Cardinal George Encourages Innovation of Liturgical Deaconesses

Women Readers Are Also an Innovation

Edit: despite the evidence to the contrary and the well-established fact that accommodating women in Liturgical roles like Reader [women are still not ordained as Readers although there have been suggestions to make it so], and has a negative effect on new vocations and is wholly an unprecedented innovation, Cardinal George is encouraging a woman to enter into the Deaconate.  He's saying that he will bring up the issue on his visit to Rome.

One nun, however, is discouraging this mistaken notion.  This notion that ordaining women to the Diaconate will ease alleged discontent over the issue is a fatuous one, for when have revolutionaries ever been satisfied with merely a concession.   What's lacking here is an understanding of reality.  Women were never legitimately functional in the Liturgy and they never will be.   A nun from Mundeline puts it this way.

Sister Sara Butler, a professor of systematic theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake Mundelein Seminary, said the role of women deacons in the early church was never the same as that of male deacons. Female deacons had separate duties such as ministering exclusively to women, and they received their ordination in separate rites, she said.

"I don't think there's any precedent for inviting women into the form of permanent diaconate," she said.

Women with ministerial roles also never completely disappeared, she said. Butler believes women deacons morphed into abbesses or leaders in monastic communities.

Link to Monteray County Herald....