Why Women Cannot Be Deacons
Much has recently been written about the possibility of the Church sacramentally ordaining women to the diaconate. Research indicates that in the early Church, especially in the East, women “deaconesses” engaged in service to women in situations where modesty needed protecting, or gender segregation called for women to minister to women. Such ministry might have occurred during the baptism of adult women, in their catechesis, or in the carrying of the Eucharist to women confined to their homes.
There is no evidence, however, that women ever participated in the eucharistic liturgy. Historic deaconesses are women who met a pastoral need during an epoch when the sexes were more sequestered. Their ministry was not equivalent to what the deacon in the Roman Church practices during the eucharistic liturgy.
Women are welcome to hold leadership positions in the Church. There are many who already do. They serve as spiritual directors, have positions of authority in retreat houses, campus ministries, Catholic charities, and so forth. Women affect the psychic health of the Church through their roles as seminary and university therapists, counselors, psychologists, and psychiatrists.
Where their presence is lacking elsewhere in Church leadership, however, may in fact be an issue of gender bias. Pope Francis is trying to deal with that appropriately. He recently named a woman to head a dicastery and another to govern Vatican City beginning in March.
But there is one place women cannot go. The central reality of the Eucharist is reserved only to ordained men due to the Sacrament’s properly nuptial signification. The impossibility of women being ordained is not a sociological, political, or discriminatory gender issue.
Women cannot fittingly image the bridegroom Savior during the eucharistic liturgy that he initiated and sustains. The Eucharist is the proleptic wedding feast of the lamb (Rev. 19:19). It is the sacramental act of Christ giving himself as bridegroom to his bride, the Church. Such an act within the Mass is reserved for the ones Christ chose to continue his self-giving liturgy, those who communicate the natural symbol of the Christological nuptial act: ordained men.
In a recent conversation with a theologian, I raised the issue of the bridegroom identity not only of the priest but of the deacon as well. He was surprised that I would make such a claim. He had never heard anyone advocating for such a symbolic representation of the deacon. This is especially true, he said, since the late Benedict XVI clearly distinguished priesthood from the diaconate in Omnium in Mentem. This move by Benedict seemed, for some, to have cleared the way for the possibility of a female diaconate, but this interpretation is erroneous.
The three grades of Holy Orders—the diaconate, the priesthood, and the episcopacy—image the One Christ in his act of offering his body at the Mass. Benedict may have distinguished priest from deacon, but he did not remove the deacon from the eucharistic liturgy, and he certainly did not separate the deacon from Christ. All three grades of Holy Orders were established together on Holy Thursday.
The apostles received the fullness of orders from Jesus at the Last Supper. In Acts 6, the apostles confer on the seven new deacons those aspects of their apostolic ministry that were not sacerdotal. Thus, though the diaconate is distinct from the sacerdotal order, it cannot be considered entirely separated from it, as it remains apostolic. Within the eucharistic liturgy, Christ is acting within the triple-graded male sacrament of Holy Orders. Christ’s own spousal self-giving to the Church is mediated through the sacramental character bestowed upon men on ordination day.
The tradition of the imparted character of the sacrament is what unites the cleric to Christ in such a way that the cleric can act in Christ’s own person (priest) or carry out his ministry (deacon). Christ desires to live his nuptial gift over again in the bodies of clerics. Clergy are the ones who eagerly host the mystery of Christ’s own spousal charity as their own too, as their new life. This spousal charity is especially expressed at the Mass. In the eucharistic liturgy, Christ is offered to the Father, and in turn is generously poured out to his bride the Church in Word and Sacrament. Such sharing serves his desire to give her “life and life to the full” (John 10:10).
Holy Orders, especially in its celibate form, is eucharistically shaped, spiritually fecund, and male. Some would say otherwise, arguing that the Eucharist is about the “risen Christ,” and therefore Christ’s embodied self-gift as bridegroom has been transcended. Men or women can image Christ as he offers salvation from the altar because Christ is not “male” anymore. To hold that Christ still possesses his male body in the risen state is “a naïve physicalism that limits the Risen Christ,” argues Phyllis Zagano in her “Survey of Vatican Studies on the Diaconate of Women.”
But one can only respond: Is there no continuity between the divine spouse upon the cross who gave his body to heal and save his bride and that same divine spouse risen in glory? In fact, the continuity between the two events by the one man is the eucharistic liturgy. Break the continuity between the one God-Man dying and rising, and you have no redemption, no reconciliation between humanity and God. What makes the salvation offered in the Mass real is the fact that the one offering it is the male Jesus of Nazareth, human and divine, born of woman, and given to his beloved as an act of love unto death. The eternal life made available to his bride’s body at Mass is possible because there is one continuous divine-spousal identity in him who died giving life and who rose receiving life. In the Most Holy Trinity, there is a human male body with wounds. Being a loving spouse did not make the risen Christ gender neutral. Christ is male, the Church is feminine. She responds to the gift that is Christ and receives salvation from the body he offered.
Feminists note that women can image Christ. Of course; every holy female alive today and every canonized woman saint in history became one with the body of their spouse, which they received at Mass. They became what they loved and imaged him in their charity. But women cannot image a man within the “wedding feast of the lamb,” the eucharistic liturgy. This liturgy is a wedding, and as such, needs a bride and a groom—not two brides.
“Let our Bridegroom ascend the wood of his bridal chamber; let our Bridegroom ascend the wood of his marriage bed. Let him sleep by dying. Let his side be opened and let the virgin Church come forth,” proclaimed St. Quodvultdeus. Within the sacramental celebration of the divine self-donation upon the “wedding bed” of the cross, only a man can fittingly image this action. The male body best represents the one sacred manhood of Christ and his nuptial action of self-donation. These actions are so deep and so mysterious that three grades of Holy Orders are necessary to capture them. The bishop and priest communicate the death and resurrection of Christ at the altar, but it is the deacon who “voices” the savior’s heart by proclaiming the gospel: “When the Sacred Scriptures are read in the Church, God himself speaks to his people, and Christ, present in his own word, proclaims the Gospel” (General Instruction of the Roman Missal, 29). And when there is no deacon present at Mass, the priest’s own diaconal ordination, sublated into his priesthood, carries this voice to the bride.
As a deacon, celibacy is latent but intrinsic to my vocation. If my wife should pre-decease me, I must be celibate until death. Pragmatic and utilitarian reasons are given, but there is only one reason to consent to celibacy, and that is because one has “seen” God. Celibacy is the way men live when they are radically oriented to God and, because of this communion with God, give their bodies in service to the needs of others—as in, Christ’s bride. Moreover, the nuptial identity of the deacon has been affirmed by the magisterium of the Church. The Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Diaconorum Permanentium states:
The permanent diaconate, lived in celibacy, gives to the ministry a certain unique emphasis. In fact, the sacramental identification with Christ is placed in the context of the undivided heart, that is within the context of a nuptial, exclusive, permanent and total choice of the unique and greatest Love . . .
Those who have received the order of deacon, even those who are older, may not, in accordance with traditional Church discipline, enter marriage. The same principle applies to deacons who have been widowed.
Celibacy is the call of deacons, either explicitly in the unmarried candidate or implicitly in any deacon who may face the early death of his spouse. This call to celibacy is a share in Christ’s own celibacy.
The joining together of the male cleric to the Christological action of the Mass embodying his radical self-gift to the Church is the non-negotiable symbol of Holy Orders. Anything that would drive apart the heterosexual symbol of bride and bridegroom strikes at the very heart of creation, the Incarnation, and the primordial symbol that is marriage.
The Eucharist is not the place for righting social wrongs against women. It is the spousal action of Christ gifting his body to those whom he loves to “the end” (John 13:1). Of course, this nuptial symbolism does not exhaust the reasons why only men can be ordained. For many, simply noting that the twelve apostles were men is sufficient. However, I believe contemplating the nuptial element of the wedding feast of the lamb unveils deeper anthropological, ecclesial, and sacramental reasons for the Lord’s choice.
This sustained nuptial identity within the three grades of the one sacrament of Holy Orders is only now beginning to theologically mature since the diaconate’s renewal sixty years ago. The deacon is the “voice” of Christ’s own heart as he proclaims the gospel to the bride. The nuptial nature of the eucharistic celebration is undeniable, and it is the men in Holy Orders who secure this mystical truth for the Church.
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