Vatican Stresses Ban on Female Deacons

VATICAN CITY —  The Roman Catholic church has no plans to let women be ordained as deacons, the step below priesthood that allows men to preach at Mass and to help celebrate liturgical services, Vatican officials said Tuesday.

Cardinal Pio Laghi, who heads the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education, said the ban on female deacons boiled down to one reason: “Christ was a man.”

Ordination of men as deacons is widely done in the United States, which has 12,000 of the 22,000 deacons worldwide. Some critics, including many in the U.S. church, have questioned why women cannot become deacons because laymen, including married men, are allowed.

“The Holy See isn’t thinking about having women in the diaconate,” Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, head of the Congregation of the Clergy, said at a news conference where he presented updated guidelines governing deacons.

“The church today doesn’t find any reason to change . . . that very holy tradition” of leaving it to men, Castrillon said.

Vatican officials acknowledged that female deacons did exist in the first centuries of the church, but said they were not ordained like men and were forbidden to even touch the host, which Catholics believe becomes the body of Christ during the Eucharist.

Besides their work during services, deacons work with the poor and assist priests in administering sacraments to those too ill to come to church.

Vatican officials said the updated guidelines broke no new ground, but appeared aimed at ensuring that deacons do not overstep the bounds that separate them from priests.

Laghi criticized the way deacons are sometimes used when priests are available. The deacon “gives the sermon and the priest sits down in his armchair. The public is astonished,” he said.

But Laghi stressed that deacons can be extremely useful in areas with many immigrant populations, because they often can give sermons in languages that a single parish priest does not have time to learn.

Deacons also are needed in places where priest shortages are often the greatest--in Africa, for example, where the church is growing and parishes are far-flung. The Vatican said there are only 338 deacons in 24 African countries.