Paul VI’s commission on women initially seemed to have a very limited mandate: it was to last for only one year and its mission was not clear. The Roman Curia did not conceal its hostility to the project. As the commission began its work, someone from the Curia leaked to the press a memo making clear that the commission would not address the issue of women’s ordination. The memo insisted that the commission would concern itself only with the question of women in the apostolate, not women in ministry.
The commission gave an interim report to the 1974 Bishops’ Synod, as tensions mounted between the women members of the commission and Paul VI. In August 1975 Archbishop Bartoletti sent Paul VI a memo requesting that the pope provide a theological and ecclesiological rationale for the rule against the ordination of women, pointing out the insufficiency of a judgment based only on discipline and tradition. This was during the period when Inter insigniores was being drafted. That declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, release the following year, formally denied women access to the priesthood. In short, the whole ecclesiastical context in which the women’s commission had to do its work was hostile to any change on the issue of women and ministry. An earlier motu proprio Ministeria quaedam (1972), which instituted the ministries of the lectorate and the accolitate, also excluded women. The International Theological Commission, which had published a document on priestly ministry in 1970, was asked to prepare a report on women in the diaconate, which has never been published. [...]
But among the bishops—not to mention the whole people of God, including theologians—there is a wide variety of opinions about women deacons, a wider variety than there was in the 1970s. In the past two or three decades, and especially during the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the debate about women deacons has remained limited mostly to specialists, but the theological reflection supporting the women’s diaconate and the current ecumenical situation (some Orthodox Churches have recently reintroduced women deacons) are much more favorable to such a development in the Catholic Church than they were in the 1970s. The role of women in the church is now an important one throughout the church in a way that it was not in the 1970s. It is no longer an issue only in the Northern hemisphere; it is being discussed in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. And the discussion is likely to continue and grow in intensity no matter what the pope’s position on the issue. [...]
A first step would be to publish all the reports on the women’s diaconate, starting with those commissioned in the 1970s and including those commissioned under Francis. The discussion needs to be an open discussion if it is going to get anywhere. A second step would be to make the discussion synodal—which would require a synod ad hoc on women in the church. Why a synod? Because the discussion should be about not only the history of women’s ministry (the preserve of experts) but also the theology. A commission of experts can and should go only so far in this issue. I repeat here what I wrote in 2016 before the announcement of the commission by Francis: we should disabuse ourselves of the naïve belief that agreement about the historical evidence of women deacons and the role of the diaconate in the early church can resolve this controversy. Appeals to history are rarely conclusive in theological debates, and they can easily backfire. It is traditionalist Catholics, not progressives, who are supposed to believe that something is legitimate only to the degree that it is not new.
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