Canadian archbishop pushes women deacons as ‘first step’
March 5, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – The time has come to take women’s place in the Church “seriously,” according to the Archbishop of Gatineau, Québec. The French-speaking bishop, Paul-André Durocher, openly promoted the idea of a female diaconate that would include the celebration of the sacraments of baptism and marriage.
He was speaking on Radio Canada’s Sunday evening chat-show, Tout le monde en parle (“Everyone’s talking about it”), where he had been asked to comment on the recent Vatican Summit on sexual abuse.
Archbishop Durocher made clear that he would have women play a ministerial role in the Church besides taking up increased down-to-earth responsibilities. “If women were deacons, for instance, they would have the power to celebrate marriages and to baptize. They would be part of management teams. I think that would be a first step,” he said.
This goes beyond the role deaconesses are purported to have played as “helpers” of the Christian community in the early centuries of the Church. Nowadays, male deacons, be they permanent or preparing for the priesthood – in which case, they promise to remain celibate –, are ordained ministers and have the power to celebrate the sacraments of marriage and baptism as well as being allowed to preach during mass.
The diaconate — being in this sense an element of Holy Orders — has been reserved for men in the same way and for the same reasons as the priesthood, which configures the ordained priest to Jesus-Christ himself, who was a male according to the flesh.
It is the same logic that traditionally prohibits girls from being altar servers and from playing a public role in the church as lectors or ministers of Holy Communion – although these traditions are often breached in the new Roman rite.
Durocher was somewhat circumspect in his statement, but went several steps further than previous trial balloons he had sent up on the same subject on previous occasions. Last Sunday on Radio Canada, he discreetly raised the even more controversial issue of women priests, stating that as far as priests are concerned, reality is more complex. “The problem on that level is that the Pope has said that that could not change, that women could not be priests. The only way for that change would be for there to be a plenary council of all the bishops on that issue, and that won't happen for a long time,” he said, noticeably avoiding any statement on the radical impossibility of allowing women into the priesthood.
The Archbishop of Gatineau clearly wants to move forward in stages. He is of the opinion that “we should work now on what we're capable of doing,” in particular in the local churches, in order to make clerical institutions more egalitarian.
The idea of promoting women in the church is not a new one for Paul-André Durocher. A prominent member of the Catholic hierarchy in Canada – Durocher, 64, is a former president of the Canadian bishops’ conference –, he was present at the second Synod on the family in 2015 in Rome where he devoted his own three-minute intervention entirely to the “place of women” in the Church.
At the time, he suggested allowing them to hold decision-making positions within the Church and to have access to the permanent diaconate, making a distinction between “ministry” and “priesthood”: “It's a just question to ask. Shouldn't we be opening up new venues for ministry of women in the Church?”
He also brought up the question of preaching by women – going directly against St. Paul's ban on women teaching within a church –, by asking the Synod fathers to “look at the possibility of allowing married couples (…) to speak during Sunday homilies so that they can testify, give witness to the relationship between God's word and their own marriage life and their own life as families.”
(cont) https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/canadian-archbishop-pushes-women-deacons-as-a-first-step