This week, I’ve attended celebrations at my parish in honor of St. Phoebe, who carried St. Paul’s letter from the area of Corinth to Rome. In the opening of the letter, Paul refers to her as a deacon, diakonos in Greek.
For the first few centuries of the Christian church, women served as deacons (and priests) but this ministry was suppressed as the church took on the power structure of the Roman Empire. The diaconate for men became a temporary step on the way to the ordination as a priest. The permanent diaconate was restored for men in the Catholic Church by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s and there has been conversation since about restoring it to women. Under Pope Francis, there have been two study commissions and many bishops at the synod on the Amazon voted in favor of ordaining women, who are already doing this ministry as lay workers, as permanent deacons. However, their recommendation was not included in the final report.
On October 4th, Pope Francis will convene a new synod, called “For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, and Mission.” While the majority of voting members will still be bishops, there will also be vowed religious and lay men and women as voting members. It will be the first time that women have ever been voting members in a synod. The document that will be the center of their discussions, called the Instrumentum Laboris, available in several languages here, is made up largely of questions gleaned from listening sessions around the world. A major theme that arose in every region was the treatment of women in church and society and ways to recognize their ministry, service, and leadership in the Church.
The truth is that women constitute the majority of those who work in church ministry but, because they are not ordained, they seldom serve in official, high-level leadership roles. Meanwhile, in many parts of the world, particularly in the global South, where ordained priests are rare, women are ministering in their communities, teaching, preaching, leading prayer services, visiting the sick, and acting as the leader of their parishes without having the option of diaconal ordination. There is hope that this synod, which will conclude next year, will finally make women deacons a renewed reality in the Catholic Church.
So, sorry for the long wind-up, but back to celebrating St. Phoebe this week…
The impetus to celebrate St. Phoebe on or near her September third feast day comes from an organization named Discerning Deacons, whose “mission is to engage Catholics in the active discernment of our Church about women and the diaconate.” I admire their work and pray that the Synod will heed the voice of the Holy Spirit and restore the diaconate to Catholic women.
But, it’s complicated for me to have hope because of my and my sisters-in-faith’s history on the issue of women’s ordination.
I have long believed that God calls people to ordained ministry without regard to their age, gender, nationality, race, language, or any other personal characteristic. In his earthly ministry, Jesus called many disciples from among the marginalized, including women. Besides historical evidence of Catholic women deacons, there is evidence of women priests and bishops in the early centuries. Married men as priests persisted into the twelfth century; their prohibition had more to do with inheritance and property rights than with spiritual matters. For centuries, the power in the church has resided in the clergy. During Pope Francis’s papacy, he has worked to re-organize the structures of the church to allow more lay people, including women, to have leadership roles and to combat the clericalism that led to so many abuses of power and the ensuing cover-ups over the centuries.
While having women restored to ordination in the diaconate could increase leadership roles for women in the church, it doesn’t address the continued denial by the Church of the full personhood of each individual, regardless of their gender. The Church considers sexism a social sin but it cannot credibly call it out in other institutions while continuing to practice it itself.
As Catholics, we are taught to see the image of Christ in each person. Somehow, though, we are supposed to believe that only a celibate male can image Christ while standing at the Eucharistic table.
Treating women as second-class, sadly, also spills over into our social world with serious, even deadly, consequences. For example, the official Catholic viewpoint that prioritizes fetal life over the life and health of the pregnant person is leading to death or loss of fertility when care for a complication is delayed because a fetal heartbeat can still be detected, even when the gestational age or medical condition of the fetus makes survival impossible.
Even within the Church, women are not equally respected as employees. I have experienced this personally and seen it happen over and over with other women, including vowed religious. In the US, church employees don’t have recourse to employment discrimination law, so the Church can act without regard to state and federal law. Of course, it does violate Catholic social justice doctrine on respecting the dignity of work and of the worker. Sadly, restoring the diaconate to women will not address these larger inequities unless it is accompanied by intensive structural reforms of the institution, especially the clergy.
So, now comes the hard part of this post – the personal history.
Back in the mid 1980s- 1990s, I belonged to a local group called Sarah’s Circle. We began as a group of Catholic women, most of whom felt called to ordination – we did also include a couple of male members – who gathered once or twice a month for prayer, discussion, and support. While we did participate in an occasional public prayer service or event, we existed for our own spiritual fulfillment and to hold each other up when life in the Church became difficult.
Some things that our members did ruffled some feathers in the diocese. For example, the diocese ran a program to enlist parishioners to submit names for possible candidates to ordained ministry or vowed religious orders. A number of Sarah’s circle members, including me, submitted women’s names to become priests or deacons.
We wound up being discovered by the broader community when someone wrote a letter to the editor of the local newspaper accusing us of being witches, which was laughable as we were Catholics, not Wiccan. Somehow, this morphed into a brief moment of national notoriety, which included us being denounced by radio personality Rush Limbaugh. It was all very strange but served to make our local circle more powerful. We even were featured as part of a 60 Minutes piece about women’s ordination in 1996.
Over time, most of our members drifted away from the Church. Some joined other Christian denominations. One is now an ordained minister. I still grieve that the Catholic Church was so blinded by patriarchy that they turned away these compassionate, talented, holy women from ordained ministry.
Despite the pain, I stayed in the Church. I used to joke that it was “just me and the nuns” who were sticking it out. (Technically, they weren’t nuns, who are usually cloistered; they were vowed religious sisters.) As more and more of our members were drawn in different directions, we stopped meeting, staying in touch in little arcs, instead of a full circle. Sarah’s Circle’s records are now part of the archives of the Burke Library of the Union Theological Seminary, part of the Columbia University system, in New York City.
So, back to the present reality. My parish is looking into starting a Discerning Deacons group and I don’t know if I should join. Part of the reason I was able to stay within the Church was that, in a long-standing attitude of cowardice, I never did the spiritual work to discern if I was being called to ordained ministry as a deacon or priest.
Not that there weren’t signs that I should do so.
When I was a young mother, I had two vivid dreams in which I was a priest.
Back in the days before the diocese started to specify that only men and single women were invited to inquiry meetings about the call to ordination or religious life, I attended one. After the more general information sessions, we had to break into groups for prospective deacons, priests, or sisters. I originally wanted to join the priest group but didn’t want to disturb the teens and young-adult men there, so I joined the deacon’s group. I remember the deacon who was leading the group saying that, often, the wives of deacons would attend all the preparatory courses and training with their husbands and what a shame it was that, at the end, their husbands were ordained and they received no recognition of their own gifts.
Later, after my daughters were grown and before I joined my present parish, there was a powerful homily about God’s call to individuals that was entwined with the singing of the hymn “Here I Am, Lord” by Dan Schutte. At the time, the deacon serving the parish was ill and I remember looking at his empty seat near the altar and thinking, “I could be that.” I was crying while singing the refrain: “Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord? I have heard you calling in the night. I will go, Lord, if you lead me. I will hold your people in my heart.” I did make an appointment to speak to the pastor, who was sympathetic but, at the time, there wasn’t really anything to be done.
So, moving on to this summer. As the St. Phoebe observance was coming together at my current parish, the pastor invited me to read the gospel passage for the prayer service. I was honored to be asked because, during mass, reading the gospel is reserved to ordained clergy only. During a prayer service, lay people may read from the gospels so I wasn’t breaking any rules, but the symbolism of the invitation to publicly read from the gospels was significant for me.
I expected the evening to be emotional for me, which it was, and fraught, which it also was.
I have circled back to another opportunity to discern God’s call, but now about to turn 63 and unsure of how long I will live in this place – or live at all. I’ve amassed a lot of valuable experience but also am burdened by the pain the Church has inflicted on me and my loved ones. I’m tired. Of the struggles. Of the dismissals. Of the lack of charity. understanding, and compassion.
Do I dare to discern?
Do I, despite the history, dare to hope?
Joanne Corey 