• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Catholic Review

Catholic Review

Inspiring the Archdiocese of Baltimore

Menu
  • Home
  • News
        • Local News
        • World News
        • Vatican News
        • Obituaries
        • Featured Video
        • En Español
        • Sports News
        • Official Clergy Assignments
        • Schools News
  • Commentary
        • Contributors
          • Question Corner
          • George Weigel
          • Effie Caldarola
          • John Garvey
          • Father Ed Dougherty, M.M.
          • Guest Commentary
        • CR Columnists
          • Archbishop William E. Lori
          • Rita Buettner
          • Christopher Gunty
          • George Matysek Jr.
          • Father Joseph Breighner
          • Father Collin Poston
          • Robyn Barberry
          • Hanael Bianchi
          • Amen Columns
  • Entertainment
        • Events
        • Movie & Television Reviews
        • Arts & Culture
        • Books
        • Recipes
  • About Us
        • Contact Us
        • Our History
        • Meet Our Staff
        • Photos to own
        • Books/CDs/Prayer Cards
        • CR Media platforms
        • Electronic Edition
  • Advertising
  • Shop
        • Purchase Photos
        • Books/CDs/Prayer Cards
  • CR Radio
  • News Tips
  • Subscribe
A woman holds a sign in support of women deacons as Pope Francis leads his general audience in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican Nov. 6, 2019. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

Women deacons?/Pope kissing hand

September 14, 2021
By Father Kenneth Doyle
Catholic News Service
Filed Under: Commentary, deacons, Question Corner

Q. Our current priest always looks exhausted. He is attempting to pastor three parishes that were merged into one. Our parish has no deacons. With the shortage of priests and deacons, will the church ever allow women to become deacons? (southern Indiana)

A. This same issue, in fact, is currently being studied by the church. In April 2020, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis had created a new commission to study the question of a female diaconate in the Catholic Church. This followed the suggestion by the 2019 Synod of Bishops on the Amazon, which had recommended that women be considered for certain ministries in the church, including the permanent diaconate.

An earlier study on the same topic had been commissioned by Pope Francis in August 2013, soon after his election as pontiff. At a 2016 meeting with the women’s International Union of Superiors General, Pope Francis told the sisters that his understanding at that point was that women described as deaconesses in the New Testament were not ordained, as permanent deacons are, but were commissioned to assist with baptism by immersion of other women.

In 2019, aboard a papal flight with journalists, Pope Francis told reporters that the first commission he had appointed to study the topic had not reached a unanimous conclusion. “What is fundamental is that there was no certainty that there was an ordination with the same form and the same aim as the ordination of men,” the pope told reporters on that May 7, 2019, flight from Macedonia to Rome.

In 2002, the same topic had been studied by the International Theological Commission, an advisory body to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which had cast some doubt as to whether female deacons in the early church had a liturgical or sacramental function.

So the creation in 2020 of this new commission has given new hope to some that the ordination of women deacons could someday happen.

Q. I have always seen on television the reverence shown to the pope, including people kissing his hand. I am wondering whether the pope ever kisses anyone else’s hand. My understanding is that the Holy Father never does this. (Kansas)

A. The pope does, in fact, sometimes kiss people’s hands. I can remember in 2014 a much-publicized visit of Pope Francis to Jerusalem.

At Yad Vashem, the memorial to the Holocaust, the pope laid a wreath of flowers and then kissed the hands of six Shoah survivors in a sign of humility and honor, as he heard their stories of loved ones killed by the Nazis during World War II.

More recently, in May 2021, following a general audience with the faithful at the Vatican, Pope Francis kissed the numbered tattoo of a survivor from the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.

He leaned over 80-year-old Lidia Maksymowicz and kissed the tattooed “70072” on her elderly arm, then gave her a warm embrace then blessed her head. Maksymowicz, a Polish citizen who was deported to Auschwitz from her native Belarus at the age of 3, was among the children who were experimented upon by Josef Mengele, the Nazi physician known as “the Angel of Death.”

More Question Corner

Question Corner: Burning or burying sacramentals? And why use holy water?

Question Corner: On Limbo and on silent prayer

Questions: Holy days of obligation, vegetarians in Lent

Purgatory and the good thief/ Weddings during Lent

Remain a Catholic?/ Holy Communion with Alzheimer’s disease?

Will Sister Ita Ford be a saint?/ Refusing Communion

Copyright © 2021 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops

Print Print

Primary Sidebar

Father Kenneth Doyle

Father Kenneth Doyle writes Question Corner for Catholic News Service. Questions may be sent to Father Kenneth Doyle at askfatherdoyle@gmail.com and 30 Columbia Circle Dr., Albany, New York 12203.

View all posts from this author

| Recent Commentary |

An open letter to Marie Kondo: Thanks for sparking my joy

Question Corner: Burning or burying sacramentals? And why use holy water?

Centered on Christ

Resolution Revival: Assemble a team to get back to your goals

Happy Chinese New Year! Welcome to the Year of the Rabbit (7 Quick Takes)

| Recent Local News |

Mercy delivers Magic show in ‘Classic’ victory over Maryvale

Catholic Charities assists in counting Baltimore’s homeless population

Gov. Moore’s budget cuts BOOST, proposes phase-out of scholarship program

‘I love you, Papa!’: Maryland Catholics recall encounters with Pope Benedict XVI

RADIO INTERVIEW: Catholic Charities of Baltimore

| Catholic Review Radio |

CatholicReview · Catholic Review Radio

Footer

Our Vision

Real Life. Real Faith. 

Catholic Review Media communicates the Gospel and its impact on people’s lives in the Archdiocese of Baltimore and beyond.

Our Mission

Catholic Review Media provides intergenerational communications that inform, teach, inspire and engage Catholics and all of good will in the mission of Christ through diverse forms of media.

Contact

Catholic Review
320 Cathedral Street
Baltimore, MD 21201
443-524-3150
mail@CatholicReview.org

 

Social Media

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Recent

  • An open letter to Marie Kondo: Thanks for sparking my joy
  • Catholics call for prayer, justice as video of Memphis Black man’s deadly arrest released
  • Where in the world is Catholic Mass attendance highest?
  • Mercy delivers Magic show in ‘Classic’ victory over Maryvale
  • Former priest Frank Pavone, head of Priests for Life, faces sexual misconduct allegations
  • Analysis: As GOP primary season nears, will pro-lifers embrace Trump or hold out for a new hero?
  • Mission begins by meeting Jesus in the Scriptures and Eucharist, pope says
  • Catholic Charities assists in counting Baltimore’s homeless population
  • Bishop’s heroic crusade against America’s suicide epidemic is personal

Search

Membership

Catholic Press Association of the United States and Canada

Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Association

The Associated Church Press

© 2023 CATHOLIC REVIEW MEDIA, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED