Participating in one of the daily press briefings held for the Vatican press corps during the Synod on Synodality, Bishop Anthony Randazzo strongly criticized the promotion of what he termed “niche issues” at the synod, including the female diaconate.
Synodality can often be “focussed on niche issues of the West,” he attested, adding that such issues are “promoted so much that they’re an imposition to other areas of the Church.”
Expanding further in response to a question about what such “niche issues” are, Randazzo – bishop of Broken Bay, Australia – mentioned secular style of governance creeping into the Church and the push for a female diaconate.
The question has been around for years, he said, not just at this synod. But Randazzo added that “at the moment when we talk about women in the Church that’s the hot button issue, and as the consequence women – who in many parts of the Church and the world are treated as second class citizens – are totally ignored.”
He did not elaborate on how women were treated as second-class citizens in the Church, but condemned any such stance towards women as “scandalous in the Church and in the world.”
Randazzo attributed the push for the topic of female deacons as being “because a small minority, with a large powerful Western voice, are obsessed with pushing this issue.”
He confessed to having “no problems with this issue being studied … but at the cost of women in the Church? Absolutely not.”
Pope Francis – as Randazzo noted – has assigned the question to a special study group led by Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández. The cardinal briefed synod members on Wednesday 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.
Referencing this group, Randazzo said that Francis has transferred the issue from the synod floor “not to remove it from the conversation, but to go more deeply into it; to actually see what’s there.”
“When women are pushed to the margins into places of poverty, violence – domestic or social – when their work opportunities are narrowed and they are excluded from participation in the community and in the Church, this is a scandal against the Gospel,” he continued.
“We must speak unto this, rather than being obsessed always by this other issue,” added the Australian bishop in reference to the female diaconate.
Let the other issue be studied but for Heaven’s sake, in the name of Jesus, can we look after and include our women! Can we stop talking about women and listen to, and speak with women. This is how the Church is called to act. This is how Jesus acts in the Gospel. He walks with them, he walks with them, He listens to them and includes them in the life of the Gospel. Are we not called to do the same?
Randazzo had earlier pointed to overlooked ecological concerns in his home episcopal region of Oceania when condemning the “niche issues” pushed by some in the synod. These “niche issues” were important, he said, “but not so much as to overpower issues of life and death and often when they speak of them we do not hear the name of Jesus or hear the good news, which is the only good news for this planet.”
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, “I declare 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.