Reading the Vatican Commission Report on the Female Diaconate
Inconclusive Findings, Open Theological Questions
One of the most high-profile questions facing the delegates at the first session of the Synod on Synodality, held in the Vatican in 2023, was whether women could be ordained as deacons. The Synod was not the first Vatican body to consider this question, however. In 2002, the International Theological Commission (ITC) published a document on the diaconate which includes a detailed section on the historical role of deaconesses in the Early Church. At the request of the International Union of Superiors Generals (an international association of religious orders), in 2016 Pope Francis established a commission to likewise study the historical evidence regarding women deacons. This commission was sharply divided over the theological significance of the available historical evidence, although its findings have never been made public. And in the aftermath of the 2019 Synod on the Pan-Amazon Region where the question of women deacons was again raised, Francis appointed a second commission in 2020. This commission met periodically through 2022, although at the time its work was not made public.
Even as the delegates discussed the issue of the female diaconate at the Synod’s first session, it became clear that the issue would not be worked out at the Synod. The following March, Pope Francis established ten study groups assigned to tackle several topics that were too complex to be resolved at the Synod. The question of women deacons, and women’s leadership in the Church more generally, was assigned to Study Group 5. At the second Synod session in 2024, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández revealed that this “study group,” unlike the others, was in fact a project of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), the Vatican office he heads. But he also announced that the specific question of the female diaconate would be handed back to the second commission established by Pope Francis, which would be reconvened. (Colleen Dulle at America has a more detailed account of these events here.)
This commission, known as the “Petrocchi commission” after its head, Cardinal Giuseppe Petrocchi, briefly resumed its work in 2025. Then earlier this month Pope Leo XIV requested that a summary of the commission’s findings be published (the commission’s full report has not been made public). The summary is in fact a letter written by Cardinal Petrocchi to Pope Leo summarizing the key points discussed by the commission and providing a tally of the votes by the commission’s ten members on a series of propositions related to their work. The headline conclusion of the commission is that “[T]he purely historical perspective does not allow us to arrive at any definitive certainty [regarding the ordination of women the diaconate]. In the final analysis, the question must be decided on the doctrinal level.” Although the commission did not conclude that women ought to be ordained to the diaconate, as many had hoped, the commission’s conclusion is also certainly not a definitive “no.” A close reading of Cardinal Petrocchi’s summary, I think, shows that the commission left the question more open than many, both supporters of the female diaconate and opponents alike, seem to think.
As I already noted, Petrocchi’s summary distinguishes between the historical question of the role of deaconesses in the Church’s tradition and the doctrinal or theological question of whether women can be sacramentally ordained as deacons. The ITC had already made this distinction in their 2002 document, which concluded that the doctrinal question remains open. Although this distinction is important, it does not imply that the historical and the theological are unrelated. Theology needs to be informed by the Church’s historical practice.
On the historical side, there is no question that there were women instituted as deaconesses in the Early Church. In Romans 16:1, the Apostle refers to Phoebe as a “minister [diakonos] of the church at Cenchreae.” And 1 Timothy 3, after describing the qualifications of deacons, describes certain women as having some kind of ministerial role in the Church, as well (v. 11); Church Fathers like Clement of Alexandria and John Chrysostom and some modern scholars have interpreted this as a reference to women deacons. Beginning in the third century, there is abundant evidence of women referred to as deaconesses, particularly in parts of the Eastern Church. These women were responsible for anointing women for baptism, the instruction of women in the faith, and ministering to women in the Church community, for example by visiting the sick.
The more controversial question is whether these deaconesses were sacramentally ordained. Cardinal Petrocchi reports that the commission unanimously voted in favor of this conclusion:
Based on the current state of historical research and of our knowledge of biblical and patristic testimonies, it can reasonably be said that the female diaconate, which developed unequally in the different parts of the Church, has not been understood simply as the female equivalent of the male diaconate and does not seem to have held a sacramental character.
At first glance, this seems to suggest the commission was not convinced that the role of deaconess in the Early Church was considered at the time to have a sacramental character. But there are a couple of oddities regarding this conclusion. The first, which some commentators have noted, is that Petrocchi reports that the vote on this thesis, which took place during the commission’s first session in 2021, was 7 in favor, 0 opposed, and 1 abstention. What happened to the other two members?
The second oddity is perhaps more substantial, although I don’t know if anyone has noted it previously. The thesis under consideration here by the commission is what one might call a “double-barreled” proposition: the commission members are asked to state whether the proposition “x and y” is true or not. To affirm the proposition as true would logically mean affirming both x and y, while denying the proposition would not necessarily mean that both x and y are false; it could also mean that only one or the other is false. For example, “Matt is tall and green” is a false statement, but that doesn’t mean I’m not tall. This creates a great deal of ambiguity.
Ignoring for the moment the added complication that the thesis the commissioners were asked to vote on is phrased in the negative (i.e., “not ‘x and y’”), the thesis (referred to as “thesis no. 3” in the summary) includes two distinct claims:
x: Historically, the female diaconate was viewed “as the female equivalent of the male diaconate.”
y: Historically, the female diaconate was seen as holding “a sacramental character.”
This is significant because x is obviously false—deacons and deaconesses clearly performed distinct functions in the Early Church—but y has been hotly disputed by scholars. Therefore, it’s not at all clear that the commission’s unanimous vote in favor of this thesis was intended as a denial of both x and y considered separately or of “x and y” considered as a single whole, and so I don’t think we really know what the commission thought about the sacramental character of the historical female diaconate considered by itself.
And I don’t think this is logic chopping. The other theses considered by the commission show that they were very attentive to wording. For example, for “thesis no. 5,” which I will consider shortly, they were asked to consider two differently worded versions of the thesis as well as its inverse! But let’s look more closely at these two historical claims (x and y above).
Anyone who has engaged in the scholarly study of the Bible knows that we cannot anachronistically read back into the New Testament the relatively clear distinction between bishops, priests, and deacons that we know today. These three roles, although mentioned in the New Testament, evolved over time. This lack of clarity, however, continued well into the Early Church. Other ministerial roles—subdeacons, lectors, acolytes, door-keepers, etc.—emerged, as well, and their functions often overlapped with those of priests and deacons, sometimes becoming a source of conflict. Male deacons and deaconesses also had some overlapping functions: both served as intermediaries between the faithful and the bishop, and both engaged in a ministry of service, with deacons serving primarily men and deaconesses women. But there were also important differences, most notably the fact that deacons could administer baptism and participate in the Eucharistic offering, while deaconesses could not.
According to the Apostolic Constitutions, a fourth-century Christian document from Syria, deaconesses were ordained in the same way as bishops, priests, and deacons: the bishop would lay hands on the individual and invoke the Holy Spirit. The prayer said over new deaconesses is in fact quite beautiful:
Eternal God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, creator of man and woman, who filled Myriam, Deborah, Anne and Hulda with your spirit; who did not deem it unworthy for your Son, the Only-Begotten, to be born of a woman; who in the tent of witness and in the temple did institute women as guardians of your sacred doors, look now upon your servant before you, proposed for the diaconate: grant her the Holy Spirit and purify her of all defilement of flesh and spirit so that she may acquit herself worthily of the office which has been entrusted to her, for your glory and to the praise of your Christ, through whom be glory and adoration to you, in the Holy Spirit, world without end. Amen. (Apostolic Constitutions 8.20.1-2)
Advocates for the female diaconate point to this ritual as evidence that the ordination of deaconesses was sacramental in nature. On the other hand, other ministers like subdeacons and lectors were also ordained in a similar way, and so the historical evidence on the sacramental character of the role of deaconess is suggestive but inconclusive. As the ITC’s 2002 document points out, the sacramental character of the diaconate itself was not clearly and specifically affirmed in magisterial teaching until the post-Vatican II period!
Importantly, the Petrocchi commission did not believe that the inconclusive historical record was itself grounds for rejecting the female diaconate today. Although the commission voted down a thesis proposing the institution of the female diaconate “understood as the third degree of Holy Orders” (“thesis no. 5C,” 2 yes, 6 no, 2 abstaining), they also voted down a proposition stating that they definitively opposed the institution of the female diaconate (5A, 4 yes, 5 no, 1 abstaining) and another provisionally opposing its institution while leaving the door open to further development of the Church’s teaching on the matter (5B, 4 yes, 5 no, 1 abstaining). I think this refusal to even provisionally oppose the institution of the female diaconate, while also refusing to recommend it, is quite telling.
The role of deaconess disappeared around the same time that the diaconate and other ministerial roles like subdeacon, acolyte, and lector were reduced to steps in the process of becoming a priest, a gradual change that was largely complete by the tenth century. The office of deacon had become a temporary status on the way to the priesthood, a practice still reflected in the ordination of seminarians as “transitional deacons” prior to their ordination to the priesthood. The role of deacon as a permanent ministry in the Church disappeared, while the functions of deaconesses were absorbed by monastic abbesses.
The Second Vatican Council, however, called for the restoration of the permanent diaconate, and Paul VI implemented this change in 1967. This meant that men could now once again be ordained as deacons not as a step toward priesthood, but as a distinct ordained ministry in its own right. This initiative, however, raised an important theological question that remains central to the question of women’s ordination to the diaconate: how distinct in nature is the diaconate from the priesthood?
This question has sometimes been mischaracterized in commentaries on the Petrocchi commission’s work. For example, Dulle writes: “In the Petrocchi summary, it is clear that the theological disagreement at the heart of the women deacons debate concerns whether diaconal ordination is primarily ‘ad sacerdotium’ (for priesthood) or ‘ad ministerium’ (for ministry).” But the answer to this question is already clear; the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, states: “At a lower level of the hierarchy are deacons, upon whom hands are imposed not unto the priesthood, but unto a ministry of service (non ad sacerdotium, sed ad ministerium)” (#29). As the ITC explains, the contemporary question is rather how this statement—which suggests an essential difference between the diaconate and the priesthood—is to be reconciled with the unity of the sacrament of Holy Orders, which includes the diaconate, the ordained priesthood, and the episcopacy. What distinguishes the diaconate from the ordained priesthood, and what do they have in common that distinguishes the sacrament of Holy Orders from the baptismal vocation of all the faithful? Does the sacrament of Holy Orders have a shared “priestly” character despite the difference between deacons and priests, or does the diaconate present us with a fully non-priestly form of ordination?
These unresolved questions are crucial to the debate over the ordination of women deacons because they raise the possibility that the arguments that the Church’s Magisterium has given in opposition to the ordination of women to the priesthood may not apply to the ordination of women to the permanent diaconate. In particular, the argument that Christ’s maleness is essential to His priestly role and must be reflected as a sacramental sign in the maleness of the priest may not apply to the diaconate. Interestingly, the Petrocchi commission’s members were asked to vote on whether maleness was essential to the sacrament of Holy Orders as a whole:
The masculinity of Christ, and therefore the masculinity of those who receive Holy Orders, is not accidental, but is an integral part of sacramental identity, preserving the divine order of salvation in Christ. To alter this reality would not be a simple adjustment of the ministry but a rupture of the nuptial meaning of salvation. (“thesis no. 8”)
The commission members were evenly split on this question, with five affirming and five opposing the thesis, suggesting the commission was divided over the question of how to reconcile the principle of “non ad sacerdotium, sed ad ministerium” with the unity of the sacrament of Holy Orders. In his own comments, Cardinal Petrocchi notes this divide, stating that the lack of convergence suggests the need for further investigation and dialogue. At the practical level, Petrocchi adds that the permanent diaconate itself has not been fully embraced in every part of the world (particularly Asia and Africa), suggesting there is a need for a better understanding of the diaconate in the Church.
That being said, the majority of the commission (9 in favor, 1 opposed) called on the Church to “expand women’s access to ministries established for the service of the community” in fulfillment of the diakonia of all the baptized. The Synod on Synodality had likewise called for women to have the opportunity to take up positions of leadership in the Church.
In his letter to Pope Leo, Cardinal Petrocchi addresses the question of how “synodal” the process of considering the question of the female diaconate has been, and some commentators have likewise questioned whether the commission engaged in adequate consultation with the faithful. These are important questions I hope to explore further, but for now I need to bring this commentary to a close. Rather than closing the door to the institution of a female diaconate, I believe the Petrocchi commission makes clear that the theological question remains open to debate.
"But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!" Is she 90+ million miles away from Romeo? Is her surface temperature 10,000°F? Such questions are obtuse, even silly. Why? Because one cannot make reliable deductions from a metaphor. Similarly, does the "nuptial meaning of salvation" mean that those who represent the Savior must have male genitalia or a masculine gender identity? Metaphors are insight generators, not propositions. Analogical language is not univocal. To ignore the facts about figures of speech leads to the sterility of thought that blocks reasonable agreement or reasonable disagreement about theological issues like those around women in the diaconate.
Thank you for this brilliantly accurate and careful account!!