Synod’s Final Text Includes Openness to Female Deacons After Draft Version’s Silence

Whilst the "Sin-od" is over, I'm afraid the Revolution has just begun. Like VII, the devil is in the details, the time bombs planted in the documents.

From LifeSiteNews

By Michael Haynes

No mention of female deacons was included in the draft report issued to the synod participants, according to a report, but amendments were then made to the final document.

Though the Synod on Synodality’s final document said the question of female deacons “remains open,” the draft text notably did not contain any mention of the topic, according to a new report.

Late Saturday night, the much-anticipated final document of the Synod on Synodality was issued to the public, after the Synod members voted to approve it. Pope Francis made the rare move of not writing an apostolic exhortation on the text but simply officially adopting it, meaning that under the terms of his 2018 Apostolic Constitution Episcopalis communio, “the Final Document participates in the ordinary Magisterium of the Successor of Peter.”

By far the most contentious paragraph of the text was paragraph 60 (258 votes for/97 against) dealing with certain questions relating to the role of women in the Church, and including the statement that “the question of women’s access to diaconal ministry remains open.”

READ: Synod final text calls for continued ‘process’ with synodal ‘listening’ and dialogue

But according to the National Catholic Register, there was no mention of female deacons at all in the draft report issued to the synod participants on October 21. The Register obtained a copy of the draft text and it was on this basis that its report was published.

Not only was there no mention of female deacons, but the passages calling for increased female governance in the Church were considerably toned down in the draft text. The draft reads that women’s “full participation in positions of responsibility and governance in the Church, including in decision-making processes, remains limited” and that this “needs to be addressed.”

With Synod participants receiving the draft text on Monday, October 21 they had until the end of Wednesday of that week to submit their proposed amendments to the Synod Secretariat. As noted by the Holy See press office, some 1,000 amendments were submitted, which was a little less than the 1,200 submitted during last year’s final week.

The Secretariat then took the amendments and spent Thursday and Friday compiling them into the final document, which was read to members on Saturday morning and voted by them in the afternoon.

Such an alteration between the draft and the final text is notable. It points to the fact that enough Synod members felt strongly enough about including the call for female deacons that the Synod Secretariat were compelled to amend the draft text to represent this.

The final text reads in Paragraph 60:

By virtue of Baptism, women and men have equal dignity as members of the People of God. However, women continue to encounter obstacles in obtaining a fuller recognition of their charisms, vocation and roles in all the various areas of the Church’s life. This is to the detriment of serving the Church’s shared mission…Women contribute to theological research and are present in positions of responsibility in Church institutions, in diocesan curias and the Roman Curia. There are women who hold positions of authority and are leaders of their communities.

This Assembly asks for full implementation of all the opportunities already provided for in Canon Law with regard to the role of women, particularly in those places where they remain under-explored. There is no reason or impediment that should prevent women from carrying out leadership roles in the Church: what comes from the Holy Spirit cannot be stopped.

Additionally, the question of women’s access to diaconal ministry remains open. This discernment needs to continue. The Assembly also asks that more attention be given to the language and images used in preaching, teaching, catechesis, and the drafting of official Church documents, giving more space to the contributions of female saints, theologians and mystics.

Another factor could also have influenced the final document. Last Thursday while the final text was being compiled, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, prefect for the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, was meeting with Synod members and Study Group 5 about the question of female deacons.

READ: Cardinal Fernández says question of female deacons is not closed, citing Pope Francis

During the meeting, the cardinal stated that “the question of women’s access to diaconal ministry remains open” despite Catholic teaching infallibly stating that the matter is closed.

Pope Francis has famously voiced opposition to female deacons while simultaneously repeatedly welcoming advocates of the female diaconate to advise him at the Vatican and at the Synod.

At the start of October, Fernández briefed the Synod on the question of female ordination saying that “the Dicastery judges that there is still no room for a positive decision by the Magisterium regarding the access of women to the diaconate, understood as a degree of the Sacrament of Holy Orders.”

“The Holy Father himself recently confirmed this consideration publicly,” he added.

But speaking to the Synod last Thursday, Fernández said that Francis “doesn’t want” to be “closing the issue of the diaconate.”

Rather, the Pope “says one can still study with patience and without obsession, without haste. One can continue to study and that is very important,” Fernández said of the pontiff. “But he thinks things are not yet mature.”

Contrary to the hopes of women’s ordination activists, the Catholic Church has clearly pronounced the impossibility of “female deacons.”

One such pronouncement is found in Pope John Paul II’s 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, where he wrote, “I declare 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.”

Indeed, in 2018, Cardinal Luis Ladaria Ferrer, S.J., then-prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, defended the teaching of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis as bearing the mark of “infallibility,” with John Paul II having “formally confirmed and made explicit, so as to remove all doubt, that which the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium has long considered throughout history as belonging to the deposit of faith.”