Cardinal Kasper Pushes For Women Deacons

 Edit: he’s been quiet since being reprimanded and sidelined by Pope Benedict during the creation of the Ordinariate.  Now he’s feeling his oats, and his time is short.  Here’s an article from the anti-Catholic, Nazi continuations magazine, Spiegel:

[Spiegel] Trier - At the spring meeting of the German Bishops' Conference, Cardinal Walter Kasper has proposed a new diaconal Office for Women. He spoke of a Church deacon who undertakes pastoral, charitable, catechetical and certain liturgical services. Such an office is different from the post of male deacon, said Kasper. The church deacon will be commissioned by blessing, not by a sacramental consecration.

"I think if there is such a position that is not easily attached to the classic office of deacon, it would have a lot more flexibility," the retired Cardinal said on Wednesday in Trier. The occasion was a study day in which the bishops discussed how they could incorporate women in the Catholic Church more thoroughly.

They committed themselves to "the proportion of women in leadership positions that require ordination to increase significantly," said Bishop Franz-Josef Bode. Currently, women in the Catholic Church at the top management level make up 13 percent. At the central level, this may be 19 percent. The figures show: "Women are still under-represented." After five years, the bishops wanted to examine how their intent had been implemented, said Bodo.

Women in the priesthood earn a rejection from Kasper. "I think that it changes nothing that women can not be ordained to the priesthood." This was "the unbroken tradition of the Eastern Church as in the Western Church." Women are however, employed in all other parts of the Church with honor full time. "Every German parish would collapse if the women would not cooperate.”

The Movement We are Church called on the margins of the Spring Plenary for women priests again. "Are the key positions in the Church only through the Office," said Annegret Laakmann Officer. "We want to be priests, bishops and Popes." According to the view of the movement, there need to be more positions for women in the administration of the Church are not being addressed. "It's a matter of course, that women with similar qualifications get these positions," said Laakmann. The talks had been "a placebo”.

wit / dpa

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....