What version of Catholic womanhood would prevail at the close of the Synod on Synodality? This was the question that brought me to Rome this October for its final session, which may have long-term ripple effects on Church politics, Mass attendance, and practical pastoral matters, like whether or not people in underserved communities have access to the sacraments.
I traveled as a reporter with Discerning Deacons (DD), a group that advocates for the renewal of the diaconate and for allowing women to become deacons, as they were in many places during the Church’s first nine hundred years. DD organized the pilgrimage along with CEAMA (the Ecclesial Conference of the Amazon), which advocates for protection of the Amazon rainforest and Amazonian peoples, as well as for women deacons. In 2019, the Amazon Synod voted with a 70-percent majority in favor of ordaining women to the diaconate.
The fifty-four DD and CEAMA pilgrims from five countries met in Rome during the first week of October. They had come from the United States, Australia, El Salvador, Canada, and Brazil. The youngest were in their twenties, the oldest in their eighties. Many of them were Indigenous; many immigrants to the United States from places like Mexico, India, and the Philippines. Some of them were sisters; some priests; some, to my surprise, lay men, like Darly Grigsby, an older Black man with a tattoo of the Eucharist on his forearm. Grigsby converted to Catholicism, he told me, “because of a Catholic woman. She was the pastoral life director at my church and her pastoral skills, her presence, her charism, changed my life.”
Most of the women like that pastoral life director have spent their entire lives doing ministry in the Church. Because they cannot be deacons or chaplains, we call them by many names: directors of liturgy and worship, pastoral assistants, catechists, spiritual directors, consociates, coordinators, theologians, directors of parish life. These titles often obscure more than they illuminate.
Some, though not all, feel called to be deacons, and many have already been asked by their bishops and priests to do diaconal work. Sr. Elizabeth Young, for example, performs baptisms and presides at funerals. Anne Attea does prison ministry. Ellie Hidalgo “give[s] reflections” at Mass. In short, these women do the work that deacons are called to do: the work of the Word, sacrament, and charity.
The role of the deacon was created in the early Church to make sure that the poor were not neglected in the daily distribution of food, to serve and recognize Jesus “in the distressing disguise of the poor,” as Mother Teresa put it. They also assisted priests by preaching and presiding over baptisms, weddings, and funerals.
Deacons are of vital importance, especially to struggling parishes. My husband’s cousin, Fr. John, is a priest whose specialty is saving dying churches. The first thing he does is get to know faithful men in the community and ask them if they have considered becoming deacons. When parishes are restored to health, it’s often because of those new deacons. Priests are moved from parish to parish, but deacons stay and serve their communities for life.
Because women in Catholic ministry are not technically “ministers,” they run into many problems and are prevented from helping the way they are called to. Anne Attea, who works with many undocumented people, told me, “Every now and then somebody is picked up by the police. An ordained minister can have access to prisoners, can visit them in prison—I was in prison and you visited me. But officially there are no women ministers in Catholicism.” Instead of a visit, she must make do with a video chat.
The DD pilgrims arrived in Rome with great hope. Pope Francis has said that he wants “a listening church” that responds to the needs of the laity. They did not expect, of course, that women would be ordained by the close of the synod, but they did hope a path would begin to emerge.
But by day two of their pilgrimage it was announced that the topic of women deacons was off the table and would no longer be discussed. Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández announced that “there is still no room for a positive decision by the magisterium regarding the access of women to the diaconate.” He noted that Pope Francis “does not consider the question mature.” The mere discussion of women deacons, though it is mentioned in Scripture (Rom 16:1-2) and in tradition (Council of Nicea 325 and Council of Chalcedon 451), was forbidden by a Church devoted to both. The topic would instead be taken up by a secretive study group, not the full assembly.
Although I had heard many hateful stereotypes about these women, who have been derided as “wanting power” in order to “change the Church,” they did not despair. Rosella Kinoshameg, who serves the Odawa/Ojibway people on Manitoulin Island in Ontario and is in her eighties, said simply, “I trust in the Holy Spirit. When it’s meant to happen it will happen.”
Rosella and the other pilgrims were mocked by Australian bishop Anthony Randazzo at a synod press conference. “A small minority with a powerful Western voice are obsessed with pressing this issue,” he said, “at the cost of the dignity of women in the Church and the world.” Bishop Randazzo, a white Westerner, was pretending to defend women of the Global South by suggesting that the issue of female deacons is a white Western women’s preoccupation distracting from real problems.
But Rosella, like many of her fellow pilgrims, is not white, wealthy, or powerful. She is not an influencer and she has no social media. She is unconcerned with Western “culture wars.” She is a poor Indigenous woman who serves other poor Indigenous people because she has been asked to serve by her priest. She had come to Rome with Sr. Laura Vicuna, the head of CEAMA—herself a penniless woman who serves the poor Indigenous people of her native Brazil as a Franciscan nun.
Casting doubt on women’s callings is a very old story in Catholicism. At the Papal Mass in St. Peter’s Square we looked up at the sculptures of women who had been persecuted in their own time but were now saints on the colonnade. St. Teresa of Ávila, now a Doctor of the Church, was brought before the Inquisition and imprisoned for attempting to reform the Carmelite order. St. Thelca, who wanted to be a celibate preacher like St. Paul, not a wife and mother, survived multiple attempts on her life. We looked up at St. Olympia, who was herself a deacon.
The DD pilgrims I met were, to a person, extremely devout. They met for morning and evening prayer, in addition to daily Mass. They aren’t “cause people” as conservative Catholic George Weigel calls them. They’re women who love the Church, often at a great personal cost, and have spent their lives serving her. Women like Zully Tellez would text the group, “I’m praying a rosary in Spanish at 9 p.m. in the chapel if anyone would like to join me.” I knew their callings were sincere when I heard their testimonies, but they were further confirmed when I found that they were too busy doing good works to talk much about them.
Like St. Phoebe, they were believers who had come with an important message, only they had been forbidden to deliver it. That message was simple: there are women already doing the work of deacons; it makes sense to strengthen them with sacramental grace. While LGBTQ Catholics and others were able to speak to the synod participants directly about their experiences, these women were not.
By now it is well known that the diaconate for women is not and never has been doctrinally precluded, and that women are mentioned as deacons in both Scripture and tradition. It is perhaps less well known, however, that the tradition of women deacons has been intentionally downplayed. The reading which mentions St. Phoebe was omitted from the lectionary in 1969, so Catholics never hear it at Mass. Phoebe’s saint day was never put on the Church’s calendar, effectively erasing her, until recently, from Catholic memory and devotion.
The argument against women deacons is weak, so its opponents attack its supporters’ character and identity instead of their ideas. Men who are discerning are encouraged, celebrated, prayed for, and educated for free. Their discernment in and of itself—even if they are not called—is seen as worthwhile. Meanwhile, women who are called are stereotyped as angry, delusional, not really Catholic. These stereotypes are so pervasive that even I did not go to Rome expecting to meet women who had obvious vocations.
On October 4, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, DD and CEAMA held an educational event at Vatican’s Dicastery for the Faith in which many women spoke of their lives of diaconal service. I felt—and I felt everyone in the room knew—that we were in the presence of real holiness. It was a humbling experience. These women were not activists, they were not celebrities, they were saints.
Sr. Elizabeth Young, who works with the Aborignal peoples in Wilcanna, Australia, spoke of telling her parents she had a vocation at the age of seven. A soft-spoken redhead who draws no attention to herself, Sr. Elizabeth lives in one of the poorest communities on earth, where she hopes to be able to stay “as long as they will let me.” “I am blessed to be doing almost the same ministry as deacons,” she said. “My bishop...instituted me as a Catechist and Parish Life Coordinator to live as a guest in this beautiful town that, however, has been named as one of the most disadvantaged communities in the state.” Her bishop has also asked her to preside over funerals and baptisms.
[J]ust last week I had to conduct three funerals.... One of the deceased was a member of the stolen generation and the godfather at the first baptism I performed there. As we share the power of ritual and enter into vulnerable spaces, we look to the cultural traditions and spiritual resources that have meaning and the power of healing. More and more I feel it is God’s mercy, both given and received. Yet healing is needed at all levels, including the Church. My ministry is a privilege, yet I don’t see many pathways for other women after me.
Sr. Elizabeth would not even name her bishop for fear he would face reprisals for allowing her to serve in this way.
Sr. Laura Vicuna Pereira Manso, a Franciscan sister who lives in an Indigenous community in Portho Velho, Brazil, spoke of watching her Indigenous brothers and sisters be murdered while trying to protect the Amazon rainforest, their ancestral home. As she spoke, Cardinal Barreto of Peru, also a member of CEAMA, nodded his head and pointed to her as if to say, listen to her. It is a struggle to imagine an American Cardinal sitting next to a woman called to ordained ministry and simply listening and nodding his head.
Rosella Kinoshameg, who was sent to a residential school at the age of eight, now has ecclesial recognition as a leader in her Indigenous Catholic community. She presides over communion services, leads prayers at funerals and wakes, ministers to the sick and dying, and chairs the board of the Indigenous Reconciliation Fund. She spoke of Kamloops in British Columbia, where unmarked graves of First Nations children were recently found at the site of a residential school. “When we heard the news,” Rosella said, pausing to collect herself, “people were very upset and angry, many people left the Church.... I meet people where they are in this anger and pain.... I do this as a representative of the Church because I am part of the Diocesan Order of Service.”
As a girl, she was taught by her teachers that Indigenous ways were “evil,” but she says, “My father showed me how our Catholic faith and native teachings could come together.” She now leads smudging (purification) ceremonies before Mass at her parish because she was asked to do so by her priest. They are a way of keeping traditions alive and atoning for past sins committed against native people. She spoke of her calling to “carry out the ministries of acolyte and lector, and to assist in other ministries necessary to the life of the Church community” and to advance her parish’s mission “to raise up Indigenous leaders in a fully alive Indigenous Catholic Church.”
Despite the setback, all those who spoke had faith that a female diaconate would eventually become a reality. Casey Stanton, the codirector of DD, put it this way, “Today we watched workers who are re-laying a cobblestone street on the edge of the Vatican. One little square at a time. They are old stones. There’s a giant pile of them. It looks like it will never be finished—but actually the road is being rebuilt. This ancient path will be restored, in time, the signs would have us believe, for the jubilee.”
On Sunday, October 7, the last day of the pilgrimage, all of the cardinals and synod delegates were invited to a private rosary with Pope Francis. Thousands of ordinary people came to the plaza outside the church, rosaries in hand, to attend the recently announced event.
The pilgrims stood outside and prayed with other synod participants, carrying images of St. Phoebe. Rosella, elderly and unable to stand for long periods of time, sat on the ground. A giant screen was erected in front of the Papal Basilica of Saint Mary Major, a building consecrated and dedicated to Mary by Pope Sixtus III in 432 but not completed until 1743. At first, the screen displayed ads for Italian luxury brands like Versace. The images of glamorous fashion models stood in stark contrast to the habited nuns and sandaled Franciscans. Eventually the rosary service came on the screen and the pilgrims prayed along in dozens of languages. It sounded chaotic until everyone landed in unison on the “Ave Marias” and the “amens.”
As clerics and delegates left St. Mary Major, the pilgrims, along with the rest of the participants, approached them asking for prayers. One asked for “prayers for Syria where I serve, and for an end to the war”; another asked for prayers for his family: “I am a deacon and I have a wife and two children at home in Belgium.”
It reminded me of a scene at the beginning of the film, “A Man for All Seasons”: Thomas More, leaving a meeting with Cardinal Wosley, is pressed by commoners waiting with petitions written on tiny scraps of paper. Like More, the princes of the Church stopped after the service and indulged those beseeching them. DD and CEAMA members asked them to pray for the Church’s discernment of the role of women in ministry. They pressed prayer cards with an icon of St. Phoebe into the clerics’ hands. “We are here,” they seemed to be saying. “We are serving. We too are the Church.”
The idea of synodality, which Pope Francis clearly hopes will outlive his pontificate, is to make the Church into both a teaching Church and a listening Church. To reflect this, the tables at the synod were circular, and everyone was encouraged to speak freely. This sounds small, but it’s radical in a quiet way.
Despite the doors closing to women deacons, there’s evidence of the Church listening to those hoping to expand women’s role. Synod membership was opened up to four hundred delegates, with women serving as voting members for the first time. One of those fifty-four women, Sr. Maria de los Dolores Palencia of Mexico, a fierce defender of migrants and other vulnerable people, served as the President Delegate to the Synod Assembly. Asked at one press conference what it was like to be carrying out a role previously reserved for men, she responded in a measured but optimistic way: “I think we are truly on a journey with the role of women, their gifts and contributions are increasingly recognized.” Women like her were referred to as “Synod Mothers,” and included many theologians. They were accepted by so-called conservative and liberal Catholics alike.
Before the Second Vatican Council, there were no female professors of theology. Today, who, even on the Right, would want to go back to a time when women were not permitted to study and teach theology? Women are in the highest levels of administration and management in the Church, to an extent that would have been unthinkable sixty years ago. One DD pilgrim, Dr. Lydia Tinajero Deck, told me, “The nuns are already running things, they are not meek and mild.” The changes are slow, sometimes achingly so, but they are real.
And there is widespread support for women to be accepted into ministry. One delegate from the United States speaking on background said, “The synod said yes. The Pope said no.” Even at synod press conferences, the “no” was not a “never,” but rather, as Fr. Giacoma Costa S.J. said, a “not yet.” “It’s not exactly clear how to develop this diaconate,” he explained. “We are looking for an ecclesial path.”
But for now, the contradictions remain unresolved. Women cannot image God and yet they are made in God’s image. Women are revered and yet derivative and inferior. Women are equal and yet they remain marked with the sin of Eve—dangerous troublemakers made of breasts and blood and temptation, whose hands cannot bless. The Catechism says that God is neither male nor female, and yet it is very important that “He” is a he. The Church says that women can be saints and that they can lead. They are given the same baptismal grace. But it lacks credibility, especially with the next generation, when it says at the same time, even in light of the priest shortage, that it is better for someone to be deprived of the sacraments than to receive them from a girl.
The fear among Catholics who oppose women deacons is real. For them the Church is like a very old sweater: you pull one thread and the whole thing may unravel. But there is fear on the other side as well. Without more deacons, both male and female, many people will not encounter a minister in their time of need. They will not be served, and they will feel abandoned. Here is a danger of genuine unraveling. The Church will look weak, unwilling to admit when it has fallen short. The American Catholic Church in particular may increasingly become a club for people with revanchist views on gender and sexuality, instead of a Church whose doors are open to anyone who wishes to bow their heads before Jesus in the Eucharist and pray.
Luckily, the heirs of St. Phoebe are not going anywhere. Their pleas to be used not simply as office managers but as ministers will continue to be pressed into the hands of bishops and cardinals and popes, until someone says yes, it is right and just that this ancient path be restored.
