For nearly a decade, two successive commissions of church experts studiously examined if women could serve as deacons, an ordained ministry in the Roman Catholic Church.
Their grinding deliberations, which began under Pope Francis, raised hopes that women might be allowed, after being excluded from leadership roles for nearly two millenniums, to join Catholicism’s all-male clergy.
On Thursday, the second panel finally announced its recommendation: No, at least for now.
The 12-person committee, which included five women, said that its recommendation “excludes the possibility” of ordaining women as deacons — junior ministers who are permitted to preach and administer weddings, funerals and baptisms, but not to celebrate Mass.
The committee’s president, Cardinal Giuseppe Petrocchi, left open the possibility of revising the decision in the future. He said in a letter to Pope Leo XIV, Francis’s successor, that further study was required and suggested that other leadership roles could be created specifically for women.
Though the move did not come as a surprise, it was still a blow to campaigners who had hoped that the Vatican, under Leo’s leadership, might allow for the inclusion of women in the lowest rungs of the church ministerial hierarchy.
“This is a lesson we’ve learned many times over, of just how far the Vatican will go to deny women equality,” said Kate McElwee, the executive director of Women’s Ordination Conference, a Washington-based Catholic group campaigning for women to become priests.
Many women longed for affirmation, recognition and an equal place in the church, Ms. McElwee said, and they were losing patience with what she described as the Vatican’s “stalling game.”
The role of women in the Roman Catholic Church has emerged as an increasingly pressing issue for the 2,000-year-old institution.
The topic was repeatedly cited as a priority, when Catholics around the globe were canvassed for their opinions ahead of meetings held at the Vatican in 2023 and 2024 to chart the church’s future.
At the request of a global umbrella organization for nuns, Francis set up several committees over the last decade to address the issue, prompting resistance from conservative Catholics opposed to changing church tradition. Though deacons lack the authority of priests, it was considered contentious even to consider allowing women to join the diaconate — because conservative Catholics have said for decades that it would be the first step toward allowing women to join the priesthood.
Catholic leaders, including recent popes, have made clear that ordaining women as priests is not on the table. To be made a deacon also requires the sacrament of ordination.
Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, a German theologian who oversaw the Vatican’s doctrinal office under Pope Benedict and for four years under Francis, maintained that ordaining women in any capacity was impermissible because of the church’s liturgical and theological tradition.
But some church historians have said there is evidence that women served in the role of deacon in the early church, bolstering the arguments of women who said they should be able to play a ministerial role in the church.
Francis raised hopes that change might be afoot after he set up two commissions to examine the history of female deacons in the church. The findings of the first commission, which was set up in 2016, were never made public. The findings of the second, which was set up in 2020, were made public on Thursday, at Leo’s request, the Vatican said.
The commission completed its work in February and sent its findings to Leo in September “in the hope that they may be of assistance in Your discernment,” the commission’s president said in a letter to the pontiff. Only the pope can make a definitive decision on such an issue.
Leo has not spoken openly about his position, but in an interview this year with a Vatican reporter, Elise Ann Allen, he said that at the moment he had no intention of changing church teaching on the question of ordination. At the same time, he said there was more to understand about the role of deacons and he was “willing to continue to listen to people.”
He also said that he hoped to continue in Francis’ footsteps, appointing women to leadership roles and “recognizing the gifts that women have that can contribute to the life of the church in many ways.” Francis appointed nuns to head administrative departments at the Vatican and into roles overseeing the management of the Vatican City State.
Phyllis Zagano, an expert on the history of women in the Catholic Church at Hofstra University in New York, said the commission’s decision did “not present a historical, theological and anthropological argument” against women deacons, but reflected a cultural bias. “To me, the major culture is the misogynist culture of the Vatican that cannot see women as ordained,” she said.
Though it rejected the idea of women becoming deacons, the Vatican commission said it was in favor of “instituting possible new ministries” for women, and to “broaden women’s access to instituted ministries for the service of the community.”
It also said that women should be allowed to take “co-responsibility in the decision-making centers of the church.”
Elisabetta Povoledo is a Times reporter based in Rome, covering Italy, the Vatican and the culture of the region. She has been a journalist for 35 years.
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