Corpus Christi Campaign Adds Women Deacons
Presently
women/lay ministers are the "glue" helping to hold the Church
together both in the U.S. and worldwide. Worldwide, there are 783,000
women religious serving the church’s 1.07 billion Catholics compared
to 405,000 priests. Add the nuns to the 2.9 million lay catechists,
missionaries, and members of secular institutes (at least half
of whom in all
categories
are likely to be women), and it becomes clear that Catholicism’s
ministerial crisis cannot be solved without expanding women’s roles.
Most women ministers in the U.S. (conservatively, an estimated
82% of 65,000 chaplains and lay pastoral ministers) already have
qualifications (and
more) to be ordained deacons. As deacons they can preach, baptize
and witness marriages. This constitutes a huge new pool of ordained
ministers who could be immediately
available to meet the growing sacramental needs of an expanding
church.
In Romans 16 Paul names Phoebe “deacon” (diakonos) of the
church at Cenchrae,” not “deaconess” as it it often incorrectly
translated. Diakonos is the same word Paul uses to describe himself in
Corinthians (1 Cor 3:5, 2 Cor 6:4). The mistaken “deaconess” translation
is most likely an anachronistic reading assigning a formal ministerial
title of the fourth century (and its corresponding duties) to the more
fluid situation of the first century in which deacons were both male and
female.There is widespread epigraphical evidence from first century tombstones
which have diakonos inscribed as a title for women church leaders. Early
ordination rites for women deacons were identical to those used to ordain
male deacons to major orders. Vatican offices are trying to say that early
female “deaconesses” were not the same as deacons. What goes
unsaid, and apparently deliberately so, is that there were both male and
female deacons in the first century Church. (Phyllis Zagano, Holy Saturday [Crossroad, 2000] and Presentation at FutureChurch July, 2003; John Wijngaards
in The Tablet, August 14, 2004)
Presently the Armenian Church has at least three women deacons.
Both Pope Paul VI and John Paul II signed documents recognizing the
apostolic
succession and validity of Armenian Catholic sacraments. (Zagano,
Phyllis: Presentation at FutureChurch July, 2003)
On October 8, 2004, the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church of Greece voted
in Athens to restore the female diaconate. This provides support for the
restoration of the female diaconate in the Catholic Church, which has acknowledged
the validity of Orthodox sacraments and orders. According to Dr. Phyllis
Zagano: Despite the distinction in Canon 1024-“A baptized male alone
receives sacred ordination validly” -one can presume the possibility
of a derogation from the law, as suggested by the Canon Law Society of
America in 1995, to allow for diaconal ordination of women. (The history
of Canon 1024 is clearly one of attempts to restrict women from priesthood,
not from the diaconate.)”
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