"She said, ‘I just don't think this Church is set up for somebody like me,'" Hidalgo recalled in a recent interview. "‘I don't think God would speak to me only through the voice of a priest.'"

The young woman's elders, said Hidalgo, were shocked to realise that despite their own deep Catholic faith, the religion had failed to pass to the new generation, and particularly that, like many young Catholic women, Hildalgo's niece felt the Church had inhibited her from truly experiencing her faith.

Discerning Deacons

Her niece's experience is the kind of story that drove Hidalgo to co-found Discerning Deacons, an organisation that argues for the ordination of women deacons.

The group launched in 2021, spurred in part by the 2019 Synod for the Pan Amazon Region, a meeting in Rome that highlighted the dire need in South America's remotest regions for more contact with clergy.

Deacons can preach at Mass, baptise children and marry couples, though they cannot say Mass, hear confession or anoint the sick.

But Hidalgo's 12 years spent helping with pastoral duties at a Jesuit church in the Latin American immigrant community of Boyle Heights, California, suggested that giving women the responsibilities of the diaconate would also hold out a promise of empowerment and stanch an outflow of women that has become more pronounced in recent years.

A study released in April by the Survey Center on American Life found that women, especially Gen Z women, are now leaving religion at a more rapid rate than men. The same poll found that 65 percent of young women said they don't believe religious institutions treat women and men equally.

The effect seems to be hitting Catholics even harder.

In 2018, a survey of more than 1,500 Catholic women by America Magazine found that only 24 percent attend Mass at least once a week — a lower share than the 27 percent of women of all faiths who attend, as is often cited in a recent study by political scientist Ryan Burge.

Consultation

Pope Francis has opened new opportunities for women to be heard, but compared to the gains made by women elsewhere, the Church's attempts at equality seem feeble.

At the Pan-Amazonian Synod in 2019, bishops voted by a staggering 137-30 tally in favor of female deacons, but the proposal was shelved for further study.

In 2021, Francis invited the Catholic faithful in parishes around the world to gather and speak about their hopes, fears and concerns for the future of the Church.

The massive, three-year consultation, given the underwhelming name of Synod on the theme of Synodality, rattled the hierarchy by showing they had questions about priestly celibacy, welcoming of LGBTQ+ Catholics and even monogamy.

No issue, however, was more urgent to rank-and-file Catholics than the lot of women. The quest to ordain women as deacons, long swept under the rug, reemerged with a newfound energy.

"The Synod process was asking: what's in your heart? What do you think the Holy Spirit is asking of you?" Hidalgo said. "Suddenly, all these women started saying: ‘Oh, if I could discern a call to the diaconate, I would love to do that.'"

After forming Discerning Deacons, which has taught hundreds of women how to lead conversations on the female diaconate in their parishes and on college campuses, Hidalgo said its organisers were convinced that "a growing number of young women are quite discouraged by the limits they see in the Church."

As bishops convened in pre-meetings for the synod, the question of female participation came up again and again.

European Catholics reported "a tension" between a changing society and the Church "practicing a second-class status of women."

In Oceania, "the role and place of women in the Church was a uniform concern," and Latin American and Caribbean bishops asked that attendees of the upcoming summit at the Vatican address the question of "the opening of some ministries to women," according to reports from the bishops' meetings.

The Maronite Church, a Middle Eastern rite in communion with Rome, held its own Synod on Women in 2022, after its bishops suggested that the Church "should begin to reflect seriously on the re-establishment of the diaconate for women," which an earlier pope had allowed the Maronites in 1746.

But in March 2024, Francis put on the brakes.

Canceling discussion of women in the diaconate at October's second meeting of the synod, Francis instead created a study group to tackle this and other controversial topics, charging them with reporting back in 2025.

The report on the female diaconate would be submitted to the Vatican's Department for the Doctrine of the Faith, a notoriously secretive and historically conservative office.

"The support for women's recognition is getting stronger and stronger.

"I don't know how the leadership inside the Vatican think that they can make it disappear by closing the doors, closing the curtains, and having a secretive study," said Miriam Duignan, executive director of the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research and a leader of Women's Ordination Worldwide, an umbrella organisation.

The case for women

Duignan will be among dozens of Catholic women making the case for women deacons on the sidelines of October's synod meeting, in vigils, prayer events and public demonstrations.

"They have opened Pandora's box," she said. "They've encouraged people to speak out, and they're not going to stop speaking out now or ever again."

In his letter to the Romans, in the New Testament, Paul introduces a woman named Phoebe as "deaconess of the Church" and praises her as "a helper of many and of myself as well."

A smattering of women deacons has since been scattered across the history of the Church, especially in the Eastern traditions.

In the 12th century, the Church interrupted the ordination of deacons altogether, and for about 900 years, until the Second Vatican Council, it didn't come up.

But in debates during Vatican II in the 1960s over how to re-energise the Church, the deaconate came to the fore once again.

Eventually the male deaconate was restored, but Pope Paul VI supported further study on the ordination of women. In 1973, he defaulted to commissioning a study that took three years to report that nothing in the Bible barred women from becoming priests.

As the Vatican ordered up further studies in the early 1990s without publishing their findings, the current lines were drawn:

Opponents argued that the biblical and historical female deacons didn't serve the same role as deacons today, or served only females in highly segregated contexts. Advocates claimed that the modern diaconate, mostly seen as a first step toward becoming a priest, is the outlier.

In 1994, now-Saint Pope John Paul II declared, "The Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women," seemingly closing the discussion forever.

Francis has supported John Paul's ruling, shutting down hopes in an interview with CBS News in May for women's ordination of any kind. But he has also kept up the pattern of commissioning studies, with one in 2016 and another in 2020, without revealing their findings.

"I think it's pretty clear that the Vatican is trying to lower expectations of any outcome of this synodal gathering," said Kate McElwee, executive director of the Women's Ordination Conference.

McElwee said that it would constitute a "scandal" if the synod were to fail to recognise the call by thousands of women. She described the October summit as "a tipping point" for many.

Coupled with the decline in the number of priests, a downward trend that started in 2012, the demand for women deacons seems to have gathered an irresistible momentum.

A February study by Pew found that 64 percent of U.S. Catholics support the ordination of women as priests. Another Pew report on Sept. 26 in major Latin American countries found overwhelming support for ordaining women priests, especially among young generations.

"While women may not be in the pews in the same numbers on Sunday, that doesn't mean that they're not watching, organising, praying and working on correcting this injustice," McElwee said.

Some women have lost hope in the synod, and Francis. Citing a misogynistic and suffocating environment, Lucetta Scaraffia quit her job in 2019 as the head of "Women, Church, World," the only Vatican magazine specifically aimed at a female audience.

"We women have never been given anything without fighting for it," said Scaraffia.

"There is this absurd idea that a good pope will come who will give women power. But that has never happened in history or in politics. Women took that power for themselves," she said.

In his Sep. 27 visit to the Louvain Catholic University in Belgium, Francis talked about women in terms of their "fertile" and caregiving nature, the latest example of his frequent tone-deafness on gender.

He recently warned a group of priests that "gossip is for women" and once referred to the women appointed to a prestigious theological commission as "strawberries on the cake."

But Scaraffia said deeper issues of trust in Church leadership have arisen with the rampant abuse of power, including sexual abuse of religious sisters by priests.

In her meetings with nuns, she has heard widespread yet often hidden demands of women religious for greater authority and, in some cases, ordination as an antidote.

Close observers of Francis' leadership note that he has allowed women to head Vatican departments and to become lecturers.

Priests and bishops have become accustomed in this pontificate to brushing shoulders with women in curial offices and seeing them participate more actively at Mass. But more significant reform remains incremental.

The World Union of Catholic Women's Organisations, which represents more than 8 million Catholic women in 50 countries, has shown itself willing to move at the Church's pace, listening to Catholic women from all walks of life.

They tell in the organisation's latest report how women often express feeling invisible and unappreciated for the work they do for the Church.

"The Church cannot go on with only men making all the decisions, when more than half of the Catholic population are women," said Monica Santamarina, president general of WUCWO.

Santamarina said canon law allows women to do many things in the Church. They can sit on pastoral and diocesan councils that advise the parish priest or the bishop.

If women start by occupying those roles and showing other women and men that it's possible, she said, young people will be attracted to the Church as well.

"I think that what is at stake for us women at the synod is not to take a step backwards," she said. "I think we have to become a little more patient, more careful," she added.

Barbara Dowding, vice president at WUCWO, believes the diaconate is possible for women but doubts it will happen in her lifetime.

"For bishops and priests who are living now and go back a long way, the very notion of having a woman ordained to anything is just so hard for them, you know? Because it's been a male-dominated Church in so many ways," she said.

There will be 54 female voting delegates at the October Synod, commonly referred to as Synod mothers, who will engage with prelates and priests in roundtable discussions.

The youngest is Julia Oseka, 23, a Polish student of physics and theology at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, who said she felt awe at the responsibility of representing the hopes of so many women.

"As I sat on that chair, I felt how many women before me contributed so that we might one day be listened to. I also felt inspired by so many women who are, for me, models of leaders in the Church," she said at a webinar organized by WUCWO on Thursday (Sept. 26).

Oseka said that sitting in and voting at the synod "is a gift" and praised the opportunity "to dialogue on the same level with priests, bishops and lay people."

Whether women watch the synod with disappointment or bated breath, Oseka urged that the event should be interpreted as "a sign not to give up on the task of giving visibility to women in the Church."

• Claire Giangravè is a Rome-based reporter for RNS, covering the Catholic Church and the Vatican.
• First published by RNS

Cultural signs and gestures could be incorporated into the liturgy without changing what is essential for Catholics, bishops say.

Bishop Rafael Escudero Lopez-Brea of Peru, says this suggestion isn't about Catholics asking for a new "liturgical rite".

The essential elements "received by the Lord and the apostles in the Eucharist" would be retained, while introducing cultural elements.

"When we speak of this possibility, it means to introduce some symbols into the Eucharist, some rites that do not affect what is essential in the Eucharist because if not, we would ruin the sacrament and go against that revelation," Escudero says.

He was one of several participants who addressed the theme of inculturation to "open the church to discover new paths within the rich diversity of Amazonian culture".

Escudero says incorporating local traditions and cultural elements can already be seen in Eastern Catholic churches and Latin-rite Masses in Africa.

"If we study church history, we can see that before everything was unified under the Roman rite, a multiplicity of different rites existed according to the area," he says.

Bishop Eugenio Coter of Bolivia says certain symbols and gestures used in the Latin rite can have entirely different meanings depending on the country or culture.

"A bishop told me that a change was asked for the liturgy in Japan".

Coter says the change was requested because in Japan the gesture of beating one's chest is a gesture of pride, of affirmation, as if saying "I matter".

Therefore, "placing it during the 'Confiteor' has an entirely different meaning. An adaptation must be made," Coter says.

Another example Coter offers is about the use of incense during Mass.

He says for some indigenous groups in the Amazon, the use of incense, which "is a sign of God's presence" in the Latin rite, signifies prayers rising to God in heaven.

With indigenous Catholics, "incense is used during the prayers of the faithful", where the reader sprinkles the incense to show that "the prayer rises to heaven".

Coter says he supports the idea of setting up a commission of experts who can recommend ways to incorporate into the Eucharist "the language, signs, gestures, music and local culture of every ethnic group while safeguarding that which the word of God and faith tells us.

"That is why there are structural elements of the Eucharist that have not changed in 2,000 years,"he says.

However he says there are other things "that can be done - through a commission that has studied the issues - in a way that speaks to the people who live it".

Source

• The Tablet
• Image: Religion News Service

One of the most important critics of the agenda set out in the instrumentum laboris is German Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, who has flatly announced that it "contradicts the binding teaching of the Church in decisive points and thus has to be qualified as heretical."

That, as they say in the business, is a strong statement.

One might expect that Cardinal Brandmüller would focus his criticism on the possible exceptional measures suggested in the working document to ordain elderly, indigenous married men in remote areas of the Amazon so the faithful there could go to Mass.

This is where most of the buzz in the unfolding debate has been focused, with traditionalists laying out the case that the ordination of married men, however exceptional, would be heretical in ways that the church's current practices — admitting married Episcopal clergy as converts to Catholicism or married priests in the Eastern Catholic Churches — are not.

But this is not where Brandmüller and others in his camp have voiced concern.

Disturbingly, their first target seems to be Catholic social doctrine.

"Clearly," Brandmüller writes in a letter that LifesSite News published in full, "there is an encroaching interference here by a synod of bishops into the purely secular affairs of the Brazilian state and society.

"What do ecology, economy, and politics have to do with the mandate and mission of the Church?

"More importantly: what professional expertise authorizes an ecclesial synod of bishops to express itself on such topics?"

This may sound like a reasonable concern until it is put in the context of the Vatican's true aims in the synod.

Put plainly, this synod will put the church on the side of the indigenous Amazon peoples.

In particular, it will put the church on the side of an integral ecology that respects both God's creation and its relationship with the flourishing of the indigenous Amazon peoples.

It will recognize, furthermore, that the church cannot be identified with the developed West alone and will honor the fact that, as Pope St. John Paul II insisted, Christ is present in indigenous peoples in a very special way.

Indeed, the working document insists that life in the Amazon is threatened by environmental destruction and exploitation and by the systematic violation of human rights.

In particular, it is threatened by the violation of the rights of indigenous peoples, such as the right to territory, to self-determination, to the demarcation of territories and to prior consultation and consent.

According to the communities participating in the synod, the threat to life comes from global economic and political interests, especially resource-extractive companies, often in collusion with, or tolerated by, local and national governments as well as traditional indigenous leaders.

The Amazon has great riches — both in its people and its resources — that these forces have taken, are taking, and mean to take in the future.

The synod's working document turns its critical attention to "insatiable vision of unlimited growth, of the idolatry of money, of a world disconnected from its roots and environment, of a culture of death."

The developed economic and political powers, of course, will not go down without a fight. But it is incumbent on the Catholic Church to remain faithful to our social doctrine by insisting on our religious duty to be on the side of the indigenous peoples in this conflict.

Bizarrely, Cardinal Brandmüller discards this mandate by suggesting that the questions the Synod document raises involve matters of professional expertise that the bishops do not have.

He even suggests that topics like "ecology, economy, and politics" have nothing to do with the mission and mandate of the church.

This suggestion, which is closer to heresy than anything in the instrumentum laboris, is totally inconsistent with nearly 130 years of Catholic social doctrine.

According to the Vatican's Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, this body of teaching is concerned with just and holy relationships in society — situations and problems regarding development, human work, economics, politics, human ecology, safeguarding the environment and more.

It is true that judgments made about specific public policies can only be informed by — not determined by — Catholic teaching.

Catholic social doctrine insists on the right to unionize and be paid a living wage, for instance, but how such unions are organized and what counts as a living wage in a particular social and economic context is not a matter that Catholic teaching can decide in the abstract.

But Catholic social doctrine demands that economic and political policies be designed with a preference for indigenous people over and against their powerful exploiters.

It demands that Western-style preferences for unlimited growth of capital, idolatry of money and exploitation of God's creation be resisted with an integral ecology that honors God's plan for vulnerable, embodied human beings and their relationship with the broader ecological world.

The specifics of how these goals are accomplished, of course, cannot be decided upon in the abstract.

The insight of those with expertise beyond bishops' knowledge should be listened to quite carefully for precisely this reason.

But as the instrumentum laboris makes clear, this synod has "the historic opportunity to differentiate itself clearly from the new colonizing powers by listening to the Amazon peoples."

Indigenous voices must speak first, and the Church must listen.

Catholic social doctrine demands no less.

• Charlie Camosy is a professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University. He is the author of five books, including, most recently, "Resisting Throwaway Culture." He is the father of four children, three of whom were adopted from Philippines.
• First publised in RNS. Republished with permission.

Its main objective is to "find new paths for the evangelization of that portion of the people of God, particularly the indigenous people who are often forgotten and often face a bleak future due to the crisis of the Amazon rainforest, a fundamental lung for our planet."

The preparatory document was published on June 8, 2018.

The Synod on Amazonia is a major ecclesial project that seeks to overcome limits and redefine pastoral strategies, adapting them to contemporary times.

The Pan-Amazonian Region consists of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Suriname, Guyana and French Guyana.

It is an important source of oxygen for the entire world as it is home to more than a third of the primary forestry reserves of the Earth. It is one of the largest areas of biodiversity on the planet.

Bishops chosen from all over the world will come to the synod, including all the bishops of the Amazonian Region.

Pope Francis has appointed as relator general Cardinal Claudio Hummes, archbishop emeritus of Sao Paulo, Brazil and a Franciscan.

Another important figure is Jesuit Cardinal Pedro Barreto, the archbishop of Huancayo, Peru.

They are respectively the president and vice president of Red Eclesial Panamazónica (REPAM), the Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network.

This transnational network seeks to create a harmonious collaboration between the various components of the Church: ecclesial districts, religious congregations, charitable organizations and various associations, Catholic foundations and lay groups.

Among its main objectives is the defense of the life of Amazonian communities threatened by pollution, by radical and rapid changes of the ecosystem on which they depend, and by the lack of protection for basic human rights.

On October 31, 2006, Cardinal Hummes was nominated by Pope Benedict XVI as prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy.

In May 2007 he participated at the Fifth Episcopal Conference of Latin America (CELAM) at Aparecida, Brazil, as a member appointed by the pope.

Today he is the president of the Amazonia Commission of the Brazilian Bishops' Conference. Given his experience and activities we decided to have a conversation with him to explore the significance of this synod and its themes.

Your Eminence, the synod on the Amazon is drawing near.

It will be a great ecclesial event concerning a specific and particular part of the world, which is an enormous and incredibly rich and complex area.

For this reason, some people fear the upcoming synod might have repercussions on the unity of the Church.

What is your opinion?

Today, much is said about the unity of the Church.

It is of fundamental and utmost importance.

However, it has to be understood as a unity that welcomes diversity, following the model of the Most Holy Trinity.

That is, it is equally necessary to highlight that unity can never destroy diversity.

Concretely, the synod accentuates the diversity within that great unity.

Diversity is the richness of unity, protecting it against becoming uniformity, against providing justifications to control.

Is diversity important for the Church?

The Church is open to diversity today more than ever.

The Latin American countries of the Pan-Amazonian region are an expression of Latin American diversity, which has to be welcomed by the Church in Europe and the whole world without fear and with a great openness.

I want to underline this because this synod is a recognition of our peculiarity.

I see it this way: the Church of Latin America can bring new lights to the European Church and to the world, while the Church in Europe has to give us ancient lights, which are very important.

Initially, Christianity found a place for inculturation in European culture, and this good process has remained valid up until today.

But that one act of inculturation does not suffice.

The pope says that one culture alone cannot exhaust the richness of the Gospel.

The Church does not wish to dominate other cultures, but respects that initial European inculturation.

We have to appreciate the diversity of cultures: the Church will be enriched by this, not undermined.

Diversity does not attack the unity of the Church; it strengthens it.

It is important not to be afraid of these things.

So, if we speak among ourselves and manage to find new paths for the Church in Amazonia, this will be for the benefit of the whole Church.

But always starting from a specific reflection on Amazonia.

The REPAM network of Pan-Amazonia ecclesial organizations met with Pope Francis.

Can you tell us something about that meeting and the new things, challenges and hopes that the Holy Father places in the synodal process?

Last February 25, Cardinal Pedro Barreto, Mauricio Lopez (REPAM's general secretary) and I met with the pope.

We told him about the process of preparation for the synod on completion of the phase of listening and consulting with the particular Churches of the Pan-Amazonian Region.

We told him about all the work done so far.

In this synodal process, our network has truly sought to "listen" and not only "see, judge, act."

Listening comes before everything else.

To prepare a synod you need to listen, not just organize and make plans.

So the mark of the synod is its ability to listen and overcome the mentality of plans and frameworks?

To truly "see" you need to listen.

It is not enough to analyze what Amazonia is, or who the Church in Amazonia is and what it does.

The synod is not an abstract coming together, a generic idea.

For us, we need to listen above all to the very people of Amazonia.

Their real situations need to be listened to; their cries need to be heard.

Methodologically, this effort has greatly enriched our seeing, judging and acting. Our "seeing" has not been the detached analysis of those who examine a situation without being involved. We truly listened.

And your conversation with the pope?

We asked the pope if he had any recommendations for us.

He replied that, first, the specific synod objective should not be watered down.

This must not become an occasion for discussing everything, following an ancient Latin saying that states with irony: de omni re scibili et de quibusdam aliis ("concerning every knowable thing, and even certain other things"). Continue reading

• Image: The Catholic Church in the European Union