You know that the issue of deaconettes is going to be raised at the Synod (“walking together”) on the Amazon.
The former Prefect of the CDF, Gerhard Card. Müller responded to something a wacky S. American suggested, namely, that the impossibility of the ordination of women to the priesthood is not a dogma. Fail.
“But, even if the Pope explained at the time that ‘all the faithful of the Church are definitely to hold this decision,’ it is nevertheless not a dogma,” [wacky] Bishop Kräutler stated in an interview with Blickpunkt Lateinamerika, the journal of the German relief agency Adveniat – a group which heavily funded [the Rhine flows into the Amazon] the preparations for the upcoming Synod. Kräutler also stated in the same interview that the Amazon Synod “must” allow a female diaconate. [MUST! Well! That’s that!]
The Amazon Synod’s controversial working document proposes “to identify the type of official ministry that can be conferred on women, taking into account the central role which women play today in the Amazonian Church” (14). But the participants of one preparatory meeting for the Amazon Synod – among them Cardinal Lorenzo [“Clergyman”] Baldisseri, the Secretary General of the Synod of Bishops – explicitly called for the allowance of female deacons.
Card. Müller points back to the document of John Paul II that simply will not go away: Ordinatio sacerdotalis. Also, the CDF put out its own document explaining the former. OS says clear that this is definitively to be held by the faithful. The CDF explained that, because of the consistent teaching of the Church, this is infallibly taught.
At LifeSite read the whole thing.
In effect, Card. Müller underscores what I’ve been repeating all along. Just as Vatican II reaffirmed, while diaconate is different from the priesthood (priest and bishop) nevertheless it is one of the Holy Orders. The three orders are intimately tied together in one Sacrament of Holy Orders. If the priesthood cannot be conferred on women (absolutely clear) then none of the grades of Holy Orders can be conferred on women. Period. Exclamation point.
It stands to reason.
But will that make a difference in this crazy age?
