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Cardinal Müller: No pope or council could permit female deacons, ‘it would be invalid’ July 26, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – The cardinal in charge of safeguarding Catholic doctrine under Pope Benedict issued today a second detailed critique of the Amazon Synod’s working document (Instrumentum Laboris), saying that no synod, Pope, or council “could make possible the ordination of women as bishop, priest, or deacon.” Cardinal Gerhard Müller, former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith who was removed from his post by Pope Francis in 2017, concentrated especially on the question of the priesthood and of the impossibility...

Op-Ed - Anglican Nightmare in Rome: "Ordained" Female Deacons, First Step Towards "Women Priests" Father Richard G. Cipolla, DPhil (Oxon) “Consecrated women already work so much with the poor and the marginalized: teaching the catechism, accompanying the sick and the moribund, distributing communion, [and] in many countries conducting the common prayers in absence of priests and in those circumstances pronouncing the homily. In the church there is the office of the permanent diaconate, but it is open only to married and non-married men. What impedes the church from including women among permanent deacons, just as it happened in the early...

The Vatican presented something important today, 8 June, at a press conference: the Preparatory Document for the upcoming 2019 Pan-Amazon Synod in which there is now talk about giving women some “type of official ministry” and of making “courageous” and inculturated proposals with regard to the Church’s “inclusive ministerial action.” One of the leading organiziers of this synod, Bishop Kräutler, says this reform should include married priests, male and female. The Preparatory Document itself refers indirectly to a decisive meeting that took place, in 2014, between the Pope and Kräutler. As a Reuters report today sums it up, today’s press...

“What are you, a deacon?” the man asks from his bed. We are about 20 minutes into a pastoral visit. His parish deacon has been visiting regularly since he got sick. Now I have entered this man’s life as a hospice chaplain, and he does not quite know what to make of me.It is not the first time I have been asked the question. Sometimes they ask if I am a priest or a sister or if they should call me “Reverend.” Their questions bring a smile to my face, but they also take me back to a time...

Father Roy Donovan, parish priest of Caheronlish, Limerick, has objected to the decision by his Archbishop Kieran O’Reilly of Cashel & Emly to introduce the permanent diaconate in his archdiocese. Donovan called on the archbishop to wait until the completion of a report by the papal commission on women deacons. He further believes that “a woman could celebrate the Eucharist even better than a man being more familiar with the shedding of blood. A woman saying ‘this is my body, this is my blood’ can give more meaning to the Eucharist than any male celibate.” The leadership of the radical...

German Bishop Wants Married Priests and Female Deacons Liberal Bishop Franz-Josef Bode of Osnabrück, Germany, wants married priests, “One must ask if priesthood and celibacy need always to be connected”, he told his diocesan paper “Kirchenbote”. Further he suggested a "female diaconate” and lay persons who run parishes.Bode has the money to pay his personnel. Last year his diocese had a budget of 161,5 Million Euro, mostly coming from compulsory church tax. This year the diocese had for the first time in more than 100 years no priestly ordination.

In the most recent edition of the Italian Jesuit bi-weekly magazine, La Civiltà Cattolica, the text of which is vetted by the Holy See prior to publication, an apologetic appears in favor of female ordination. Sandro Magister, the well-known Vaticanista, offers an overview of the article on his blog, L’Espresso [available in English], wherein he reminds readers of a comment made by Francis on the return flight from Sweden last November 1st: For the ordination of women in the Catholic Church, the last clear word was given by Saint John Paul II, and this holds. Magister goes on to argue,...

Catholic sisters globally would be better-equipped to carry out their work if they could become deacons, the head of a global network of nuns has said, an important marker in the sharp debate over women deacons that Pope Francis opened last week. “We are already doing so many things that resemble what a deacon would do, although it would help us to do a bit more service if we were ordained deacons,” Sister Carmen Sammut, president of the International Union of Superiors General, or UISG, told RNS. Francis put a spring in the step of women religious on Thursday (May...