Pope Francis has created a commission to study the historical role of female deacons in the Catholic Church, the Vatican’s press office said Monday.
The commission was first promised by the Pope after a meeting with a group of nuns on May 12. He said the Vatican should study the question of ordaining women as deacons, answering a call that women, particularly in the United States, have been asking the church to address for decades.
“In the course of a dialogue during a meeting with the participants in the Plenary Assembly of Superiors General, Pope Francis expressed his intention to establish an official commission that could study the question” of the diaconate of women, “especially with regard to the first ages of the Church,” the Vatican’s statement said.
“After intense prayer and mature reflection, Pope Francis has decided to institute the Commission for the Study of the Diaconate of Women.”
As president of the commission, Pope Francis has appointed Archbishop Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer, S.J.
In addition to Archbishop Ladaria, the commission is composed of six women and six men from academic institutions around the world.
One of the appointees, Prof. Phyllis Zagano of Hofstra University, is an American who has written in favor of female deacons.
Last year, she penned a piece for the Harvard Divinity Bulletin called “Ordain Catholic Women as Deacons.”
“(H)istory documents women ordained to the diaconate from the earliest centuries of Christianity to the Middle Ages, when the diaconate faded as a separate order,” Zagano wrote.
“As priests absorbed the work of deacons, ordination to the diaconate became simply a step in the cursus honorum on the way to priesthood. Fewer and fewer women — mostly monastic abbesses — were ordained as deacons, primarily for service within their own convents.”
In May, the Pope joked that he felt like a goalie fielding shots — with women calling him out, asking why they can’t preach at Mass or be ordained as deacons.
The Women’s Ordination Conference issued a statement that month saying “until women are included in all decision-making structures and as priests and bishops of the church, equality remains painfully denied.”
