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Transcript from Rita Cassella Jones Lecture at Fordham of September 17, 2024.

As you know, I belonged to the initial Pontifical Commission for the Study of the Diaconate of Women. We were named in August 2016 and first met in November of that year.

I traveled to Rome several days in advance of the scheduled meeting, so I could recover from jet lag.

As soon as I arrived in Rome, I attended the celebrations honouring the three US bishops—they call bishops “monsignors” in Rome—the three US bishops named cardinals then: Blasé Cupich, Kevin Farrell, and Joseph Tobin.

Arriving in Rome

I resided outside the Vatican at the generalate of the LaSalle Christian Brothers for a few days, and on Thanksgiving Day, 2016, I arrived at the Vatican City gate called Porta Sant’Uffizio, in the Palazzo Sant’Uffizio.

That is the Vatican City gate near the building known in English as The Holy Office, where the business of the Congregation, now Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith takes place.

I presented my passport to the Swiss Guard and was permitted through the gate. I walked past Saint Peter’s Basilica on the right and the German cemetery on the left, to the guard booth of the Pontifical Gendarmerie, the Vatican military police.

Again, I presented my passport.

The officer looked at the list of expected guests. He looked at me. He looked again at the list. He looked at me. I asked if there was a problem. No madam, he answered.

But you are listed here as “Monsignor Zagano.”

He would not let me take a picture of the list.

I proceeded to Domus Sanctae Marthae, the small guest house where Pope Francis lives, and, as a guest of the Holy Father, was saluted as I entered the building.

The desk clerk greeted me, took my passport, and looked at her list which included “Monsignor Zagano.”

She looked at me, looked at her list, looked at me, and we both had a good laugh. She let me get a copy of the list.

That was a Thursday, and my first meal at Domus Sanctae Marthae was Thanksgiving dinner with other guests, including an American Nobel Laureate. This, I thought would be some ride.

My Commission met for the next two days, and again in March 2017, September 2017, and June 2018, for a total of eight days over nearly two years. Of course, there were many, many Zoom meetings and emails during those years.

I suppose you would like to know what we gave to the pope.

So, would I.

I’ll get to that.

Women – managers not ministers

The question before us this evening concerns the future of women in the Catholic Church.

Please believe me, the future of women in the Catholic Church is the future of the Catholic Church because the future of the Church depends on women.

Women comprise the largest segment of church-going people in the world, Catholic or not.

In the Catholic Church, women staff the Parish Outreach. Women teach Catechism, Women bring their children to church. Women bring their husbands to Mass, at least on Christmas and Easter.

But women at every level of Church life are restricted to management and cannot perform ministry as it is formally understood.

Let me define the terms.

By “management,” I mean all the non-ordained and therefore non-ministerial tasks and duties in Church organisations, from parish centers, to diocesan offices, to episcopal conferences, to the papal Curia.

That includes the parish secretary, the diocesan chancellor, the bishops’ conference spokesperson, and every employee of every Vatican dicastery. These, except for the jobs (called “offices”) that have legal authority over clerics—over deacons, priests, and bishops—these management positions are jobs that any layperson can have.

I am not saying the people in these jobs (or offices) are not “ministering,” for they truly perform “ministry” as the term has been enlarged over the past forty years or so.

Yes, the head of the parish religious education program, the organizer of the diocesan CYO, the employees of the USCCB, and the people in the papal Curia are all “ministering” in a sense. But they are not performing sacramental ministry in the classroom, on the playing field, or behind their desks.

So, by “ministry” I mean sacramental ministry, as performed by ordained deacons, priests, and bishops. You know the differences. Deacons may solemnly baptize and witness marriages.

In addition to these sacraments, priests may anoint the sick (give “last rites”), hear confessions and offer absolution, and celebrate the Eucharist.

Performing confirmations is generally restricted to bishops, who sometimes delegate their authority to confirm to priest-pastors.

All these are “clerics,” and as such can legally preach at Masses and serve as single judges in canonical proceedings.

So, “Management” is open to women. “Ministry” is not.

It might be helpful to use the distinctions known in military and business organisations: “management” would be “admin”, and “ministry” would be “ops.”

That is, “management” handles administrative matters, and “ministry” would be the core operations of the organisation.

The analogy may not be perfect, but the important word here is “admin” or “administration.” That is what, in his own words, Pope Francis believes women are capable of.

In November 2022, when the pope met in Domus Sanctae Marta with the editors and writers of America Magazine, the journal’s executive editor, Kerry Weber, asked him the following question:

Holy Father, as you know, women have contributed and can contribute much to the life of the church. You have appointed many women at the Vatican, which is great.

Nevertheless, many women feel pain because they cannot be ordained priests. What would you say to a woman who is already serving in the life of the church, but who still feels called to be a priest?

Francis’ long and thoughtful answer expanded the notion of “ministry” somewhat.

However, he retained the great divide between the ordained and non-ordained, between those people who are central and those people who are not central to the essential operations of the church, to the ordained tasks and duties of performing sacraments, and (because of their ordained status) of preaching and judging.

That is, Pope Francis clearly distinguished the people who can be ordained—men—from those who cannot be ordained—women.

His comments were based on a theoretical construct presented by the long-dead Swiss priest-theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), a former Jesuit of whom several prominent theologians are critical.

The Petrine Church and the Marian principle

One theologian central to Vatican doctrine since his appointment to the first iteration of the International Theological Commission (ITC) in 1969, Joseph Ratzinger—the future Benedict XVI– said “[von Balthasar] is right in what he teaches of the faith.”

Some of what von Balthasar “taught” is what Francis presented to America Magazine: “the Petrine church” and “the Marian principle.’ So, the pope said, “The church is a woman. The church is a spouse.”

Specifically, in response to the question about ordaining women, Francis distinguished the “ministerial dimension, [which] is that of the Petrine church” from “the Marian principle, which is the principle of femininity (femineidad) in the church, of the woman in the church, where the church sees a mirror of herself because she [the church] is a woman and a spouse.”

The pope continued, describing the church as female, and then said, “There is a third way: the administrative way….it is something of normal administration. And, in this aspect, I believe we have to give more space to women.”

Francis went on to extol the “functioning” of women in management, summing up his comments by saying, “So there are three principles, two theological and one administrative.”

To sum up his belief, the “Petrine principle” covers ministry and the “Marian principle” presents the church as “spouse” and these two so-called “theological principles” are complemented by the “administrative principle” to which women are suited.

Francis concluded by asking, “Why can a woman not enter ordained ministry? It is because the Petrine principle has no place for that.”

The Executive Editor of America Magazine, Kerry Weber (a woman) did not ask a follow-up question.

We can return to the question of women in ministry, but let us examine women in management more closely, the idea that women exemplify the “administrative principle” that Francis presented that late November day in 2022.

Management

The Church has advanced somewhat in its inclusion of women in management, in administrative positions in local dioceses.

For example, in the United States today, 54 women serve as diocesan chancellor, an important, non-ministerial position. (c.f. The Official Catholic Directory, Athens, GA: NRP Direct, 2023. There are 28.73% Latin Rite and 11.11% Eastern Rite female chancellors. In Latin Rite dioceses, 23, or 12.71% of chancellors are deacons, none in Eastern Rite dioceses.)

The chancellor is the senior administrative officer, the highest-placed office manager of a diocese, but the chancellor—in his or her role—is not performing “ministry” as it is formally defined, and the chancellor has no jurisdictional authority.

In Rome, especially in the Roman Curia, the question of women in managerial or administrative positions gets complicated.

We know women have been appointed to positions in the Curia, but these appointments are not to offices with jurisdiction. It is important to remember that only persons with jurisdiction can make decisions.

The easiest way to understand the situation is to look at the Instrumentum Laboris—the working document–for the coming session of the Synod of Bishops this October (2024):

In a synodal Church, the responsibility of the bishop, the College of bishops and the Roman Pontiff to make decisions is inalienable since it is rooted in the hierarchical structure of the Church established by Christ.” (IL #70)

Listen carefully: “the responsibility…to make decisions is inalienable since it is rooted in the hierarchical structure of the Church.”

And who makes up the hierarchy? The hierarchy is the ordained men of the Church.

The paragraph asserting the “inalienable” right of the clergy to make decisions underscores the “you discern, we decide” fact of ecclesiastical discipline, of church law.

Its roots are in Canons 129 and 274 of the Code of Canon Law. (Can. 129 §1. Those who have received sacred orders are qualified, according to the norm of the prescripts of the law, for the power of governance, which exists in the Church by divine institution and is also called the power of jurisdiction. §2. Lay members of the Christian faithful can cooperate in the exercise of this same power according to the norm of law. Can. 274 §1. Only clerics can obtain offices for whose exercise the power of orders or the power of ecclesiastical governance is required.)

Canon 129 states that ordained persons are qualified for the powers of governance and jurisdiction, and that lay persons can “cooperate” in this power.

Canon 274 states that only clerics can obtain offices requiring the power of orders or governance (or jurisdiction.)

But this same paragraph in the coming Synod meeting’s Instrumentum Laboris later goes on to give ample room to the actual process of synodal discernment and it even throws a lifeline to the non-ordained of the Church.

The paragraph ends by suggesting the Code of Canon Law restricting the non-ordained to a “consultative vote only” (tantum consultivum) should be, in its words, “corrected.”

It remains to be seen what correction could be made. As the synodal processes in Australia and Germany, for example, have proven, requests for change meet great resistance, and at least in the case of Germany rebuke, from Rome.

Having said all this, we must acknowledge the fact that there are more women in more responsible managerial roles in the Roman Curia than during prior pontificates.

The Roman Curia comprises the staff offices for Pope Francis, each managing a specific part of the Church’s organisational needs, for example, the choosing of bishops, matters involving other clergy and religious, oversight of finances, and the operations of Vatican City State, from managing the library and museums to overseeing the pope’s representatives (called papal nuncios) abroad, etc.

In the Roman Curia, there are sixteen curial offices called dicasteries.

There are also the Secretariate of State, three Institutions of Justice (Apostolic Penitentiary, the Supreme Tribunal, the Tribunal of the Roman Rota), four Institutions of Finance (Council for the Economy, Secretariat for the Economy, the Office of the Auditor General, and the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (A.P.S.A.)).

Of these, only A.P.S.A. has a woman undersecretary, Sister Silvana Piro, F.M.G.B

Curial offices with women as senior officers include:

• the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (Secretary Sister Simona Brambilla, M.C.; Under Secretary Sister Carmen Ros Nortes, N.S.C.),
• the Dicastery for the Laity, the Family, and Life (Under Secretaries Dr. Linda Ghisoni and Dr. Gabriella Gambino),
• the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development (Secretary, Sister Alessandra Smerilli, FMA). These women hold paid professional appointments.

Other dicasteries of the Roman Curia have women who are termed “members,” and who, alongside clerics (usually cardinals and bishops), largely act as trustees for the dicasteries’ work and who meet in Rome from time to time.

All dicasteries have female staff who assist with day-to-day operations, as clerks, secretaries, and translators, but clerics retain the overall organisational power in the Vatican.

While women are also members of Councils and Commissions, for the most part, these are not full-time professional appointments. For example, one of Pope Francis’ initial endeavors was to regularise Vatican finances, and so within one year of his election, he established the Council for the Economy, as mentioned earlier.

The title of Pope Francis’s Apostolic Letter establishing the Council for the Economy as a dicastery of the Roman Curia is Fidelis Dispensator et Prudens, (faithful and wise manager).

The fifteen-member Council for the Economy has consistently maintained a clerical majority and is coordinated by a cardinal. However, its website describes seven members as “experts of various nationalities, with financial expertise and recognised professionalism,” and six of those seven are women, each a financial professional.

Its deputy coordinator, Dr Charlotte Kreuter-Kirchhof, is a law professor who is also an advisor to the “Women in Church and Society” sub-commission of the Pastoral Commission of the German Bishops’ Conference.

As you move down the Vatican’s wire diagram to the groups with a consultative role, more women are present in “titled” roles.

The Secretary for the Pontifical Commission for Latin America is Argentinian Dr Emilce Cuda, and the Adjunct Secretary for the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors is American Dr Teresa Kettelkamp.

The Secretary of the Pontifical Biblical Commission is Spaniard Dr Nuria Calduch-Benages, a well-known biblical scholar and professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.

Dr Calduch-Benages is the unpaid Secretary of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. I do not know if Dr Cuda or Dr Kettlekamp is paid.

You see, not every Vatican appointment comes with a salary.

The voluntary nature of participation in certain positions in the Vatican increases as the commissions and institutes that are ad hoc, or adjunct, to one or another dicastery proliferate.

While participation is unpaid, travel expenses are covered, including (if needed) a few nights’ lodging in Domus Sanctae Marthae. However, budgetary and language restrictions within the Vatican cause a significant default to choosing participants and members already residing in Rome and its environs.

And it is important to recall that women –whether secular or religious women – have no guarantee of ecclesiastical salaries outside their voluntary Vatican work.

So even if chosen, it is sometimes difficult for a woman to accept a consultative Vatican appointment.

So, yes, there are many women involved in Vatican operations. Those central to actual management functions of the Curia are salaried Italian women, including many religious sisters, and others fluent in Italian.

Those in more consultative roles are from a larger pool of qualified individuals. Those in even more peripheral positions, such as the members of the two Pontifical Commissions for the Study of the Diaconate of Women, include more women.

But even the commission I served on was comprised of members of other, more permanent Vatican commissions, or they were members of university faculties in Rome. Except me. I was the only member of my commission with no Roman or Vatican connection.

Ministry

The Commission I served on was about ministry as the Vatican formally defined it then and how the Vatican realistically defines it to this day. If you ask the folks at Merriam-Webster, “ministry” comprises the office, duties, or functions of a minister.

That is, ministry is about the office, duties, or functions of a member of the clergy.

As I noted earlier, Pope Francis seems to depend on categories invented by Hans Urs von Balthasar, categories the pope calls “theological.”

He said the ministerial dimension is that of the Petrine church and the Marian principle is the principle of femininity in the Church. That appears to eliminate women.

As grating as these categories are, it is important at this point to recall how Pope Francis has referred to women from the very beginning of his pontificate.

In May 2013, during his first address to the International Union of Superiors General, Francis recommended that the sisters be mothers, not old maids.

His repeated “jokes” and other comments about women have fallen flat time after time.

Who can forget his calling women theologians the “strawberries on the cake”? That was ten years ago, but it signaled one way Francis saw women professionals then.

What about now?

Francis has repeated his feminine analogies about the Church.

Just last March, in an address to participants in a conference entitled “Women in the Church: Builders of Humanity,” the pope said, “The Church is herself a woman: a daughter, a bride and a mother.”

While the qualities he attributes to women are laudable for everyone, he emphasises two aspects of “women’s vocation”: style and education. He notes that “style” includes the ability “to bring love where love is lacking, and humanity where human beings are searching to find their true identity.”

He speaks directly to the conference participants about “education,” expressing his hope that “educational settings, in addition to being places of study, research and learning, places of ‘information,’ will also be places of ‘formation,’ where minds and hearts are opened to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.”

Without digressing to the 1967 Land O’Lakes Statement and its controversy or Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae on Catholic universities, I must note here the distinction between theology and apologetics, as well as the tasks and duties of the diaconate.

As for Catholic education, the fact of the formative influence of Catholic education cannot be disparaged nor denied, but theology is not apologetics.

As for the diaconate, the deacon is ordained to the ministries of the Word, the liturgy, and charity. If we consider the historical position of the deacon as the principal coordinator of the charity of the Church, then the duty of the deacon to proclaim and preach the Word in the liturgy becomes evident.

If we apply the pope’s words to the diaconal ministry of women throughout the centuries, in the West up through the mid-12th century, we can see that it was women deacons who brought love where love was lacking and who provided formation to women and children.

We know women were ordained in Lucca, Italy in the mid-1100s, but realistically in the 12th century, no person who was not destined for priestly ordination could be ordained deacon.

Since by that time, most women deacons were monastics, with few serving as what might be termed “social service” deacons, and because the diaconate as exercised by men had become mostly ceremonial and generally moribund, the sacramental ordination of women to the diaconate ceased in the West.

I spoke at length about women in management. But what about women in ministry?

It is impossible to ignore Pope Francis’ emphatic “no” when he was asked in a CBS television interview about the sacramental ordination of women as deacons.

He seemed to support his “no” with his opinion that the “deaconesses” in the early church—and “deaconess” is the word he used—that the “deaconesses” in the early church served diaconal “functions” without being sacramentally ordained.

That understanding is not supported by scholarship.

A little recent history

Since 1971, the Church has, at various times and various levels, directly discussed the ordination of women as deacons.

In 1971, the second meeting of the Synod of Bishops included substantial discussion about women in ordained ministry.

By 1973, Pope Paul VI established a Commission on the Role of Women in Church and in Society, which met intermittently over a period of two years. In that Commission, the question of women priests was immediately off the table.

But at its first meeting, one of the commission’s fourteen women members asked to discuss women deacons.

The Commission’s president, an Italian archbishop, immediately closed the discussion.

He said the diaconate was a stage of orders directly connected to the priesthood—this argument would soon be termed the “unicity of orders” –and therefore women deacons could not be considered.

Even so, he augmented the commission’s final two-page report with a seven-page private memorandum to Pope Paul VI, which was much more positive about women deacons.

Meanwhile, in 1969 the International Theological Commission had been created to address questions of doctrine.

The world’s foremost (male) theologians gathered in Rome on occasion to discuss pressing issues for the Church.

Women in ministry soon became one of those pressing issues, and the Secretary of the International Theological Commission, perhaps at the suggestion of the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, named a small sub-group of theologians to study the female diaconate.

Their discussion was quite positive—even Yves Congar thought the ordination of women as deacons was possible—but despite some members urging a positive vote on the question, none was taken, the question was tabled, and the ITC proceeded to write a document that opined women could not be ordained as priests.

The official commentary to that document stated that the question of women deacons would be left for “further study.”

Academic debate continued, and there remained no consensus as to whether the women deacons of history were sacramentally ordained.

However, to say the women of history were not sacramentally ordained would be to dispute the intent of the ordaining bishops, who used the same ritual for women deacons as for men deacons.

The formal rituals used to ordain women were performed within the Mass, where the persons to be ordained as deacons—whether male or female—were ordained by the bishop inside the sanctuary, through the laying on of hands with the epiclesis (or calling down of the Holy Spirit); they were invested with a stole, self-communicated from the chalice, and the bishop called them deacons.

That is, both male and female candidates were ordained in identical ceremonies and were called deacons, or, in some languages, the women deacons were called “deaconesses.”

So, why could women not be ordained today?

Several reasons are given, all of which fall to either logic, history, or both. They are,

• Women deacons were blessed but not “ordained”;
• “Deaconess” always means the wife of a deacon;
• Male and female deacons had different functions;
• The unicity of orders limits ordination to men (cursus honorum);
• Women cannot image Christ (iconic argument);
• Women are not valid subjects for ordination;
• Women are “unclean” and restricted from the sanctuary.

Since the 17th century, scholars have argued over the history of women deacons, one or another questioning whether the women deacons of history were sacramentally ordained.

In the 17th century, one scholar, Jean Morin, studied all the existing liturgies in Latin, Greek, and the languages of Syria and Babylonia.

He determined that the liturgies met the criteria for sacramental ordination set forth by the Council of Trent.

A century later, another writer disagreed.

When we arrive at the 1970s, the question of women in the church, especially the question of women priests, was in the air.

Nothing came of the work of the ITC sub-commission, except one member, Cipriano Vagaggini published a long and dense article stating his positive view.

Vagaggini was so well thought of, that the 1987 Synod of Bishops asked his opinion on women deacons, which he freely shared.

After reminding the assembled bishops that in 1736, when Pope Benedict XIV approved ordained women deacons in the Catholic Maronite tradition, he permitted them to administer the sacrament of extreme unction within their monasteries, Vagaggini continued:

If that is the case, one senses the legitimacy and urgency for competent authorities to admit women to the sacrament of order of the diaconate and to grant them all the functions, even the liturgical functions that, in the present historical moment of the church, are considered necessary for the greater benefit of believers, not excluding—as I personally maintain—if it is judged pastorally appropriate, equality between the liturgical functions of men deacons and women deacons. (– Cipriano Vagaggini, “The Deaconess in the Byzantine Tradition” in Women Deacons? Essays with Answers, Phyllis Zagano, ed. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2016, 96-99, at 99.)

His recommendation went nowhere, and around that time I was told in Rome by the highest placed women in the Curia that “they can’t say ‘no’; they just don’t want to say ‘yes’”.

The discussion continued and was picked up by the 1992-1997 ITC, which again formed a subcommittee and again found in favor of restoring women to the ordained diaconate.

Their 17-page document was printed, numbered, and voted on, but not promulgated. The ITC president objected. He was then the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

So, the question went to yet another ITC subcommittee, which in 2002 published a paper stating that the question was “up to the Magisterium” to decide.

Nothing happened.

Until, in 2016, the International Union of Superiors General (UISG) asked Pope Francis to form another Commission. And so I went to Rome that following November in 2016.

There was another pontifical commission, which met twice for one week each, in September of 2021 and July of 2022.

The Synod on Synodality

The first session of the current Synod on Synodality asked for the reports of each Commission because in synodal discussion some felt ordaining women as deacons would restore a tradition, while others disagreed.

The Synod stated that questions about women were “urgent,” and so, one of the ten “study groups” charged by the pope and the Synod office to provide detailed reports to Synod members was charged with the question of women deacons.

Meanwhile, as I mentioned, in his televised interview with CBS-TV’s Norah O’Donnell, the pope said “no” to women deacons.

Specifically, he denied the possibility to Norah O’Donnell, who asked him:

Norah O’Donnell (23:05): I understand you have said no women as priests, but you are studying the idea of women as deacons. Is that something you are open to?

Translator (23:15): No. If it is deacons with holy orders, no. But women have always had, I would say the function of deaconesses without being deacons, right? Women are of great service as women, not as ministers. As ministers in this regard. Within the Holy Orders.

That could be the end of it, or not. I am attempting to get the Spanish recording or the Spanish transcript.

What did the pope understand?

Was he being asked about the diaconate as a preliminary step to the priesthood?

On the face of it, his response is wholly incorrect.

There was no distinction between women deacons and deaconesses throughout history. It is a fact that some, if not all, were sacramentally ordained.

What the Church has done the Church can do again.

And the Church has done it.

On May 2, the Greek Orthodox Church of Zimbabwe ordained a woman deacon—they prefer the term “deaconess”—using the liturgy it uses for ordaining men as deacons.

The ordaining prelate, Metropolitan Seraphim, just changed the pronouns.

We know that Synod reports from every corner of the world ask the Church to recognise the baptismal equality of all people.

While women are increasingly added to church management, the only response to requests for women deacons has been Pope Francis’ televised “no.”

We sit and wonder what the future holds.

I cannot tell you what my Commission did.

Despite my three requests to the Commission president, then-Archbishop Luis Ladaria, twice in writing and once in person, I have not seen what he gave Pope Francis in the name of the Commission I served on.

I can tell you one thing, however.

After our first meeting formally closed, I asked to say just one more thing, to the group and to the Commission president.

I said: “When I arrived at the Vatican, I was listed on the guest list as ‘Monsignor Zagano.’”

One member asked: “If she’s a monsignor, what are we doing here?”

Exactly.

 

• Phyllis Zagano, Ph.D. is senior research associate-in-residence and adjunct professor of religion at Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York.
• Transcript from Rita Cassella Jones Lecture at Fordham of September 17, 2024.

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