American bishop suggests ordination of female deacons
CWN – September 21, 2012
In the Jesuit magazine America, Bishop Emil Wcela, an auxiliary of the Rockville Center, New York diocese, suggests that women might be ordained to hte permanent diaconate.
Bishop Wcela acknowledges that Pope John Paul II wrote in 1994 that the Church “has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.” But he questions whether that statement applies to the ordination of deacons, whose role in the Church can be distinguished from that of priests. He calls for wider discussion of the possibility.
Additional sources for this story: Why Not Women? (America) www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?o=1000&article_id=13590
I thought I had seen it all when female extraordinary ministers and altar girls were not only approved but encouraged, and now this. I hope I will never see this happen in my lifetime, but I have my doubts unless a truly Catholic and valiant Pope puts the Church back in the right track.
It’s a good start. Someday we’ll have a female Pope.
I thought that we already had one in the person of Popess Joan.
Some thoughts occasioned by Bp. Wcela’s essay on female deacons
Edward Peters, JD, JCD, Ref. Sig. Ap.
In the Light of the Law: A Canon Lawyer’s Blog
September 22, 2012
canonlawblog.wordpress.com/2012/09/22/some-thoughts-occasioned-by-bp-wcelas-essay-on-female-deacons/
Writing in America magazine, Bp. Emil Wcela (ret. aux. Rockville Center) is encouraging wider public debate on the ordination of women to the diaconate. Those not familiar with the arguments favoring female ordination to the diaconate can find them outlined in Wcela’s essay. Counter arguments—and they are many—are available in, e.g., Aimé Georges Martimort, Deaconesses: an historical study (Ignatius, 1986).
Some canonical observations occasioned by Wcela’s essay.
1. Canon 1024 declares invalid any attempt to ordain women (presumably, first to diaconate). While Canon 1024 does not address the question of a woman’s ontological capacity for ordination, it leaves no doubt that any attempt to ordain a woman to any level of holy Orders is of zero sacramental force in the Church today.
2. John Paul II’s ap. lit. Ordinatio sacerdotalis (1994) settles forever, negatively, and on ecclesiological grounds, the question of ordaining women to priesthood (and by logical necessity, to episcopate). Further agitation for the ordination of women to Catholic priesthood seems a violation of Canon 1371, 2º—Wcela does not do that. Ordinatio says nothing, however, at least in its dispositive paragraph 4, about ordaining women to diaconate nor, strictly speaking, does it address (at least not definitively) ontological questions about female ordination. In that regard, discussion may continue.
3. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 2008 visitation of a latae sententiae excommunication, however, on those attempting to ordain women to the diaconate represents, I suggest, something more than a temporary disciplinary measure against prematurely implementing a sacramental development that might, in fact, never come. That such a severe sanction is levied at all suggests to me that some very significant—if not yet formally defined—values are being protected thereby.
Consider: sanctions for the invalid and/or illicit conferral of sacraments are relatively few in number, at least when compared to the total number of ways that such conferrals can be abused. Specifically in regard to ordination, only the illicit conferral of episcopal orders contrary to Canon 1382 is punished with excommunication; other violations of law in the context of ordination (say, conferral of orders without proper dimissorial letters, per c. 1383) carry lesser penalties. The same lighter touch marked the Pio-Benedictine Code (see, e.g., 1917 CIC 2364).
Therefore, it seems to me that the CDF excommunication for attempted female ordination (especially in light of the roll-back that excommunication has undergone over the last 150 years) should be taken as a sign that ecclesiastical authority regards female ordination, even to diaconate, with at best grave reservations; the enactment of such a sanction certainly does not suggest that female diaconal ordination is coming, and that all we need is time to work out the details.