During his customary in-flight news conference at the end of his trip
to Sweden Monday, Pope Francis took a question on women priests and
not only reiterated, as he has several times in the past, that St. Pope
John Paul has already said no, but he appeared to suggest that the
Church’s “no” is forever.
“If we read carefully the declaration of St. John Paul II, it goes in that direction,” Francis said.
What that response didn’t address, however, is the more interesting
question currently percolating about women clergy, which is the matter
of whether women can, and should, be ordained as deacons. I say it’s
more “interesting” largely because Francis’s answer is less predictable,
and therefore the outcome is more up for grabs.
I don’t know how to handicap where the pope will come down on the
issue, but I do know where to begin in trying to describe how he’s
likely to approach it: What he sees as the “disease” of clericalism, and
the danger of clericalism setting the tone for discussions of women in
the Church.
Despite the fact that he stands today at the apex of the clerical
pecking order, there’s a sense in which Pope Francis is the most
anti-clerical pontiff in Catholic history. His jeremiads against
clerical power and privilege have become the stuff of legend, and one
has the sense when he uses the word “clericalism” that he’s virtually
talking about the sin against the Holy Spirit.
When Francis traveled to South Korea in August 2014 and discovered
that the faith had arrived there not through priest-missionaries but lay
scholars visiting China, and that small Catholic communities flourished
for more than a century before the first resident priest arrived, he
lit up, and has never stopped extolling Korea ever since as a model for
lay leadership and enterprise.
Lest it be considered flippant to describe Francis in these terms,
let it be recalled what while we were in South Korea, the Vatican
spokesman at the time, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, smilingly
characterized him as a “a little bit of an anti-clerical pope.”
As part of his aversion to a form of ecclesiastical culture that sees
clergy as more worthy or noble than everyone else, Francis has voiced
deep skepticism about proposals to empower women in the Church that he
would regard as effectively clericalizing them.
Back in December 2013, speculation was on the point of going viral
about whether Francis might name a woman as a “lay cardinal,” reviving
an earlier tradition.
(In fact, the term is somewhat misleading, since
all the laymen named cardinals in the past were given first tonsure,
which at that time meant one had entered the clergy.)
In any event, Francis was asked in a December 2013 interview with Vatican Insider if he were open to the possibility, and this was his response.
“I don’t know where this idea sprang from,” he said. “Women in the
Church must be valued, not “clericalized”. Whoever thinks of women as
cardinals suffers a bit from clericalism.”
That, in a nutshell, is what makes it so difficult to anticipate how
Pope Francis will eventually resolve the debate he himself has beckoned
over women deacons.
As is by now well known, last May Francis held a Q&A session with
the International Union of Superiors General, the Rome-based umbrella
group for superiors of women’s religious orders around the world. One of
the sisters in attendance proposed to the pope that he consider
creating a commission to look into the idea of women deacons, and he
agreed.
A brief flurry of speculation followed about whether the pope simply
meant that his commission would look into the role of women in the
ancient church referred to as “deaconesses,” or whether the panel would
consider possibilities in the here-and-now.
That was basically resolved when the Vatican announced the
composition of the commission in August, with 12 members representing a
variety of theological perspectives, including one, American scholar
Phyllis Zagano, whose advocacy of women deacons is well-known.
Obviously, Francis wanted to hear arguments not just about the past but
the present.
Further, Pope Francis repeatedly has said that he wants to see a
“greater role” for women in Catholicism, including participation in the
“important decisions . . . where the authority of the Church is
exercised.” Clearly, creating the possibility of participation in the
diaconate would be one highly visible way of accomplishing that.
Yet there’s also the nagging point that doing so might strike the
pope as reinforcing the idea that the only way to matter in Catholicism
is to be part of the clergy.
Over the last three and a half years, there have been times when Pope
Francis launches a conversation in the Church with a seemingly
pre-formed conclusion in mind about where he wants it to go.
Such was
the case with his two-Synods of Bishops examination of the family, which
he knew going in would focus in part on the question of Communion for
divorced and civilly remarried Catholics, and where he appeared from the
beginning to want the answer to be some form of “yes.”
In the end, “yes” is the answer he essentially gave in Amoris Laetitia, albeit in a slightly ambiguous form that left latitude for bishops and pastors to exercise their own judgment.
In other areas, however, it sometimes seems Francis has a sense that
some issue or theme in the Church is important, yet doesn’t have a fixed
position on what to do about it, and therefore simply kick-starts a
conversation to see where it might end.
Time will tell which of the two is the case with women deacons, but
for now it seems the smartest move for pope-watchers is to hedge their
bets, because how Francis may come down hardly seems a slam-dunk.