Catholic ping!
I would imagine this is one area where Roman Catholics and straight-laced, fundamentalist Baptists agree: i.e., women have no place in ordained ministry.
1 Timothy 2:12 ESV I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.
Seems pretty clear, doesn’t it? Our Catholics brethren have thought so for centuries.
Also, notice this verse:
1 Timothy 3:12 ESV Let deacons each be the husband of one wife, managing their children and their own households well.
See that phrase “...the husband of one wife,...”? Only some nutty liberal would twist the plain, simple meaning of that phrase to mean that a woman can be a deacon (or even a priest for that matter).
The bottom line of all this is clear: women are not meant for ordained ministry.
I don’t think this will really happen.
No doctrine will be changed.
A commission to study this is a very bad idea Francis. It would only encourage the radical feminists of the Church (i.e. some of those whacky nuns) to pursue this as a goal for human motives only, and certainly not for the spread of God’s kingdom on earth.
I think an honest and impartial study would not hurt. I also found this book on an examination of Deaconesses in the Orthodox churches:
Fr. Z needs to stop kidding himself. Francis made this statement to a gaggle of superiors of liberal nuns. Francis switches tunes according to his audiences.
In the early Church, deaconesses were almost all widows or unmarried women “of an age”. They were not (and are not) ordained in the same sense that priests and male deacons are, rather they were “consecrated” somewhat like readers and altar boys are. Their role was very limited, mostly to ministering to women because cultural taboos of the time forbade priests and male from touching women. Some local Orthodox Churches today do have deaconesses, mostly the Slavic Churches, though Greece reinstituted the order in 2011. The women, always unmarried, serve so far as I know only in women’s monasteries, usually isolated ones at that. They can perform certain sacramental functions like anointing the sick nuns and giving communion which has already been consecrated to nuns. They also may have some administrative role under the gerondas. I have been told that in Russia some work in women’s hospitals, I assume in the same roles.
There are very few of these deaconesses; none here in No. America, none in the ME, No. Africa or among the Ethiopians so far as I know.
Given the mindset of the modern Latin Church and of the Western laity, I trust you folks will stay far, far away from this.