Women in the Catholic Church: Pope Leo XIV will soon have to address the call for female deacons

A report of a study group on women deacons is expected as soon as June, putting the spotlight on the issue of women’s roles in the church once more. CLAIRE GIANGRAVÉ, of Religion News Service, reports…

Vatican City
RNS

Like unpaid bills arriving for the inheritor of a house, reports will soon arrive on Pope Leo XIV’s desk offering possible steps to take on some of the most hot-button issues facing the Catholic Church – among them the question of ordaining women as deacons.

The 10 reports are being generated by study groups of theologians and canon lawyers tasked by Pope Francis with discerning a way forward for the church on how it selects its bishops, combats poverty and relates to women and LGBTQ Catholics. These issues threatened to derail the Synod on Synodality, a three-year-long, worldwide series of meetings initiated by Francis in 2021 in which Catholics were invited to enumerate their priorities of the church. Instead, Francis created study groups to report back on the most controversial topics.

Pope Leo XIV poses with women at the end of his first weekly general audience in St Peter’s Square at the Vatican, on 21st May, 2025. PICTURE: AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino.

Study Group 5 focused on “some theological and canonical issues around specific ministerial forms,” including whether women should be allowed to serve as deacons – ordained ministers who perform some of the sacraments and preach at Mass, but who do not celebrate the Eucharist, hear confessions or anoint the sick. While Francis ruled out the possibility of ordaining women to be priests in 2024, he said only that the question of women deacons was “not yet mature”.

Leo has been a proponent of synodality and reaffirmed his intention to continue the process. But it remains unclear what his plans are for his predecessor’s unresolved legacy.

Some of the groups have asked for an extension until December because of the distractions of Francis’ death and Leo’s election. The synod office did not confirm to RNS whether Study Group 5 asked to postpone its report.

Leo has been a proponent of synodality and reaffirmed his intention to continue the process. But it remains unclear what his plans are for his predecessor’s unresolved legacy.

While attending the synod in 2023, Leo spoke with hesitancy on the possibility of women deacons and seemed to negate the idea that women could be ordained at all, citing the “very significant and long tradition of the church” on the matter. But he recognised the church’s “openness” on the topic, citing the study group tasked with discerning the question.

On 21st February, Leo – then-Cardinal Robert Prevost – gave a talk during the Jubilee of Deacons in Rome, where thousands of deacons came from all over the world to gain forgiveness for their sins and celebrate their ministry. Among the attendees were women who hoped one day to be allowed to fulfill their call to the diaconate.

On that occasion “he did talk about the concern for clericalism,” said Ellie Hidalgo, co-director of Discerning Deacons, a network aimed at informing Catholics about the female diaconate, who was present at the event. But, said Hidalgo, he “went on to say that these are things that he will continue to study, reflect upon, and [he doesn’t] know what the outcome will be.”

Cardinal Robert Prevost, centre, poses with attendees after speaking about the diaconate at the Basilica di Sant’Andrea della Valle on 21st February, 2025, during the Jubilee of Deacons, in Rome. PICTURE: Photo Courtesy Ellie Hidalgo.

Discerning deacons has submitted 29 testimonies from women who feel called to the diaconate to the Vatican’s doctrinal department, which is overseeing the work of Study Group 5.

“We need a renewed diaconate that is really focused on mission, on walking with people at the margins, that’s what you’re being formed to do. And that’s the kind of diaconate that we would then want to include women in,” Hidalgo said.

She added that women would “be helping to declericalise the diaconate,” referring to Francis’ long-standing crusade against “clericalism” – an unquestioning reverence for priests that the late Pope often pointed to as the root of the church’s woes.

In his 2023 remarks at the synod, then-Cardinal Prevost said, “Clericalising women does not necessarily solve the problem.”

But overall, Leo has a positive track record on promoting women to church leadership, and he became a priest in a heady time, when the demand for women’s ordination echoed powerfully in the church.

In 2022, Francis appointed three women to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Bishops to assist Prevost, then the dicastery’s prefect, in the crucial role of appointing bishops around the world. In one of his first acts as pontiff, Leo appointed a Catholic nun, Sister Tiziana Merletti, to become secretary of the Dicastery for Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, overseeing Catholic nuns, monks and brothers. Francis had earlier appointed Sister Simona Brambilla to head the office, making her the first woman to ever lead a Vatican department.

“I think appointing women to Vatican positions, and specifically senior Vatican positions, is an important part of a culture shift. And I hope that Pope Leo is able to continue that shift outside of Rome,” said Kate McElwee, executive director of Women’s Ordination Worldwide.

“What we’ve heard is he’s very open to listening,” McElwee said, adding that “those calls [to the priesthood] women experience haven’t gone away, despite decades of the Catholic Church trying to close the door, diminish them or silence them, and so I hope that our new listening Pope is able to really absorb the reality that women are ready and willing to serve the church as ministers.”

McElwee said she hopes the Pope will meet with women advocating for the diaconate, but emphasised that the synod’s time for listening must be followed by concrete actions.

Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC) Executive Director Kate McElwee addresses WOC members during the “Let Her Voice Carry” vigil in the Basilica of Saint Praxedis in Rome, on Tuesday, 3rd October, 2023. PICTURE: AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia.

But Miriam Duignan, executive director at Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research, said focusing on Vatican appointments risks being a “smoke screen”.

“How women are treated in a local parish is more important to Catholics than maybe some people knowing that there are a few women scattered amongst the majority of men in Rome.”

The Synod on Synodality’s demand for discussion of the female diaconate from parishes around the globe showed that one “cannot still maintain that the campaign for women’s ordination is a white, Western, Northern European, feminist new idea,” Duignan added.

Indeed, said Hidalgo, as a missionary in Peru and later as the head of the Diocese of Chiclayo in the country for a decade before coming to the Vatican in 2023, Leo “would have been meeting women who are doing incredible work, religious sisters and lay women” denouncing illegal mining and deforestation while ministering to the Indigenous communities in the Amazon region.

“There are women saying: ‘Hey, we’re in. We’re already doing the work. We just need a little bit more support from the church and the grace of the sacrament.’ The grace of the diaconate sacrament would really go a long way in strengthening us for mission,” she added.

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With its huge area and its shortage of priests, the Amazon region has posed a greater challenge to the male-only diaconate than any other part of the world. Discerning Deacons was created after the Vatican’s 2019 Synod on the Pan-Amazon region, which brought the calls for female leadership to the heart of the church. On 5th April, the Latin American Ecclesial Council published a seven-page summary of its proposal for the creation of an Amazonian Rite, which includes the ordination of women deacons and married men.

“For an authentic Amazonian Rite, it’s essential that women can, in a symmetric and complementary way, occupy spaces as preachers and officiants of sacraments, as well as in the organisation and the structures of the Church,” the document, which will be sent for approval at the Vatican, reads.

In the 2023 synod interview, Cardinal Prevost seemed to picture a “new understanding or different understanding of leadership, power, authority and service” in the church, in which the perspectives of both men and women are allowed to emerge. The cardinal and canon lawyer who said that may still be formulating his views as Pope Leo XIV, but he will need to have an answer very soon, as women will be knocking at the Vatican’s door once more.