Alternatives to women deacons

Letters to the Editor of The Tablet

I’m disappointed but not surprised at the outcome of the latest Vatican commission on women and the diaconate (Letters, 13 and 20 December 2024), but I think that we have to stop ordination becoming an obsession.

This has two consequences: first, it devalues all the work that women already do, as if the work is of no value unless it is affirmed by the hierarchical laying on of hands; and second, it diverts energy away from developing women’s ministries outside the hierarchical structure, where they have great freedom to be creative, into trying to climb on to the clerical bandwagon, with all the limitations that would impose.

Patricia Stoat
Nottingham

Today, lay women and men teach, counsel, coordinate parishes, lead communities in liturgical events and social action, administer some sacraments and, with a mere adjustment to canon law, could preach at Mass.

They are carrying out their roles as lay people living out their baptismal calling. They act from an ontological sameness with those they serve. Ordaining women as deacons would separate women providing pastoral services out from their peers and set them apart.

It would clericalise what are legitimate roles in our lay vocation and relegate lay people once again to being passive members who pay, pray and obey. It would reduce the voice of women within the Church, confining it to the lowest ranks of clergy.

A synodal Church calls for the institutional framework to be shattered and remade to create permanent empowered spaces for all the faithful – as called for by Hal St John (Letters, 6 December) – which would include replacing the clericalised diaconate with a universally recognised pastoral ministry that commissions lay women and men to walk on the synodal path of shared mission.

Only then will we get recognition of the roles proper to lay ministries. Only then will we stop ordaining men to be altar servers in the liturgy. This is the rigorous re-examination I and others call for and which our synodal Church demands.

Ann Smith
Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire

As a consecrated woman (OCV – Order of Consecrated Virgins) my ministry involves both serving in the Church and witnessing in ordinary life, through engaging with people who would otherwise never come near the Church.

My experience tells me that we need more lay people with background theological training able to answer the many questions which people we meet in daily life are asking. The lay vocation is a missionary vocation, complementary to that of the priest.

I believe we first have to learn what it means to be an authentic source of the love and compassion of Christ in the secular world, before we ever start considering whether we should be deacons, let alone priests. That problem can be considered a long way down the line.

Marion Morgan
Bristol

Aquinas’s gift

Jonathan Ruffer deserves huge gratitude for his work on the restoration at Bishop Auckland. So it may seem churlish to find fault with his piece (“The stars have their limits”, 6 December).

However, he advances a questionable opposition between Reformation theology and Roman Catholic doctrine. He says: “Luther’s insistence that it was possible to have a vibrant direct relationship with God was a shocker to Catholics, who insisted that it was only through the Church that such a blessing could have any validity.”

There are problems with this bold generalisation. First, all Christian traditions teach that when Christians pray to the Father, through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit, they enjoy intimate contact with God and their prayers are heard.

Second, Martin Luther was adamant that our fellowship with God requires the means of grace, given by God and provided by the Church. Luther has an extremely high doctrine of the sacraments.

He wrote voluminously in defence of the doctrine of the Real Presence, not defined by Transubstantiation, because he objected to saving doctrine being defined in terms borrowed from a pagan philosopher (Aristotle); but in a more dynamic mode, so that Christ is in the eucharistic elements “as fire is in the iron”. Affirming the necessity of the sacraments was a test of orthodoxy for Luther.

It is misleading to imply that St Thomas Aquinas’s theology is the special preserve of the Catholic Church and provides a kind of antidote to Reformation theology. Modern research has identified significant doctrinal resonances between Aquinas and the major Reformers, and there is much written expounding this happy convergence. Aquinas’s theology is a priceless gift to the whole Western Church.

(The Revd Dr) Paul Avis
Honorary Professor, School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh

Rooted error

I write in response to your letters (20/27 December) which referenced Abigail Frymann Rouch’s article on annulments (13 December). I understand that the word “many” was changed to “several” during the editing process of that article.

It would indeed “beggar belief” if I had suggested that merely witnessing a handful of divorces would constitute “rooted error” sufficient to invalidate marriage consent. If this were the threshold, there would be no canonically valid marriages.

The article as edited said that if a Catholic has grown up “seeing several marriages around them end in divorce”, it cannot be presumed that they understood marriage to be for life. The concept of “rooted error” in canon law means that a person no longer has any understanding that marriage is a lifelong commitment and so can only intend to enter into a marriage which is dissoluble.

However, the sentence in the article is not how I had explained it. I said that there may be situations where the only understanding of marriage a person possesses is one that is not indissoluble – if their entire formative experience of marriage, across all contexts, has been of relationships that have ended in divorce.

Even then, this erroneous understanding would need to be proven with moral certainty, according to the canonical rules of evidence.

Rooted error cases remain exceptional and require substantiated evidence of a fundamentally distorted understanding of marriage that determines the will at the moment of the exchange of consent.

Annulments are a sensitive and complex area of Church life where the correct use of language is essential to avoid any misunderstanding.

(Canon) Kristian Paver JCL
Ashburton, Devon

Nicaea sources

Thank you to Sara Parvis for requesting more detail on the troubles of the fourth-century Church (Letters, 13 December).

Ramsay MacMullen points to tens of thousands of Christians killed by other Christians in the two centuries following Nicaea in “Cultural and Political Changes in the 4th and 5th Centuries”, Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, 52 (2003), pp. 479-495, citing many references.

More shocking detail is found in Johannes Hahn, “The Challenge of Religious Violence: Imperial Ideology and Policy in the Fourth Century”, in Johannes Wienand (ed.), Contested Monarchy (OUP 2015), pp. 379-404. Hahn says that this wave of violence was unique in the empire because it spread into the rural areas.

The extended controversy over Athanasius’s consecration, and his subsequent, heavily bloodstained career, is itself a fine illustration of the descent into violent factionalism that followed Nicaea.

I argue that the attempt to invent and impose orthodoxy – which was in reality the pursuit of power and the access to enormous wealth – eclipsed the loving kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed.

(Dr) Jon Rosebank
Oxford

Working together

In the Christmas newsletter our parish priest thanks all those who “keep the show on the road, carrying out the routine chores of parish life week by week”.

While it’s good to have an acknowledgment, even a somewhat paternalistic one, of all the time and hard work, this is all so inward-looking, geared to maintenance and stasis.

Unfortunately, those good, thoughtful, spiritually intelligent people who carry out these ministries cannot have any co responsibility in discerning and deciding the way forward for this part of the body of Christ locally. No pastoral council has yet been created, and I have not heard the word “synodality” in any context.

Pope Leo warned: “We must not delude ourselves that carrying on with a few traditional activities will be enough to maintain the vitality of our Christian communities.”

Those who offer the loving service – cleaning, office admin, etc. – are somehow made complicit in the perpetuation of clericalism, shoring up the tired fabric of the parish.

Please give us a chance to work together – priest and people guided by the Holy Spirit – co equal members of the body of Christ on our local patch. Then we will be renewed and equipped to take the Gospel out to those whose need is great.

Mary Kirk
Harlesworth, Suffolk

Migration law

While I share Fr John Murray’s reservations on conflating migrants with illegality (Letters, 29 November), migrants are a composite group used to describe both asylum seekers and regular migrants.

Asylum is predicated on the assumption that the claimant has been persecuted in his/her home country and is entitled to protection under the UN Refugee Convention. The receiving country has the duty to assess the persecution narrative in the courts.

If the evidence is found wanting and asylum is not granted, then pending further appeal, the asylum seeker is generally listed for deportation. Once a negative decision is handed down, the person is considered to be illegally in the country. Similarly, overstayers of employment, tourist or student visas are likewise illegal.

Our commitment to a cause, however laudable, should not mask legal realities that are based in domestic or international law and from which many of our human rights are derived.

(Dr) Joseph Mullen
Former expert witness to Immigration Appeal Chamber, Eastbourne, East Sussex

We need hope

I can hardly begin to tell you how moving I found your Christmas editorial (“Hope in the birth of a baby”, 20/27 December): so many people need it. Hope for women in labour, hope for the Jewish people. But also sorrow: sorrow for the women who have experienced a miscarriage or a still-birth, sorrow for the many persecutions and massacres the Jews have endured.

My labours with our two children were relatively easy, but I did have a miscarriage and I still remember it on the anniversary of the day it happened.

Hope and light. St John says that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. Both that, for Christians, and the Menorah candles for the Jewish people are beacons of hope. Thank you for reminding me of that.

Anne Haselhurst
Solihull, West Midlands