Remember when the fellow in charge of organizing Pope Francis’s Big Meeting on Meetings Synod on Synodality, Cardinal Mario Grech, announced a special study group—one of ten dedicated to various questions and issues in ecclesiastical life—for the synodal discernment of a “female diaconate” in the Church?
That was in the bottom half of March.
A few weeks later, Pope Francis synodally discerned the answer in an interview on US national television: “No.”
Coming from the guy who convened not one, but two commissions to study the question before approving the special synodal study group, the answer was something of a surprise to lots of folks.
In one important sense, Pope Francis’s was the least likely response to Norah O’Donnell’s question for CBS. Francis didn’t need to say anything at all in order to maintain the status quo.
Pope Francis may yet give the Church some scheme based—at least in its purport—on the ancient idea that being in Holy Orders is a matter of legal status, of belonging to some rank of the κλῆρος or clerus, i.e. the clergy—a term that in its earliest use referred generally to anyone who had his or her living in whole or in part from service to the Church—rather than of having the one Sacrament of Holy Orders in any degree.
Deaconesses, after all, were ordained to special service—usually attached to specific churches—in both East and West for a thousand years. In some times and in some places, it seems they were enrolled among the clergy of a place, as were acolytes and exorcists (basically orderlies who helped with ritual preparation) and lectors and porters. Deaconesses, like acolytes and exorcists et al., were clerics in Holy Orders but did not have the Sacrament of Holy Orders.
There was also a role called “subdeacon” in the Church—there still is, in fact—and the subdiaconate was a Major Order in the West (until Pope St. Paul VI, father of modern and grandfather of contemporary synodality, suppressed it). It was and is a Minor Order in the East. This bears mention because Deaconesses sometimes vested with a subdeacon’s stole, suggesting—not establishing—parity of rank, which in any case is something any competent ecclesiastical authority could establish by law.
Whether restoring the Order of Deaconesses is a good idea, well, that’s not only a whole other question but another sort of question entirely. It is a question of prudence, a prudential question. Questions of prudence do not appear terribly important to Pope Francis or to the Church’s clerical and hierarchical leadership generally these days.
Leave them aside for a minute longer.
In any case, Pope Francis does not appear too keen to use his synodal process to “back door” any really significant changes into the Church.
“The most important element of the Synod on synodality is not so much the treatment of this or that problem,” Pope Francis told participants in a June 13th meeting—organized by the Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life—of people with leadership positions in various movements and communities and associations. “The most important element,” Francis said, “is the parochial, diocesan and universal journey we make together in synodality.”
As one wag put it somewhere on the internet, “The real synodality is the friends we made along the way.”
That’s a great line and I wish I’d thought of it, but I’m glad someone did.
Anyway, the reason it seems unlikely to this Vatican watcher that Francis will propose a scheme for Deaconesses that’s anything like the one sketched here, is that any such or similar arrangement requires a kind of thinking to which both Francis and the fellows he’s put in charge of the synod are very much unused and in fact apparently ill-suited.
In a word, it requires thinking organically, with tradition rather than against it or beside it or above it, with a view to clarifying what is possible in the present by understanding what the Church has done on her own terms in the past. It is a kind of thinking more closely akin to the ethos of the gardener or groundskeeper than that of the interior decorator (especially one of the reality show variety, who spends studio money to play in—and with—other people’s homes).
Gardens are places in which walls and fences go up from time to time, and from time to time come down. Signs saying, “Keep out,” and “Stay off the grass,” and “Don’t feed the wildlife,” are almost always to be found somewhere on the premises at any given time. Sometimes, things go wrong. Rot can creep in, and strangling growth can threaten the general health of any garden.
Sometimes, biting and stinging creatures will become a nuisance to visitors, especially careless ones.
Sometimes, fire is the only remedy.
Fire is destructive. Fire is dangerous. Fire spreads.
A gardener whose first instinct is to use fire is not a gardener, and sometimes the stinging creatures are pollinators, without which the garden may survive by art for a time, but the world will wither.
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“How long, Lord? How long?”
I appreciate reading an article about what Bergoglio is not.
(I.e., a good pope?)
I think I would be afraid to read about what he actually is.
The synod is a loaded cannon which is packed with all of the hot issues of the Church, but I doubt if anyone will light the wick.
Is it Arthur Conan Doyle or Fiorella De Maria? A good mystery writer gives intriguing details for the reader to ruminate. Altieri writes well, here a mystery novelist flair filled with knowledge on deaconesses I wasn’t aware of. That alone is worth the read.
Back to the mystery. A good writer leaves us puzzled which Altieri accomplishes. Is Synodal discernment humor? Or not. Is it the image of a garden with biting and stinging creatures that foretells the reaction within the Church for an imprudent policy? Fire dangerous and destruction? Or the withering inevitability of skeletal aging. Now my thoughts are more Stephen King. I don’t know the answer to female deaconesses in whatever form, but I like the mystery.
More smoke than fire, a fizzle! 😂
We read: “In any case, Pope Francis does not appear too keen to use his synodal process to ‘back door’ any really significant changes into the Church.”
To make this statement seems a failure to understand the “principle” of GRADUALISM….When Pope Francis was asked if he would approve a female diaconate, what he actually said was: “If it is deacons with holy orders, no.”
And what meaning or foreseeable consequence of deaconesses who are not ordained?
PRECEDENT: In the secular domain, gradualist accommodation is what gave us “civil unions,” not as the endgame but as the halfway house to mainstreaming the oxymoron “gay marriage”–and to the redefinition of marriage. So, now within the Church, instead of gay marriage (now blessed as “couples”), the synodal process will surely conjure non-ordained deaconesses. AND, likely, with a special “mission”?
ECCLESIAL MITOSIS: Not quite a half-way house with a “back door” into traditional ordination, but maybe a separate NICHE within a polyhedral Church? The non-ordained niche for deaconesses—perhaps under archdeaconess Jeannine Gramick coupled with James Martin (the communications/outreach guy)? Will the hologram niche-role be to “informally, non-liturgically and spontaneously” administer Fiducial Supplicans’ hologram blessings to irregular “couples” and the LGBTQ religion. This divisive role OUTSOURCED (!) from the ordained priesthood?
Under the principle of “gradualism,” a parallel church-within-a-Church? As a local option, of course, within a polyhedral carnival of accommodation? Almost as if the so-called Church, itself, is only a “pluralism of religions”? More Islamic in structure—with a gay “dhimmi” religion as a church-within-a-Church?
SUMMARY: Is the strategy about retaining doctrine on the one hand, while enabling disconnected (!) pastoral and non-pastoral praxis on the other? The German (!) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel smiles: the GRADUALISM of “backwardist” thesis + mutant antithesis = evolutionary synthesis!!! Say what?
The practice of “walking together” on the historical plane while sidestepping any kind of “development or contradiction of doctrine”? Non-ordained/dhimmi deaconesses, perhaps to be rebranded later, as “ordination” erodes further into a hologram within an evolved and “inverted pyramid” Church?
I question the “restoration of the Order of Deaconesses”, as there is not substantial evidence in my current graduate studies of such an order founded by the early Church Fathers. Women at that time could not speak to nor visit a priest on her own, and required a female who was representative of the church to relay information. Or perhaps she would be tended to by a woman who could prepare her for her faith journey or bring the Eucharist to her.
This position was not even close to an ordained woman, but rather a type of eucharistic minister or counsellor.
“In any case, Pope Francis does not appear too keen to use his synodal process to “back door” any really significant changes into the Church.” Stop being ignorant.
“”The most important element,” Francis said, “is the parochial, diocesan and universal journey we make together in synodality.”
Many people in the business, professional and governmental worlds have become familiar with this “journeying” toward greater organizational unity and harmony over the past several decades. It has been a popular metaphor in management theories that seek to reorganize/restructure/reform hierarchical organizational and operational structures into something that is … less hierarchical. That “something else” has been given different labels over time. Even the round tables used at the Synod on Synodality have been done before, with the idea that circular tables are better at promoting an egalitarian mood than rectangular tables. (But only if the round tables are small enough that people sitting across from each other don’t have to shout to be heard, as anyone who has sat at those huge round banquet tables used for large events has experienced.) However, now that many meetings have gone online, less people are sitting at tables, period, so meeting dynamics have changed again.
There is a lot of enthusiasm and hype around these various management plans and structures, so that it’s hard to get a clear picture of how well they work. From what I have seen so far, some of the ideas can be useful in smaller groups but it’s much harder to find larger, multi-level organizations that have been truly successful in adopting them. Hierarchical patterns continue to reassert themselves, often in quiter, less obvious ways. One of the biggest obstacles occurs with the core function of decision-making; making and transmitting decisions, followed by implementing those decisions and having them become generally adopted.
“As one wag put it somewhere on the internet, “The real synodality is the friends we made along the way.””. Yes, it is a great line that will never grow stale. Although I find myself silently inserting the parenthentical phrase “(and enemies)” after “friends.”
To create Deaconesses in this time of whirling confusion, pushing out of boundaries, etc, would be a mistake.It worked “back then” when the question of women priests would’ve never been considered.While today, when everything is being questioned, it would probably lead to a female priesthood, I could see transgender women to men becoming priests too.
While silly me thought the synod was to find ways to have more effective synods, and yet all it seems to actually be about are attempts to change any number of ancient teachings, and no other meaningful output, whatsoever. Kinda like every other synod of this pontificate. If this keeps up, I might even get suspicious.