or more precisely, with deacons' vestments. When I first saw deacons "in action" I thought they were priests, and if I go to a church I am not familiar with, I am never sure if there are two priests co-celebrating or not (OK, now I am clearer on what a deacon does, so I can eventually spot the difference).
However, my point is that to have a deaconess during mass to most people (often including myself) would be like having a priestess.
You do not change the Traditions and precepts of our Catholic church based on the earthly opinions of the laity. This is not how the church foundation was laid in the ACTS of the apostles. Apostolic tradition is the cornerstone of our faith . Our traditions and precepts make us ONE HOLY AND APOSTOLIC CHURCH. Jesus did not come to satisfy human opinions, HE came to lead us to the Truth guided by the HOLY Spirit and dictated to the will of God the Father. God made Mary a handmaid of the LORD. She was submissive to GOD"s will. Women have a special place in the church but not on the altar. Women today do not want to be submissive to anyone or any entity. This is the sin of pride. Submission to God's will is our faith. Submission to pride started with EVE in the garden of Eden. IF you replace Catholic tradition with public opinion , you no longer have a faith founded by Jesus and passed down to the men or apostles. This is a dangerous precedent that will lead to the spiritual death of many Catholics and destruction of the pillars of our Catholic Faith.
This certainly seems to be what the synod was always about. The Blessed Virgin Mary is the most celebrated human being in history and the respect for the "feminine" and "motherhood" is arguably the foundation of a distinct "western civilization." Mary is the foundation of the "culture of life" -- a phrase you used to hear about but not so much anymore. Karl Stern in the Flight from Woman talks about how western civilization got out of balance when it began to reject the feminine that is grounded upon the recognition of the importance of human values (like family and motherhood) over financial and worldly status. Similarly, Bishop Fulton Sheen reportedly said the real opposite of a materialist Marxism is not capitalism but motherhood -- the culture of life. Stern notes that focus on the masculine "organization" of the Church (and its status) as opposed to the spiritual "organism" is best seen as a rejection of the feminine. Folks like Stern and Chesterton observed that feminism is the rejection of the feminine in culture which is grounded upon the example of the Virgin Mary. The worldwide collapse of the birthrate coinciding with the ascendancy of feminism seems to bear this out. The current prioritization of the "status" of Church organizational positions and hierarchy in the synod is the rejection of the feminine and would be consistent with the rise of feminism. The schism in the United Methodist Church would appear to be along the same fault line. Stern noted that the historic position is you need both masculine and feminine for a healthy culture. Is there anyone in the Church willing to stand for the Marian culture?
WHO CARES WHO SUPPORTS IT. If every Catholic on earth supported it, the Sacrament of Holy Orders still CANNOT change.
"It’s therefore unclear whether they are also talking about sacramental ordination, or the creation of a new lay ministry, or the restitution of the early Church ministry of deaconesses in some form."
Not every proposal for women deacons involves the Sacrament of Holy Orders. And while the Church may be protected from teaching error about her Sacraments, she may still make imprudent decisions surrounding them. Like here. Even if creating (or restoring) a lay ministry for "women deacons" is technically within the bounds of orthodoxy, I believe that it would be more likely to confuse the faithful than help them. Even if lay women deacons were present in the early Church, we cannot ignore that the Church since then has identified deacons only in terms of sacramental ordination, or that she has often conferred the diaconate with the expectation of a future ordination to the priesthood. In light of that history, allowing for women deacons today - in any form - seems like it would lead many to believe that these women are actually being ordained (or that the Church may allow them to be ordained in the future).
And given that people are no longer baptized in the nude, the reason the early Church needed deaconesses no longer exists.
It's good to know who supports it, if only so a future pope would know where to concentrate his catechetical energies...
And why don’t our bishops and the faithful stick our heads up and see the uproar and disagreement now emerging out of the Eastern Orthodox deaconess recently ordained in Africa . Let’s take a look around and see what we can learn and what could impact ultimate reunion
How do you manage to be both this historically illiterate and unaware of all the Protestants who did this bleeding out? There was a certain phrase between the Wayne’s World guys and Madonna that comes to mind.
I have an idea—
Let’s have an instituted ministry (non clerical) for women specifically that we kind of “brand” as “the diaconate for women.”
But, to avoid confusion with Holy Orders, rather than calling them “deaconesses,” we can simply refer back to the original Greek to inspire a new term that distinguishes them.
The word “deacon” really just comes from the Greek word for “servant,” so we can just refer to them as “servants” in English.
However, since it’s a specifically female oriented ministry, we should use a properly gendered term for a female servant. An adequate synonym for “female servant” could be “handmaiden.”
This “ministry of handmaidens” will need appropriate vestments to distinguish themselves from male clerics in the performance of their duties. Since the people asking for it are clamoring for a return to the allegedly “ancient tradition” of female deacons, we could make reference to traditional garments worn by women historically.
White head coverings, perhaps some kind of bonnet to distinguish them from nuns’ veils or from mantillas, could be used. Long, ankle length robes could be worn, in an appropriately liturgical color. Red would be a nice color, to recall the passion, and to put them on equal footing with the cardinals.
Once the ministry of handmaidens is established, and the Vatican has unveiled the white bonnet with red cloaks liturgical vestments, we could open it up to the women who have felt so “excluded” from the life of the Church and see how many of them sign up.
The kind of people who want a “female diaconate” aren’t concerned with the sacramental life of the church, they’re only concerned with the optics of “not having female clergy.” Let’s just call their bluff and make the optics of introducing something for them so unpalatable to them as to extinguish it altogether.
Hmmm. "Maiden" means virgin, so you won't want to restrict this servanthood to virgins; it'll be uncompassionate, ya know. How about servantess? :- D
You are trying to make "lust for power" less appealing by countering it with "vanity", and sometimes pitting one vice against another does actually work to free a person from a temptation (at least temporarily), but I am confident that if the position came with apparent power, the lust for power would win. There are already people with a lust for power who cosplay Handmaid's Tale when they are protesting the Catholic Church's opposition to abortion, and nothing about the cognitive dissonance troubles them at all (maybe they did not actually read the book.)
Deacons, who were left out of the synod on synodality entirely, can affirm that deacons do not actually have power (by this time I have used the word "power" enough to flash back to a Star Wars scene "UNLIMITED POWER!"). But we also know that deacon is considered a stepping stone on the way to priest, and for good reason: as soon as you are ordained a deacon, you become a player character such that all you have to do is acquire enough experience points in dungeon-crawling campaigns, and you will simply level up and gain new abilities, as I am given to understand from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons; if it is possible to become a priest there is nothing to stop you from also becoming, e.g., a Thuc-line bishop and then an antipope, ... not necessarily in that order, as a footnote in the handbook would doubtless clarify.
How about 'Doula'? It's already on its way back in to common parlance, and as some have pointed out it is the actual Greek word used to refer to the Virgin Mary in Luke's Infancy Narratives.
Also, snarky Handmaid's Tale reference aside... I think that is unfair to some of the quieter and more serious thinkers on women in the Church.
The most frustrating thing about the whole 'women deacons/clergy' debate is that 1) the completely miss the real power women DO currently hold within Church. and 2) It completely smothers any potential for the Holy Spirit to creatively call forth the gifts of women to serve the Body of Christ anew in this age because of a fixation on dress and office.
As my mother has said repeatedly to women who complain about 'being held back by the clergy': "who said you needed Father's permission to go and start a ministry or attend to a need? If it's of God, it will go somewhere, if its not, maybe you're the problem."
This should be a kind of non-question. Even if the great majority of Catholics living today around the world thought women deacons would be a great idea, that wouldn't matter, because the Church Universal is not simply "the Church of What's Happening Now." It includes the Church throughout time as well as space, going all the way back to the apostles. And despite the rather scanty evidence that in the early centuries of the Church women sometimes assisted at baptisms (of other women in times when full immersion was the norm), for reasons of modesty and were referred to by a term that today might be translated "deacons" or "deaconesses," there is NO UNBROKEN TRADITION of women in any kind of holy orders, and it certainly was not mandated by either Our Lord or His apostles. That's all we need to know: hasn't ever been done, so shouldn't ever be done.
My main takeaway from the quoted portions of bishops’ responses seems to be a theme of “if we accept that the world says we are deficient because that is the actual truth instead of Truth being truth and we do what the world wants us to do, the world will suddenly accept Truth from us.” Hey guys, pitifully lowly unordained woman supposedly without possible hope of fulfillment here, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work that way.
I can tell you… that Australian Report greatly exaggerates the support of women deacons. Hiding behind the eastern churches… pathetic. There has been robust push back on a whole lot of noisy and public advocates who spat the dummy at the plenary council. They are not normative and I’d challenge their data that says so (if there is any).
A great data point would be to see which of these conferences and dioceses even have permanent deacons? I bet some of them don’t.
It's all a matter of whether the hierarchs and the other assorted bureaucrats decide that the Church needs to adjust its dogma to groupthink. We seem to be moving that way. If they have their way, Catholicism will have another Great Reformation. Ratzinger saw that coming, no?
I have always had a problem with deacons, or more precisely, with deacons' vestments. When I first saw deacons "in action" I thought they were priests, and if I go to a church I am not familiar with, I am never sure if there are two priests co-celebrating or not (OK, now I am clearer on what a deacon does, so I can eventually spot the difference).
However, my point is that to have a deaconess during mass to most people (often including myself) would be like having a priestess.
You do not change the Traditions and precepts of our Catholic church based on the earthly opinions of the laity. This is not how the church foundation was laid in the ACTS of the apostles. Apostolic tradition is the cornerstone of our faith . Our traditions and precepts make us ONE HOLY AND APOSTOLIC CHURCH. Jesus did not come to satisfy human opinions, HE came to lead us to the Truth guided by the HOLY Spirit and dictated to the will of God the Father. God made Mary a handmaid of the LORD. She was submissive to GOD"s will. Women have a special place in the church but not on the altar. Women today do not want to be submissive to anyone or any entity. This is the sin of pride. Submission to God's will is our faith. Submission to pride started with EVE in the garden of Eden. IF you replace Catholic tradition with public opinion , you no longer have a faith founded by Jesus and passed down to the men or apostles. This is a dangerous precedent that will lead to the spiritual death of many Catholics and destruction of the pillars of our Catholic Faith.
This certainly seems to be what the synod was always about. The Blessed Virgin Mary is the most celebrated human being in history and the respect for the "feminine" and "motherhood" is arguably the foundation of a distinct "western civilization." Mary is the foundation of the "culture of life" -- a phrase you used to hear about but not so much anymore. Karl Stern in the Flight from Woman talks about how western civilization got out of balance when it began to reject the feminine that is grounded upon the recognition of the importance of human values (like family and motherhood) over financial and worldly status. Similarly, Bishop Fulton Sheen reportedly said the real opposite of a materialist Marxism is not capitalism but motherhood -- the culture of life. Stern notes that focus on the masculine "organization" of the Church (and its status) as opposed to the spiritual "organism" is best seen as a rejection of the feminine. Folks like Stern and Chesterton observed that feminism is the rejection of the feminine in culture which is grounded upon the example of the Virgin Mary. The worldwide collapse of the birthrate coinciding with the ascendancy of feminism seems to bear this out. The current prioritization of the "status" of Church organizational positions and hierarchy in the synod is the rejection of the feminine and would be consistent with the rise of feminism. The schism in the United Methodist Church would appear to be along the same fault line. Stern noted that the historic position is you need both masculine and feminine for a healthy culture. Is there anyone in the Church willing to stand for the Marian culture?