History is not enough: Women deacons and the unity of holy orders

In four recent articles, Phyllis Zagano has renewed her long-standing argument for admitting women to the ordained diaconate. Writing in America, The Tablet, Religion News Service, and Commonweal, she presses a consistent claim: the historical evidence for women deacons is substantial, the Church has never definitively prohibited their ordination to the diaconate, and the non-sacerdotal character of the diaconate leaves the question open despite the Church’s definitive teaching on priestly ordination.¹

This article is offered as a respectful response. Zagano’s scholarship deserves serious engagement, but I believe her argument gives historical reconstruction a theological weight it cannot bear and treats the diaconate with insufficient attention to the unity of Holy Orders.

The issue is clearest in her July Commonweal essay, where Zagano writes that the question “is not now, and never really has been, whether women can be ordained as deacons. The question is whether they should be so ordained.” That formulation moves too quickly. Before the Church can ask whether she should confer diaconal ordination on women, she must first determine whether she has received from Christ the authority to do so. Sacraments are not ecclesial instruments whose essential form the Church creates. They are gifts received, guarded, celebrated, and authoritatively interpreted within the apostolic Tradition.

This distinction stands at the center of my forthcoming book, That They May Be One: Toward a More Integrated Understanding of Holy Orders (Emmaus Road Publications, Spring 2027). There, I argue that questions concerning the diaconate cannot finally be settled by considering the diaconate in isolation. Holy Orders is one sacrament conferred in three degrees: episcopate, presbyterate, and diaconate. The theological question is therefore not merely what deacons have done historically, but how the diaconate participates in the one sacramental-apostolic reality received from Christ.²

History remains indispensable. Zagano is right to insist that women called deaconesses appear in the ancient sources and that their rites, ministries, and ecclesial status deserve careful study. The problem arises when historical evidence is asked to establish sacramental identity. The 2002 International Theological Commission concluded that ancient deaconesses “were not purely and simply equivalent to the deacons” and warned that the historical data do not yield a simple identity between ancient female ministries and the sacramental diaconate as the Church now understands it.³ The 2025 summary of the second papal commission similarly stated that the evidence is varied, that the title “deaconess” did not carry one uniform meaning, and that “the purely historical perspective does not allow one to reach any definitive certainty.” It also reported a strong commission judgment that the present state of historical and theological research does not permit moving toward the admission of women to the diaconate as a degree of Holy Orders, while acknowledging that the judgment was not definitive in the manner of priestly ordination.

That judgment is methodologically decisive. Historical inquiry can establish terminology, practices, rites, offices, and patterns of ministry. It cannot by itself determine the sacramental meaning of those realities. Catholic theology must ask how the evidence stands within Scripture, apostolic Tradition, liturgical reception, doctrinal development, and the authoritative teaching of the Magisterium. History illuminates theology; it does not independently determine doctrine.

This is where Zagano’s argument in America is especially important. She resists what she describes as a theory of the “unicity of orders,” emphasizing that deacons are ordained “not unto the priesthood, but unto a ministry of service.” The distinction is real and essential. Deacons are not priests, and any theology that treats the diaconate merely as an incomplete presbyterate distorts Vatican II. But distinction is not separation. Lumen Gentium places bishops, presbyters, and deacons within the one divinely instituted ecclesiastical ministry and identifies the diaconate as a degree of the hierarchy strengthened by sacramental grace. The Catechism states even more directly that episcopate, presbyterate, and diaconate are “all three conferred by a sacramental act called ‘ordination,’ that is, by the sacrament of Holy Orders.”

Benedict XVI’s Omnium in Mentem clarifies the distinction without dissolving the unity. Bishops and presbyters act in persona Christi Capitis in a way deacons do not; deacons are empowered to serve the People of God in the diakonia of liturgy, word, and charity. Yet all remain within Holy Orders. Pope Leo XIV underscored the same point in March 2026 when he referred to episcopate, priesthood, and diaconate as degrees of the one sacrament of Holy Orders.⁴ The Church’s theological tradition therefore requires us to hold two truths together: the diaconate possesses a proper, non-sacerdotal sacramental identity, and that identity exists only within the organic unity of one sacrament.

One way of approaching this question is through what I have called the Establishment Hypothesis, a theological proposal that begins not with the three degrees of Holy Orders considered separately, but with the one Christ from whom they receive their sacramental identity.

The hypothesis proposes that Christ established the one sacrament of Holy Orders within the unified self-gift of his Paschal mystery, entrusting to the apostles a single sacramental mission that the Church would subsequently receive and articulate in the distinct degrees of bishop, presbyter, and deacon. The Lord who offers himself sacrificially to the Father is the same Lord who stoops to wash the feet of his disciples. Sacrifice and service, therefore, are not competing identities in Christ but mutually interior dimensions of his one saving mission. The three degrees became historically differentiated within the life of the Church, but this differentiation should not be mistaken for separation. Each is a distinct and intrinsically ordered participation in the one apostolic gift of the one Christ.

The significance for the present discussion is considerable: if Holy Orders is first one sacrament before it is three degrees, no theological question concerning one degree—including who may receive it—can be adequately considered in isolation from the sacramental whole.

This matters because historical differentiation cannot be treated as proof of sacramental discontinuity. The fact that the threefold structure became explicit over time does not mean that the Church invented three unrelated ministries and later grouped them beneath the title “Holy Orders.” Catholic doctrinal development works differently. Christ gives; the apostles receive; the Church, under the Holy Spirit, discerns and articulates more fully what has been given. The mature sacramental form need not appear in every detail at the first historical moment in order to be rooted in Christ.

The same principle complicates Zagano’s effort to insulate the diaconal question from Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. Saint John Paul II’s declaration concerns priestly ordination and does not, by its wording alone, definitively settle the question of women and the diaconate. That limitation should be acknowledged. But its theological rationale cannot simply be bracketed. Ordinatio Sacerdotalis argues from Christ’s sovereign institution and from the Church’s lack of authority to alter what she has received.⁵ If Holy Orders is one sacrament whose degrees are intrinsically related, then the Christological principle governing the Church’s authority in one degree cannot be presumed irrelevant to the others.

My forthcoming book presents this not as a new definitive conclusion but as a necessary theological relocation of the question. Before asking whether the distinctiveness of the diaconate permits an exception to principles operative in the presbyterate, we should first ask what follows from the Christological unity of the sacrament itself. The authority of the Church is ministerial rather than creative. She may regulate, develop, and deepen her understanding of sacramental practice; she cannot redefine what belongs to a sacrament’s essential constitution.

This also exposes the weakness of the argument that there is “no doctrine banning” women deacons. The absence of an explicit prohibition does not establish sacramental competence. The burden of theological argument is not merely to identify a historical precedent or to show that no canon expressly forbids a practice. It is to demonstrate that the proposed practice belongs to the sacramental reality Christ entrusted to the Church. That is a much stronger claim, and history alone cannot establish it.

Nor can function decide the matter. Women already exercise many forms of service historically associated with deacons: catechesis, charitable ministry, pastoral care, administration, theological scholarship, and positions of ecclesial responsibility. But ordination is not the sacramental validation of tasks already performed. It establishes an enduring sacramental configuration to Christ and incorporates the ordinand into the apostolic ministry according to the degree received.

The pertinent question is therefore not whether women can perform diaconal works. Plainly, they can and do. The question is whether the Church possesses the authority to confer upon women this degree of Holy Orders.

Zagano’s June Religion News Service essay argues that fear of schism should not determine the answer. On that point, she is correct. Sacramental truth cannot be decided by calculating who may leave or who may stay. But the principle cuts both ways. Neither fear of division nor impatience with delay can determine sacramental doctrine. The Church is free only insofar as she is obedient to the gift she has received.

Likewise, the ecclesial dignity of women cannot depend upon ordination. Where women’s gifts, scholarship, leadership, and co-responsibility have been inadequately recognized, that failure should be corrected. But Holy Orders is not the measure of baptismal dignity, nor is access to ordination the Catholic grammar of equality. The sacramental economy is not constructed from social equivalence but received from Christ and ordered to communion.

Zagano is right about several important things. History must remain on the table. Ancient deaconesses cannot be dismissed as irrelevant. The permanent diaconate must not be treated as merely a transitional stage toward priesthood. And the Church still needs a richer theology of the diaconate. Indeed, the present controversy exposes how costly an underdeveloped the theology of the diaconate can be. But the remedy is not to detach the diaconate from Holy Orders. It is to understand Holy Orders more deeply.

The fundamental issue, then, is not simply whether women once bore the title deaconess or participated in rites resembling ordination. It is whether those historical realities disclose the same sacramental diaconate the Church now confesses as an intrinsic degree of one Holy Orders—and whether the Church has received authority from Christ to confer that degree upon women. History supplies evidence. It cannot supply sacramental authority.

That judgment belongs ultimately to the Magisterium. Until the Church speaks definitively, theological study should continue with rigor and charity. But it must begin from the whole: Christ, Scripture, Tradition, liturgy, sacramental ontology, doctrinal development, and the living Magisterium. When the question is placed within that larger horizon, Zagano’s historical case is important but not determinative. The Church cannot answer the question by looking backward alone. She must ask what, in Christ, she has received.

Endnotes:

Read original article