Dominican theologian Fr Timothy Radcliffe has said he is hopeful that women will be soon ordained deacons in the Church so that they can preach and have a public voice.
The former Master of the Order of Preachers made his comment in the course of a new documentary aired by RTE Television this week on Pope Francis.
Fr Radcliffe said that though he was personally hopeful about the introduction of women deacons he felt that Pope Francis was “looking for something more radical than that”.
He described the biggest challenge facing Francis as giving a voice and authority to women.
Recent proposals to ordain women deacons have emerged in Germany while the question has been studied in depth by the International Theological Commission of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It stated that a decision needed to be taken by the Church’s Magisterium and pointed out that a distinction could be drawn between the ministries of bishops and priests – exclusively reserved to men – and the diaconal ministry.
Fr Radcliffe said he believed Francis wants to have a church “that is less controlling because he believes that the Holy Spirit will blow where it will”. Another contributor to the programme, “Pope Francis – The Sinner”, former Irish president, Mary McAleese, described the Church’s attitude to women as “a blindside” which leaves so many “good and decent men like Francis still carrying a residual element of misogyny that closes them off to the danger of not dealing with this issue”.
Speaking separately to The Tablet, Ms McAleese, who is currently completing a doctorate in canon law at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, said the Pope must invest the same level of effort into developing the new theology of women as has been invested in reforming the Curia.
“Currently no body has been set up to deal with the role of women in the Church despite it being infinitely more urgent and central to the role of the Church than either the Vatican Bank or Curia, which are merely managerial matters associated with the Church as a business and institution rather than a faith of divine origin,” she warned.
Also in the documentary Cardinal Wilfrid Napier of South Africa warned that if the Pope is going to make changes in the governance of the Church that will last, “you have got to put structures in place that are going to make those changes carry through regardless of who is in the seat”.
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