VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Cardinal Mario Grech, one of the two leading cardinals in charge of the Synod on Synodality, has appeared to contradict Catholic teaching, stating that “the female diaconate and a different space for women in the Church are a natural deepening of the Lord’s will.”
Speaking on the sidelines of meetings of the Swiss Catholic bishops, Cardinal Mario Grech gave his extensive thoughts on the current status of the multi-year Synod on Synodality, accentuating themes of forms of “equality” in the Church, while also speaking on “harmony” and “unity” in response to more difficult questions about the fallout following Fiducia Supplicans.
‘Female deacons’
Grech – who serves as secretary general of the General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops – highlighted the new study groups that Pope Francis has established and that will study 10 themes from the synod.
READ: New Synod documents reveal discussion themes for study groups formed by Pope Francis
This move, said Grech, showed how Francis is treating the Synod on Synodality differently than previous synods by effectively curtailing the discussion and giving the post-synod instruction to the Roman Curia before the synod has even finished. The cardinal explained:
The synod for the first time is being held in two sessions. After the October 2023 assembly, all the points discussed were summarized in a summary report. What is new is that the Holy Father identified 10 themes in the same report and assigned them to inter-dicasterial groups asking for further responses. In the past the exhortation was always post-synodal, but in doing so Francis has once again shown that he is listening.
Grech described the pope’s selection of discussion themes for the new groups as dealing “with aspects of the life of the Church on the road, but also the relationship with the changing society.”
As LifeSite has reported, the fifth discussion theme for the newly formed groups includes the subject of the role women in the Church and “a growth in the pastoral responsibilities entrusted to them in all areas of the life and mission of the Church.” It is this question that will encompass the “possible access of women to the diaconate,” drawing on the October 2023 Synthesis Report and the 2016 and 2020 commissions on so-called “female deacons.”
When asked about this in the interview, Grech shied away from using the term “revolution” to describe “the female diaconate.” Instead, he stated:
I don’t use terms like revolution. The female diaconate and a different space for women in the Church are a natural deepening of the Lord’s will, they express and demonstrate the dynamism inherent in the history of the Church.
With the issue of “female deacons” now officially tasked to one of the study groups, the topic is not officially due to be discussed at this October’s session of the Synod on Synodality.
However, key Synod members and the pope himself have continued to give signals that they are lobbying for “female deacons” during the October meetings or at least are open to such lobbying.
READ: Cardinal McElroy: Synod could end link between diaconate and priesthood to allow ‘female deacons’
San Diego’s Cardinal Robert McElroy revealed that the 2023 Synod meetings discussed ending the so-called “transitional diaconate” in order to more easily accommodate having “female deacons.” Both he and Chicago’s Cardinal Blase Cupich have vocally made representations in favor of such efforts, following the October 2023 meetings.
Additionally, in recent weeks Pope Francis appointed six consulters to the General Secretariat of the Synod, along whom are documented campaigners for female governance or “female deacons” in the Catholic Church.
READ: Pope appoints female deacon advocates to Synod as October meetings confirmed
Catholic impossibility of ‘female deacons’
While arguments continue to be made in favor of “female deacons,” especially in conjunction with the Synod on Synodality, the Catholic Church has clearly pronounced the impossibility of them. The diaconate, as part of the sacrament of Holy Orders, is not possible to be opened to women.
In his 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, Pope John Paul II taught, “I declare that 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.”
READ: Pope appoints female deacon advocates to Synod as October meetings confirmed
In 2002, the Vatican’s International Theological Commission wrote after much study that:
- The deaconesses mentioned in the tradition of the ancient Church — as evidenced by the rite of institution and the functions they exercised — were not purely and simply equivalent to the deacons;
- The unity of the sacrament of Holy Orders, in the clear distinction between the ministries of the bishop and the priests on the one hand and the diaconal ministry on the other, is strongly underlined by ecclesial tradition, especially in the teaching of the Magisterium
In 2019, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), spoke with LifeSite’s Dr. Maike Hickson about the issue of female ordination, issuing a categorical clarification about the Catholic prohibition on the matter of women as priests or deacons:
It is certain without doubt, however, that this definitive decision from Pope John Paul II is indeed a dogma of the Faith of the Catholic Church and that this was of course the case already before this Pope defined this truth as contained in Revelation in the year 1994. The impossibility that a woman validly receives the Sacrament of Holy Orders in each of the three degrees is a truth contained in Revelation and it is thus infallibly confirmed by the Church’s Magisterium and presented as to be believed.
Some months prior to that, Cardinal Müller issued an intervention concerning the working document of the Amazon Synod, noting that “no synod – with or without the Pope – and also no ecumenical council, or the Pope alone, if he spoke ex cathedra, could make possible the ordination of women as bishop, priest, or deacon. They would stand in contradiction to the defined doctrine of the Church.”
Indeed, in 2018, the then-current prefect of the CDF, Cardinal Ladaria Ferrer, S.J., defended the teaching of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis as bearing the mark of “infallibility,” with John Paul II having “formally confirmed and made explicit, so as to remove all doubt, that which the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium has long considered throughout history as belonging to the deposit of faith.”