Addressing a press conference in Fatima, Portugal, over the weekend, Steiner renewed his prior calls for a female diaconate.
“In our reality, women exercise the deacon’s ministries,” said Steiner on Saturday. The Cardinal-Archbishop of Manaus, in the Amazon, presides over an area with approximately 1.6 million Catholics.
He added that “the vast majority of our small communities are coordinated by women,” noting that the “role of women in the church of the Amazon is fundamental.”
Steiner continued, revealing that he performs a para-liturgical ceremony for women he sends to offer the sacraments within the archdiocese.
“When I send someone, for example to baptize, I lay hands on them, but I don’t lay hands on someone as an ordination. I lay hands as the apostles did,” he attested, adding that it is “a sign of receiving a ministry and that this person will celebrate a sacrament.”
The apostles are recorded in the Scriptures as laying on hands on new Catholics, but primarily the laying on of hands was used in conjunction with conferring sacramental ordination to Holy Orders, such as when ordaining the seven deacons. (Acts 6: 6)
St. Paul also warns against too freely practicing the laying on of hands for new converts, warning in 1 Timothy 5:22: “Impose not hands lightly upon any man, neither be partaker of other men’s sins.”
Steiner’s testimony about his laying on of hands to confer a “ministry,” while arguing that he is not ordaining, appears to contradict the custom of the early Church since new members of the Church did not receive a “ministry” when the apostles laid hands on them.
Additionally, the Catholic Church notes that the “ordinary ministers” of the Sacrament of Baptism are bishops, priests, and deacons. It is only “in case of necessity” that “any person, even someone not baptized, can baptize, if he has the required intention.”
Steiner has regularly highlighted the leading contributions of women in his archdiocese, and following calls from the Amazon Synod to have female deacons, the issue has gained renewed attention with the Synod on Synodality.
Continuing his remarks to the press in Fatima, Steiner made passing reference to the controversy relating not only to female deacons, but also to Pope Francis’ 2023 document Fiducia Supplicans.
“These issues are very tense in the Church,” he commented. “We should not stop discussing and reflecting. And if, in an hour, we come to the conclusion that, in the past, there was the female diaconate, why not reintroduce it, how was the permanent diaconate reintroduced?”
Advocates for female ordination continue to argue that such a practice would simply be revitalizing a custom of the early Church. But in 2002, the Vatican’s International Theological Commission wrote after much study that:
- The deaconesses mentioned in the tradition of the ancient Church – as evidenced by the rite of institution and the functions they exercised – were not purely and simply equivalent to the deacons;
- The unity of the sacrament of Holy Orders, in the clear distinction between the ministries of the bishop and the priests on the one hand and the diaconal ministry on the other, is strongly underlined by ecclesial tradition, especially in the teaching of the Magisterium
As LifeSiteNews columnist Dr. Maike Hickson noted in an article for OnePeterFive, “female deacons were not sacramentally ordained, were excluded from any role in the liturgy, and thus cannot be compared with a sacramentally ordained female deacon as Cardinal (Christophe) Schönborn and others propose.”
The question of female deacons has been consistently raised by certain voices in the media and in the Church, and it continues to be proposed at the Synod on Synodality.
Pope Francis has assigned the question to a special study group led by Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández. The cardinal briefed synod members October 2 about the issue, saying that no approval would be given to female deacons at the moment, but that “in-depth study” would continue until 2025.
The study group is examining the question by drawing on the October 2023 Synthesis Report and the Vatican’s 2016 and 2020 commissions on “female deacons.” In addition, Fernández told the synod assembly that he was drawing upon Evangelii Gaudium 103-104, Querida Amazonia 99-103, and Antiquum Ministerium 3.
The Catholic Church infallibly teaches that it is impossible to ordain women to sacred orders, including the diaconate. In his 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, Pope John Paul II taught “that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”
In 2018, then-prefect of the CDF Cardinal Luis Ladaria Ferrer, S.J., defended the teaching of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis as bearing the mark of “infallibility,” with John Paul II having “formally confirmed and made explicit, so as to remove all doubt, that which the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium has long considered throughout history as belonging to the deposit of faith.”
“It is certainly without doubt, however, that this definitive decision from Pope John Paul II is indeed a dogma of the Faith of the Catholic Church and that this was of course the case already before this Pope defined this truth as contained in Revelation in the year 1994,” declared former CDF prefect Cardinal Gerhard Müller in 2019.