Vatican Rules Out Women As Deacons

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 help celebrate liturgical services, Vatican officials said Tuesday.

Ordination as deacons is widely done in the United States, which has 12,000 of the 22,000 deacons world-wide. Critics have questioned why women cannot become deacons if 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.

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.”

Vatican officials acknowledged that women deacons did exist in the first centuries of the church, but said they were not ordained like men and were forbidden to touch the host.