Who Says It Matters

When I started writing on this blog last fall, I asked Google Alerts to let me know when anything relevant to women’s ordination or women in the Catholic Church was posted online. In the beginning, I got articles from publications I never heard of before, and most of them opposed any change in the role of women.

NOW, after Mary McAleese (my thesis about the increased attention) I get lots of articles which are somewhat sympathetic, in two kinds of publications: those I know about and some local news outlets. The issue of women deacons is a case in point.

The heads of women’s religious orders leave an audience with Pope Francis in Paul VI hall,  May 12, 2016. (CNS/Paul Haring)

How to get ordaining women deacons covered in the press? Do a survey of people who matter. Ask major superiors of religious orders of women and men what they think – and find them quite open to the idea, in contrast to what seems to be the Vatican position. Create news. CARA (the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate) asked the questions, and issued a report full of the usual hairsplitting analyses and graphs on August 2. Who says it matters.

The 385 leaders who responded headed congregations in LCWR, in the more conservative CMSWR, in the conferences of major superiors of women and men, and in some contemplative communities not in any umbrella group. The big take-aways, as reported in NCR:

•  77 percent believe it is “theoretically possible” to ordain women as deacons;
• 72 percent say the church “should authorize” such ordinations;
• 76 percent say ordaining women as deacons would be “very much” or “somewhat” “beneficial to the Catholic Church’s mission”;
• 45 percent believe the church will return to the practice of ordaining women as deacons.

There is much more and NCR does a good job reporting it, including some substantial concerns expressed about jurisdiction (to whom would a nun-deacon report: the order or the bishop?), much detail about differences among those in the various umbrella groups, the only mention of early Christian deacon Phoebe, and a valiant effort to summarize the open-ended questions. The answer that most impressed me was whether the writings of particular authors influenced them; Joan Chittister, Sandra Schneiders, and Phyllis Zagano were most frequently cited, in that order. The photo was of a crowd of those religious order superiors who attended the session in 2016 when Francis promised to set up a commission to consider women deacons.

We expect an article about ordaining women in NCR. It matters to many of its readers. But what about the general public?

While it seemed like an avalanche in Google, really it was only four local papers that used Nicole Winfield’s long AP article, which was also published in America. 

A terrific photo accompanies this article, which does note that the Vatican summit on the Amazon in 2019 may “identify new ‘official ministries’ for women” there, and concludes by referring to Phyllis Zagano’s March article in US Catholic: 

Phyllis Zagano, a member of the Vatican’s commission, has written that much of the criticism and confusion over women deacons stems from ignorance about the distinctly separate ministries of priest and deacon, and the erroneous belief that those advocating for women deacons have a secret agenda to ordain women as priests.

“We know today that married deacons are not eligible for priesthood. Neither would women deacons be eligible,” Zagano wrote in a February article for U.S. Catholic magazine. “To deny the people of God the ordained ministry of women deacons is a serious failing that the church in the west has lived with for 800 years.”

Zagano’s article is a very good summary of what I would characterize as the conservative position favoring women deacons, as is clear from the above quotation. She does stress that the work of the commission is secret. There is another terrific photo, too, of women deacons from the Southwest Florida diocese of the Episcopal Church. (It’s summer; photos please me.)

Photo source: Flicker: Episcopal Diaconate Ordination, Florida 

The one diocesan news article that came through Google is, oddly enough, Catholic Philly. This uses the Catholic News Service release. I don’t get this USCCB service, but, as you might expect, it emphasizes some of the difficulties that were surfaced by the survey. There is a good photo of an African-American Eucharistic minister. Inadvertently, I think, the release raises a question in saying “The survey was taken in response to a papal commission organized by Pope Francis to study the question of ordaining women to the permanent diaconate.” Really? I wonder who paid for the survey and who expected to benefit from the results. My guess is not the commission.

Partly I say that because the commission head has limited their purview to the historical role of deacons. That’s made clear in NCR and in the release from the Catholic News Agency, affiliated with EWTN. They take on the additional responsibility of repeating several of Pope Francis’s steps back from any implications that the commission might have for a female priesthood.

So does this unusual flutter of attention prove to you that who says it matters? Would a survey of the laity attract as much attention? It surprises me that this is the third post in which I have addressed this issue (January 12 and July 7, 2018). I have become convinced that small steps are the way forward in the institutional church. At the same time, I requested the RCWP photo attached to this blog because women are ordained deacons already, and most of them are now priests. All of us have our roles in this great drama.

Photo Source: Roman Catholic Women Priests

You may have noticed that I was away. I am absolutely delighted by the various writers who stepped up to do the blog. This convinces me that we need many voices in this debate; no one voice, or even a few, is enough. Thanks to all those who contributed such wonderful reflections.