Deacon Distinctions

Since I’m writing this blog early this week, I am hoping that there are no news flashes that I wish I had covered. Instead, I am going back to two articles I have saved on women deacons. They came to mind because of articles in NCR about a talk by Ally Kateusz that looked for evidence of ordained women in early church artifacts.

Kateusz writes about is a mosaic at the Lateran in Rome, made about 650.

This photo, taken in 2009 by Eric Weinberg and used with permission, shows more men surrounding Mary than in the print in NCR. The key item is the pallium, the white cloth draped in front of Mary, an episcopal symbol indicating her importance among the other church leaders. What happened to this mosaic illustrates one of the difficulties in making clear conclusions about this kind of evidence, however.

According to Miriam Duignan of the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research, … the Holy Office decreed in 1916 that all images depicting Mary in priestly vestments were to be banned… Most of the documented red tesserae [tiles] comprising the cross on Mary’s pallium were removed.

Weinberg confirms: “The red cross on Mary’s pallium is indeed now reduced to a scrawny red line.” We know that Mary was not literally a bishop – no one in the founding generation was – but by the seventh century a woman could wear the symbol of episcopal ordination – and in the twentieth century, it was obscured. What does it prove? The NCR includes other illustrations.

One of the highlights of my life was traveling in 2014 with my sister Helen Bannan-Baurecht on the FutureChurch pilgrimage to Rome, which was most recently offered by Christine Schenk and Russ Petrus. Peering with my own eyes at these mosaics and sarcophagi was like touching the past I always believed existed. Having the expert guidance of Schenk and Carolyn Osiek confirmed the truth of women’s roles in the church for me.

Kateusz was not speaking to a group of very sympathetic listeners like us, however, but at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, to the International Society of Biblical Literature. Of course, scholars quibble, as some do in both these articles about her talk. What makes me really happy is that people are debating ordaining women in a most reputable forum, right there in Rome.

One of the deacon articles I saved is by Massimo Faggioli in Commonweal, in which he details once again the hostility that surrounded all prior discussions of ordaining women to anything. Now, he argues, there is “a wider variety” of opinion about women deacons. Many around the world who support it have developed a more complete theology, but those who oppose it are encouraging a resurgent clericalism that excludes women. As a historian, I smile ironically at Faggioli’s conclusion:

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…Today it is unlikely that Rome could get away with dismissing requests for the diaconal ministry of women simply by pointing to lack of consensus on the historical findings.

Which is, let me remind you, just what the Pope did before this article came out.

The other deacon article I saved, “The ancient diaconate of women was a sacrament” by John Wijngaards, is distributed by the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church (ARCC). This is one side of the argument on the papal commission, apparently, though that final report has yet to be released. Like the artifacts Kateusz used, Wijngaards finds many rituals that “parallel” women’s ordinations with men’s. He argues that the bishops intended these ceremonies to be sacraments because of the public setting “in the sanctuary, before the altar and right within the eucharistic celebration” and because of the prayers they said. His final argument connects deacon ordinations with the priesthood:

Vatican II speaks of one “divinely established ministry which is exercised on different levels by those who from antiquity have been called bishops, priests and deacons”. It thus confirms the unity of the sacrament already proclaimed by the Council of Trent. On the 15th of July 1563 that Council had declared that “holy orders is one of the seven sacraments of the Church” and that “in the Catholic Church there exists a hierarchy by divine ordination instituted, consisting of bishops, priests, and deacons”… Since women in the past did receive the sacrament of the diaconate, they are obviously capable of receiving holy orders as such, that means: also the priesthood and episcopacy.

So women have had access to all seven sacraments all along, because thousands were ordained deacons in the first millennium of the church’s history. And Trent is used to support the argument! Our little joke about “seven for men, six for women” falls!

We know women have been ordained for years, now, in sacramental communities, but I am writing today about moving the Vatican to a similar position. How is this to happen? In NCR Don Clemmer suggests a synod of Bishops on women. My first reaction was “Not Again!” I sat through the debate at the USCCB in 1994, when they could not decide on a pastoral on women. But, as Faggioli says, times have changed. Maybe a preliminary meeting of women, diverse women, would articulate a true theology of and by women that those who are meeting would have to consider, if not actually adopt. While these Francis synod documents are sometimes disappointing, the conversation is never the same.