Ultra-dissident “Voice of the Faithful” to host an online meeting about deaconettes. Anyone can register!

This is interesting.

Voice of the Faithful – which is neither – is sponsoring an online meeting about the ordination of woman to the diaconate.   It is hosted through the super-liberal Hofstra University.

Anyone can register!  HERE

Women Deacons Now [That‘s objective!]

Women Deacons Now that the Synod is Over

Dec 4, 2019 07:30 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)

To learn more about Voice of the Faithful try HERE.  This group is the very paradigm of dissident.

There are real problems with the suggestion that women can be ordained.

First, we don’t know enough about what female deacons were in the ancient Church.

Second, the Sacrament of Orders is one sacrament, not three.  The one sacrament confers three orders, diaconate, priesthood, episcopate – that is, deacons, priests and bishops.   Only men can be ordained as priests and bishops.  It is by divine appointment that men only can be ordained with this sacrament as bishops and priests.  Hence, women cannot be ordained as deacons with Sacrament of Orders.  Cf. Lumen gentium 20 ff.

 

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11 Comments

  1. JEF5570 says:

    I wish somebody would explain the whole one sacrament, three orders/degrees to Trent Horn of Catholic Answers. That guy crashed and burned on this issue.

  2. Just Some Guy says:

    What if we all signed up and raided the meeting with traditional Catholic Theology….

    Unless, by “meeting” it means set people having a one sided conversation while others can only spectate.

  3. FrSteveHartley says:

    Perhaps they are confused by what the Pope has been saying as of late. Talk about trying to prep the Church for Deaconetts. Lord have mercy. Is he really going to lead the Church into a Schism?

    “Setting aside his prepared text, Pope Francis warned against the danger of what he termed as “clericalizing the laity”. Sometimes, he said, permanent deacons, who are to be the custodians of service in dioceses, soon find themselves “looking at the altar” and end up as “wannaby priests”. Work with the laity but don’t clericalize them, the Pope said. “Move the deacons away from the altar… They are the custodians of service, not first-class altar boys or second-class priests,” he added.”

    https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2019-11/pope-francis-dicastery-family-laity-life-plenary.html?fbclid=IwAR3E-iCz4cO28h08oK2syqH681vxT3xvbjEO1iGNq1ANKGGfweSnpq4y-K0

  4. JonPatrick says:

    The Catholic Thing has a good discussion about why women can’t be ordained
    https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2019/11/17/women-priests/

  5. Marion Ancilla Mariae II says:

    I believe deaconesses were used in the early Church because many of the people being baptized were no longer infants. The early Church practiced full-immersion baptism, and so the candidates, in the final moment, and of necessity, handed their outer raiment to a witness. When females beyond the baby stage were presented – or presented themselves – to receive the Sacrament of Baptism, the Church, in her carefulness to preserve holy modesty at this most sacred time, ordained that the deaconess – not the deacon or priest – should administer the Sacrament to the candidate.

    I don’t know, of course, but it would make sense that only female witnesses would be present at the Baptism of a female no longer a babe in arms.

  6. veritas vincit says:

    While fully agreeing with the description of Voice of the Faithful in the Catholicity link, I do need to point out that the article is dated. Deal Hudson who wrote that article has not been at Crisis since 2011. He was once a visible personality in the Catholic blogosphere, but after some personal shortcomings were brought to light, he has stepped into the background.

  7. ajf1984 says:

    [NB: this post was written mostly in jest, as I have no desire to denigrate the Holy Order of Deacons!]

    Why are so many people on the Left clamoring for women to become ecclesial table-waiters, anyway? Isn’t that a step backwards, into that retrograde line of thinking that the purpose of women is to serve men, clean up the dishes after supper, etc.? Or are these people under the mistaken impression that the diaconate (and, indeed, all grades of Holy Orders) is not about service but about Power and Authority? That the unordained layfolk (of either sex) aren’t invested with their own dignity? Clericalism much? It’s crazy-making.

  8. Lurker 59 says:

    There are really two questions present here in this issue:

    1.) Where there deaconettes in the early Church?
    2.) Is it possible to ordain women as deaconettes in the modern Church?

    Those that argue for deaconettes, in hearing a NO for #1, will still argue YES for #2. This is important to keep in one’s mind instead of getting bogged down issues of source criticism due to the limited amount of sources relating to this issue and the fact that the early Church is less distinct and precise in its discussion of Holy Orders (and what distinguishes between them) than the Western Church (which has some variance with the Eastern Church / Orthodoxy).

    Therefore, it is important to keep in mind the goals of the argument as well as presuppositions of the opponents — ask first if that the historical record shows that there were no ordained women that they will not support the ordination of women in the modern period. If they insist that, independent of the historical record, women should be ordained, it is pointless to have the discussion on #1 and instead head into the discussion for #2, which can be shown to hinge on false presuppositions relating to soteriology and sacramental theology. And if one digs a bit, there is undoubtedly a Christological heresy at the root.

    @Marion Ancilla Mariae II — Yes that is one of the recorded functions of a position exclusive to women in the early Church.

  9. TonyO says:

    Setting aside his prepared text, Pope Francis warned against the danger of what he termed as “clericalizing the laity”. Sometimes, he said, permanent deacons, who are to be the custodians of service in dioceses, soon find themselves “looking at the altar” and end up as “wannaby priests”.

    What kind of crack-pottery is this? Everybody should be looking to the altar, that’s where God is. But from their own proper place, which is how the Church (from Christ and the Holy Spirit) designated different roles, but the same Church. If deacons shouldn’t want to be priests (I suppose he is just plain forgetting those deacons who are ordained as transitional deacons????), then all the more so, women shouldn’t want it either. Wait, maybe we shouldn’t be wanting to have women in Dicasteries that exercise priestly authority in the Church?

    “Move the deacons away from the altar… They are the custodians of service, not first-class altar boys or second-class priests,” he added.”

    I gather that he neither knows nor understands the EF of the Mass, then?

  10. Lurker 59 says:

    @TonyO Great points.

    There does arise the question of how does His Holiness understands (permanent) deacons? It seems that he doesn’t see them as clerics but rather as a category of the laity.

    To reiterate what you said, there is a very common misunderstanding of the purpose of the Christian life, both in its present condition and eschatological dimension. All of creation is created and ordered, in some way, towards the liturgical worship of God. In our fallen world, the disorder that exists is precisely the orientation that moves one’s gaze “away from the altar”. That is the fall; that is the reason for evil.

    When we start to place concerns for the goods of the created order above concerns for the eschatological order – which IS the liturgical worship of God of the Church Triumphant, we lose sight of God and distance ourselves from Him.

    Everything is intended to be at the service of the altar. Zechariah 14:20. Look at Adam. What is his purpose? It is not to enjoy himself. It is not to be a god over creation. It is not to serve pachamama. Adama is a cultivator (gardner prefall, tiller of the land post-fall) which is to cultivate or to bring cultic order to the created world, necessarily to order creation in the cultic worship of God. From the very beginning, man has been instructed to keep his gaze upon the altar and to order the gaze of all material things to the altar.

  11. The Cobbler says:

    Just Some Guy,

    There are certainly lots of interesting lines of arguments we could bring up. If we believe Christ is God come to save us, then presumably we should trust He made the important stuff clear and wouldn’t let His Church screw up that badly; hard to argue otherwise without denying His divinity, and one could always accuse them of having little Faith who try to wiggle out of it. Or if they say, He had to make concessions to the culture of the time, one might point out the likes of Catherine of Alexandria – martyr, no compromise with the culture, a woman (nay, a girl) who outsmarted the pagans. Or if they say, but we know better about women now, point out that they’re essentially implying Jesus Christ was a misogynist, or ask them which of their current ideas we will soon also know better than. Or if they try to cut us off, call them out for elitist fear of listening to the voice of the faithful, for being too rigid to dialogue, etc.

    The theology of the matter is worth knowing, but when it comes to heresy, it’s beside the point: either we are faithful to the Truth or we are not, and those who are not inevitably will eventually trap themselves.

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