A Vatican report on women deacons published last week said that women could not be admitted to the diaconate. The document, a summary of the conclusions reached by the Vatican’s second study commission on the issue in recent years, “understood as a degree of Holy Orders” but stopped short of giving a definitive “no.” Instead, the report said that the question needed to be decided on a doctrinal level.
The commission—sometimes called the “Petrocchi commission” after Cardinal Giuseppe Petrocchi, the former Archbishop of L’Aquila in Italy, who headed it—was established in 2020 after the bishops at the Synod on the Pan-Amazon Region challenged Pope Francis to reopen the study on women deacons. A previous commission, set up by Pope Francis in 2016 at the behest of the heads of the world’s women’s religious orders, had examined the history of women deacons but, Pope Francis said, did not reach a consensus. He famously called the commission’s scholars “toads from different wells.”
Francis gave the final report from this first commission to the head of the International Union of Superiors General, the group representing close to 600,000 women religious worldwide that first requested a commission be created, but the report was never made public, and its members were not permitted to speak about its work.
The Petrocchi Commission’s first sessions
Francis agreed to reopen the study commission at the Amazon synod in 2019, and in 2020 appointed all new members, which is why it is colloquially called the “second study commission.” This commission had a slightly different task from its predecessor: It was meant to look not only at the history of women deacons in the early church but also at broader questions about them, including the theology and contemporary possibility of the female diaconate.
The commission was composed of five women and five men, two of whom were deacons and three of whom were priests.
The group met throughout 2021 and 2022, according to Cardinal Petrocchi’s report to Pope Leo. Already at its first session, it agreed that it could be “reasonably affirmed” that while female deacons existed, the female diaconate had developed differently in different parts of the church, and it “was not understood as the simple female equivalent of the male diaconate and does not seem to have had a sacramental character.”
The “sacramental character” question relates to the question of Holy Orders, which in church teaching has three degrees: the diaconate, the priesthood and the episcopate, to which sacramental ministers are progressively ordained. Before being ordained as a priest, a man is first ordained to the diaconate; before being ordained a bishop, a man must first be ordained as a priest. After the Second Vatican Council, though, the “permanent diaconate” was restored for the first time in the universal Catholic Church since the 12th century, meaning men could remain deacons without ever becoming priests, and married men could serve as deacons.
Interestingly, at the first session in September 2021, the commission took a sort of poll on whether its members thought the Catholic Church should “institute the female diaconate understood as the third degree of Holy Orders.” The members were presented with three different formulations. The first two options did not favor the institution of the female diaconate. (The second option added a description of the position as based on knowledge “to date” without excluding future developments.) In each case, four voted “yes,” five voted “no” and one abstained—which might seem to mean five would support the institution of the female diaconate and four would oppose it. However, the third option, which asked directly if participants were “in favour of the institution in today’s Church of the female diaconate understood as the third degree of Holy Orders,” only two voted “yes”; six voted “no” and two abstained.
In contrast to this divided vote, the commission voted unanimously at the same session in favor of establishing new ministries in the church that could “contribute to the synergy between men and women”—likely referring to lay ministries that would be open to both. Just months before this meeting, in January 2021, Pope Francis changed canon law to allow women to join the lay ministries of lector and acolyte. In May of that year, Francis established the new lay ministry of catechist, which was also open to men and women.
When the commission met again in July 2022, only eight of the 10 members were present. Names are not given in the report, but it is likely the Rev. Santiago del Cura Elena was one of the two not present, as he died a month later following a long illness.
At that meeting, in an effort to formulate a thesis everyone could agree on, the eight members present voted 7-1 in favor of the statement:
The status quaestionis surrounding historical research and theological investigation, considered in their mutual implications, excludes the possibility of proceeding in the direction of admitting women to the diaconate understood as a degree of the sacrament of Orders. In the light of Sacred Scripture, Tradition and the ecclesiastical Magisterium, this evaluation is strong, although it does not currently permit the formulation of a definitive judgment, as in the case of priestly ordination.
This carefully phrased thesis concluded the commission’s work, it appears, after two meetings. It is unclear what kind of research or consultation process, if any, the commission undertook, or what work was done between meetings. This lack of transparency has provoked criticism from some proponents of the female diaconate. Belgian Deacon Geert De Cubber, the only Latin-rite deacon appointed as a full voting member of the Synod on Synodality, told America: “For the members of the synod, it was never clear what this commission was doing. There were never official contacts between the larger synod and that commission. So, as far as the synod process is concerned, you can hardly say that this was a highly synodal approach.”
The Synod on Synodality (2021-24)
The Synod on Synodality began with a global listening process that opened in October 2021, just after the commission’s first meeting. It continued on regional and continental levels through 2022, and the results of the global listening and regional discernment were brought together at month-long meetings in Rome in 2023 and 2024. The document prepared from the various continental assemblies said that “almost all reports raise the issue of full and equal participation of women” in the church and said “many reports ask that the Church continue its discernment” on questions including governance in the church, preaching in parishes and the female diaconate. “Much greater diversity of opinion,” it said, “was expressed on the subject of priestly ordination for women, which some reports call for, while others consider a closed issue.”
The 2023 synod session also discussed the female diaconate at some length. In its closing report, members asked for the results of the 2016 study commission to be made public. This request was never granted.
In between the 2023 and 2024 sessions of the synod, each held in October, Pope Francis set up 10 study groups that were meant to look more closely at certain controversial issues that had arisen at the 2023 synod. One of them, Study Group 5, was assigned to look at “Some theological and canonical matters regarding specific ministerial forms,” including the female diaconate. Although the rest of the study groups’ members were named publicly, members of Study Group 5 were not.
The opacity of the group’s membership and the widespread interest in the question of women’s ministries raised in the global listening process meant that the report from Vatican doctrine czar Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández on the progress of Study Group 5’s work at the beginning of the 2024 synod meeting was highly anticipated. In October 2024, Cardinal Fernández surprised synod participants by saying, “based on the analysis so far…there is still no room for a positive decision” on the female diaconate. Synod members demanded more information on how this decision was made, so organizers agreed to set up an afternoon of meetings with the members of the study groups in the interest of transparency.
The meeting with Study Group 5 on Oct. 18, 2024, included no study group members; instead, two lower-level officials from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith met the synod participants, asking them to stand in lines to receive a half-sheet of paper with an email address to which they could submit questions. The synod delegates, displeased, took control of the meeting, with one woman theologian distributing the papers while the officials first attempted to answer questions and then simply writing down the questions received.
Later that evening, Cardinal Fernández apologized for the “misunderstanding” that he would be present and agreed to meet with delegates on another day. In the interest of transparency, a recording of that meeting was made public. It clarified that the work of Study Group 5 had been incorporated into a process that was already underway in the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith to prepare a document on women’s roles in the church. Cardinal Fernández also confirmed at this meeting what he had announced on Oct. 18: that the D.D.F. document would focus on the broader questions of women’s ministries, while the Petrocchi Commission would be reopened to look anew at the question of the female diaconate. The commission would receive any contributions from synod participants or the wider church on the female diaconate.
Petrocchi Commission reconvenes
The Petrocchi Commission reopened for a single meeting in February 2025. The cardinal’s report says that 10 members were present, so the deceased Father Santiago del Cura Elena must have been replaced, but the name of his replacement has not been made public.
“At its last session, held in February 2025, the commission received substantial and significant written material for analysis on the question of the female diaconate,” Cardinal Petrocchi wrote to Pope Leo. It is unclear whether the commission reviewed the material beforehand or read it all during its February meeting; it is also unclear from the report how long the meeting lasted. Whereas other meetings’ dates are recorded (Sept. 13-18, 2021, and July 11-16, 2022), only the final report’s date is given for 2025: Feb. 7.
That report has not been published in full; what was published last week and has often been called the “Petrocchi Commission Report” is actually a summary letter sent from the cardinal to the pope on Sept. 18. Pope Leo ordered the summary to be published last week.
In the letter, Cardinal Petrocchi downplayed the 22 contributions that the commission received after the synod, saying that they came from a limited number of countries and thus, “although the material is abundant and, in some cases, skillfully argued, it cannot be considered the voice of the Synod, much less of the People of God as a whole.”
Cardinal Petrocchi only mentioned receiving contributions that favored the women’s ordination to the diaconate. These “draw on ideas concerning questions of theological anthropology,” he wrote. “These beliefs often conflict with the Tradition of the Catholic (and Orthodox) Church to admit only baptized men to the sacrament of Holy Orders.” (In 2024, a woman was ordained a deaconess by the Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria and all of Africa. The Roman Catholic Church recognizes the validity of Eastern Orthodox ordinations of deacons, priests and bishops, but has not yet expressed an official judgment about this ordination of a deaconess.)
Summarizing the contributions received from the Synod, Cardinal Petrocchi wrote:
[M]any women described their work for the Church, often carried out with great dedication, as if it were a sufficient criterion for ordination to the diaconate. Others spoke of a strong “feeling” of having been called, as if it were the necessary proof to guarantee the Church the validity of their vocation and demand that this conviction be accepted. Many already held diaconal functions, especially in communities without a priest, and believed they were “worthy” of receiving ordination, having, in some way, acquired the right.
The cardinal’s tone was criticized as “dismissive” by Discerning Deacons, a group that advocates women’s ordination to the diaconate.
Cardinal Petrocchi argued that there was no consensus in the church on the question of the female diaconate, citing the summary report from the 2023 session of the Synod on Synodality, which outlined areas of disagreement in the discussion, as well as the opposition of “some local churches.” He also noted that paragraph 60, on the role of women in leadership, of the synod’s 2024 final document, which Pope Francis adopted as magisterial teaching, earned the most “no” votes of any paragraph in the synod document, although it still passed with a nearly three-fourths majority (263 yes, 97 no). He also mentioned that while permanent deacons are numerous in some parts of the world, they are practically nonexistent in others.
In the Petrocchi summary, it is clear that the theological disagreement at the heart of the women deacons debate concerns whether diaconal ordination is primarily “ad sacerdotium” (for priesthood) or “ad ministerium” (for ministry). Put simply, the former view favors the unity of the three levels of Holy Orders and thus leads to the conclusion that women cannot be admitted to one of them without being admitted to all of them, which church teaching explicitly prohibits. The latter views diaconal ministry as a service to the church that is not necessarily a step on the path to priesthood, and could thus allow for women to be ordained as deacons.
It is noteworthy that the commission agreed that it could not move forward with recommending that women be admitted to the diaconate but that they sharply disagreed on whether “the masculinity of Christ” was the reason why women could not be made deacons. The commission was split 5-5 on the thesis: “The masculinity of Christ, and therefore the masculinity of those who receive Holy Orders, is not accidental, but is an integral part of the sacramental identity, preserving the divine order of salvation in Christ. Altering this reality would not be a simple adjustment of ministry but a disruption of the nuptial meaning of salvation.”
Presumably, two of the “yes” votes for this thesis came from the two American deacons on the commission, James Keating and Dominic Cerrato. In an interview with OSV News published the day after the report, the two argued that the masculinity of Christ prevents the possibility of women deacons.
In the interview, Deacon Keating, a professor at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, said that “the masculine identity of Christ is intrinsic to his mission as bridegroom,” and as a result, “fundamentally, women cannot become deacons.”
Deacon Cerrato, the director of deacon formation for the Diocese of Joliet in Illinois, argued further that “if you take away this beautiful imagery of Christ and his bride, the church—where, of course, the head is represented by the clergy, and the church is the bride” in what he called “beautiful nuptial imagery”—the result, he said, is “a theological transgenderism.”
Cardinal Petrocchi concluded in his letter to Pope Leo that in his personal opinion the theological disagreement “and the lack of convergence on fundamental doctrinal and pastoral polarities motivate, in my opinion, the maintenance of a prudential approach to the issue of women’s diaconate. This approach should be supported by increasingly well-equipped, global investigations, aimed, with farsighted wisdom, at exploring these ecclesial horizons.”
Advocates for the female diaconate, including Deacon De Cubber and Casey Stanton, a co-director of Discerning Deacons, agreed that the next step should be a global consultation. Both expressed to America that such a consultation should be undertaken in a synodal way, and they hoped that Pope Leo might be open to the possibility of different solutions for different regions of the world. For example, the bishops of Deacon De Cubber’s home country, Belgium, have stated that if the pope were to approve women deacons, the Belgian church would begin ordaining them.
Ms. Stanton said, “I would hope for some kind of guidance from those who are well versed in synod methodology and are really rooted in our tradition and ecclesiology to offer a kind of vademecum, a guide for the discernment that local churches around the world could be invited to participate in over a number of years.” She continued, “I think it would be an opportunity not just to have a question about women’s inclusion in the diaconate but what the commission calls for, which is a broader, deeper conversation about the ministry of the deacon.”
The Petrocchi commission concluded with a unanimous vote in favor of exploring other ministries for women outside of the diaconate. From Cardinal Fernández’s comments and the interim report from Study Group 5, this appears likely to be the position the forthcoming D.D.F. document will take.
The question of the women’s diaconate specifically now returns to Pope Leo for further discernment, with the most recent magisterial teaching on it being paragraph 60 of the final synod document: “The question of women’s access to diaconal ministry remains open. This discernment needs to continue.”
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